Counter Attack

Everyone else sees the sideline act, all that raving and swearing, and figures that’s why Bob Huggins had a heart attack Sept. 28 -- at 49.

The sidelines were never what worried his friends.

It was the pace, the planes, all that fast food, the 2 a.m. beer, cigars and storytelling. It was that drive he had that no one was going to outwork him, out-schmooze him, outdo him for a player, or have a better time doing it.

The other weekend, not yet five weeks from the day they feared he might die, Huggins’ closest friends sat around a fireplace with him in Cincinnati.

Then he did something he never used to do. He got up to leave early.

“Normally, he’d stay late,” said Jim Collins, a chiropractor who has been a friend since Huggins became the University of Cincinnati’s basketball coach in 1989.

“But about 10:30 he says, ‘I’ve got to get home, get my medication and get to bed.’ He didn’t have any cigars. He had one glass of red wine. He is making changes.”

Let it be said that Huggins, who spent 11 days in the hospital and has a defibrillator device implanted in his chest, looks terrific. There is a healthy hue to a face that used to tend toward pasty, and he has lost 23 pounds.

Speaking at a banquet in New York recently, promoting the Jimmy V Classic, he asked for a show of hands.

“Would all the people who say how much better I look raise your hand?” Huggins said.

“Like half of the room raised their hands. I said, ‘I must have looked like hell before.’ ”

It is time for laughs now.

John Calipari, the Memphis coach who is both Huggins’ friend and intense rival, watched Huggins walk into a Conference USA media session recently and readied his jab.

“He looks good,” Calipari said. “That suit’s five years old. Wide stripes. So I know he’s lost at least 25 pounds, because that suit fits him again.”

But Calipari remembers how difficult it was to see Huggins in the hospital the day after he’d suffered his heart attack at the Pittsburgh airport.

“We can be funny, but it was very serious,” Calipari said. “As funny as we can make it now, it was not then.

“He looked awful. Overweight, pasty, tubes everywhere. He didn’t look good. And the nut case was trying to move the bed. I was like, ‘Stop!’ ”

Huggins tells the story of his potentially fatal heart attack his way:

“I wasn’t scared. I don’t know what being afraid is going to do for you. I just couldn’t breathe. I was trying to breathe. Then I found out the guy in the ambulance was Calipari’s cousin. Then I was afraid.... But Cal said his cousin knew not to let me die before he beat me.”

Unlikely but true: The attendant in the ambulance really was Calipari’s cousin.

“People don’t believe it, but I’m doing OK,” Huggins said.

“It was very serious. I don’t mean to say it wasn’t. I’m going to have to take pretty good care of myself. My heart took a pretty good shock. Right now, a pretty good portion of it is not working. It’s stunned. We hope it comes back. All I can do is do the things they tell me and hope it comes back. It’s not dead, it’s just not working right now.”

Though he insists the scare hasn’t made him dwell on his mortality, he said he isn’t in denial, either.

“If I was on the plane, I probably wouldn’t have made it.”

He did make it, and he made it to the Bearcats’ first practice of the season Oct. 12, two weeks to the day after the heart attack.

“I knew as long as he could walk, he was going to come back,” said senior forward Leonard Stokes, the only starter back on a Cincinnati team ranked 23rd in the preseason poll.

“He’s the same as ever, except at practice now, he has sliced fruit to eat.”

He was his old self at the Bearcats’ first exhibition game Saturday night too, ranting at his own players and the officials and even kicking the scorer’s table during a 20-point victory over Northern Kentucky.

“He was screaming and yelling that we weren’t playing good,” senior guard Taron Barker said. “He was just Huggs.”

Here’s the only difference: After the game, Huggins snacked on celery and carrots.

No one, not even his cardiologist, is telling him he has to change the way he is on the sidelines.

After all, his heart attack didn’t happen at courtside. It happened amid the off-season swirl of recruiting and clinics.

“It has nothing to do with his style on court,” Calipari said. “He’s not going to change that. It’s his lifestyle off-court.”

Huggins is trying.

