There is a Rose in Motown
3 weeks 1 day ago #458
by wvu4u2
There is a Rose in Motown was created by wvu4u2
MORGANTOWN — It is a marriage made in heaven.
Or is it hell?
Guess it depends on where you live.
But Bob Huggins hosts his 12th Annual Fish Fry Saturday night with the doors opening at 5:30 p.m. at Mylan Park and his special guest for the evening is Pete Rose, a marriage of two of the most polarizing sports figures of all time.
Love or hate them, you have an opinion on them. You argue about them, acknowledging their accomplishments in basketball and baseball, and you have an opinion on the troubles they each have brought upon themselves.
But put them together and give them a microphone and you have an evening that promises to be one not soon forgotten, all in the name of helping establish an effort to help find a cure for cancer and establish a regional cancer treatment center at WVU. It’s been a dream of Huggins’ through the Norma Mae Huggins Endowment established in his mother’s name that took a huge jump toward reality on Wednesday.
That was when it announced that the Hazel Ruby McQuain Charitable Trust is donating $50 million to the WVU Cancer Institute to help establish a state-of-the-art, comprehensive cancer hospital that is part of the WVU Medicine J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital complex in Morgantown.
This fish fry marriage of Huggins and Rose puts together not only the Hall of Fame basketball coach who once was the toast of both Morgantown and Cincinnati, and baseball’s all-time hit leader in Rose, whose gambling misdeeds cost him a spot in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., but could not shake his popularity in his hometown of Cincinnati.
Both, of course, made mistakes that cost them their jobs and tarnished their reputations.
“Tell me someone who hasn’t made a mistake. We’ve all made mistakes,” Huggins said in a recent interview this week. “The difference is, everybody else’s mistakes aren’t thrown out there on television and radio and newspapers and social media, which has changed the world today.
“When I lived in Cincinnati a lot of guys did a lot of stuff. In today’s world, it would be a lot more magnified than it was then,” Huggins continued. “You think about it, listen to some people talk and you look at them and think ‘You’re talking about me and you don’t think I know what you did?’”
Rose went out and reinvented himself as a commodity, selling autographs and memorabilia, making appearances out of new home base in Las Vegas, hoping to gain a chance to be declared eligible for election to the Hall of Fame but baseball commissioners over the years have refused to lift his ban even though legalized gambling has become one of the sports backers.
Huggins, like Rose, holds out hope to find another basketball coaching job. Like Rose, he is reinventing himself, stopped drinking alcohol, lost weight and staying in the public eye but in this round of college basketball coach hiring, no one offered him a job.
“All I know is I have tried my best pretty much to emulate how my grandfather treated people, how my mother treated people. I think to a large degree the reason the people in West Virginia love me to death to this day is because I was kind to them,” he said.
“I was approachable. I love being home, I love being here in West Virginia, I love the people in West Virginia. I’m not going to get caught up in all the B.S.
“This is nothing like Cincinnati and what they get away with saying about people. I’m just running around trying to help people. I went down and helped Willie with the Willie Akers Classic. I’ve been all over the place. I’m actually going to Wheeling to help a guy that would be a great governor. I’ve been a bunch of places with him and everywhere I go people have been terrific.
“There’s nobody that comes up and says ‘You’re an a—hole. Why did you do that?’ People are really nice. If it wasn’t for social media, where all the cowards hang out, nobody would know anything.”
The two got to know each other in the city, Rose as a Cincinnati Reds’ legend and Huggins as coach of the University of Cincinnati basketball team but Huggins was well aware of Rose as player through his days leading up to and during his days as a WVU player.
In fact, style of play at WVU and coaching was very much a hardwood, hard-nosed version of Rose’s play that earned him the nickname of Charlie Hustle, given to him by no less a player than the New York Yankees’ great Mickey Mantle after watching him run full speed to first base on a walk in a spring training game.
That summarized the style of play that led Rose to perhaps his most famous quote, noting “I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.
Huggins marveled at Rose’s popularity when he got to Cincinnati.
“Pete was the King of Cincinnati when I was there,” Huggins admitted the other day.
Huggins’ arrival in Cincinnati to coach the Bearcats in 1989 coincided with Rose’s suspension from the game by commissioner Bart Giamatti after he was found to have bet on baseball while managing the Reds.
Huggins was named to coach Cincinnati on March 29, 1989, while on August 24, 1989, Rose voluntarily accepted a permanent suspension from baseball.
As Huggins’ legend grew at UC, Rose’s popularity waned across the country, but not in his hometown.
‘’In Cincinnati there’s probably three golf outings a day,” Huggins said. “I would see Pete at all different kinds of events. When you first get to a place like that [as a coach], the first thing they tell you is you need to get out in the community.
“So, initially I went to virtually everything I could go to. Pete was pretty much the star of everything ... him and Johnny Bench