“I’m working out now,” he said. “I eat better, sleep more. I just get tired. I didn’t used to get tired. Now, 9:30 or 10 o’clock, I’m tired. But I feel stronger every day.”

He’s on the treadmill three days a week. Other days, it’s a 45-minute walk.

“I tried to get him to work out one time before,” Calipari said. “I said, ‘Come on, let’s go for a run.’ We ran for a while and he said, ‘I’m not running. Let’s walk.’ Then he said, ‘Let’s go in here and get a beer.’ ”

Now it’s a glass of red wine a day.

“See, the French don’t have heart attacks,” Huggins said. “The studies say a glass of red wine a day is good for you.”

He has cut back on fast food as well.

“I ate poorly because I was always on the run. Some of the places I go, fast food is all there is,” he said. “I’ve had fast food once since, and it was chicken. I haven’t had a hamburger.”

The cigars? Hasn’t smoked one since.

“I would hope he cuts out that cigar smoking, because it’ll save my clothing,” said Charlie Spoonhour, the coach at Nevada Las Vegas and one of Huggins’ closest friends. “I’ve had to toss about two or three shirts.”

Here’s a hint for Huggins’ buddies. If you like cigars, stay nearby.

“He has a very fine selection of cigars. I think he’ll enjoy giving them away,” said Collins, his Cincinnati friend.

It’s all very familiar to Charlie Coles, the Miami of Ohio coach who went into cardiac arrest during a conference tournament game in 1998. A year later, he made it to the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 with a team led by Wally Szczerbiak.

“Most of the changes that I’ve made have been off the court, because it’s almost impossible to make changes on the court,” Coles said. “You are who you are, and when that scoreboard lights up, you can’t change, so my changes have come off the court.

“For instance, I get up as early as I’ve always gotten up -- sometimes that’s as early as 3:30 or 4 a.m. -- but now when I get up, I just sit around for a while. I don’t get up and rush around, because I’ve learned that causes stress. So I get up and lounge around for about an hour. I may have a cup of coffee. During that hour, I’m really not doing anything -- I’m not writing plays or game plans out.”

For now, Huggins seems to be adhering to the advice of his doctors.

“Of course the thing about Bobby is, he’s going to act as though everything is all right,” Spoonhour said.

Now is the easy part.

“What I’m worried about is when he gets into the season and wants to start recruiting, taking off after the game,” Spoonhour said. “That part will be hard for him. He’s been a little extreme about working.

“I think we’ll find out when he gets into situations like that. Right now he’s focused and when you talk to him, he says he’s got to go do his rehab at 10.

“I think when he thinks he’s going to lose out on a player if he doesn’t work harder, that’s when he’s going to have to use that brain of his, and he has a good brain.”

Intellectually, Huggins recognized long ago that he was at risk. He had seen doctors about the possibility of heart trouble.

His father, Charlie, had a heart attack before he was 40. He survived and is a regular at Bearcat games.

“I remember us convincing him to go to the hospital,” said Huggins, who was 15 or 16 at the time. “He wasn’t going to go.”

To him, it seemed destined that he would have heart trouble too.

“I think it’s genetic, frankly,” Bob Huggins said.

Coaching the way he does might be in Huggins’ genes too.

“A couple of my friends did [suggest I take the year off],” he said. “They said, ‘Let [associate coach Dan] Peters take the team for a year.’ I think they were teasing. My family? They know enough about me to know I wouldn’t do that.”

But his wife and two children, like others, feared this day might come.

“I knew in my heart it had to happen sooner or later,” Collins said. “By the grace of God, he was in the place he was. God has a way of putting us where we’re supposed to be. It showed his purpose here isn’t done.”

The people close to Huggins remember the fear they’d felt when they’d heard of his heart attack, and the relief that swept over them as Huggins’ condition improved.

“It was devastating when it happened,” said Stokes, the Bearcat senior. “When they told us, my heart skipped a beat. By later that day, they called us and said he was talking, and you felt like he was going to be OK.”

Spoonhour felt much the same way.

“It scared us all,” he said.

“I’m glad the boy hung around.... I think he found out how much people cared about him.”

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The Associated Press contributed to this report.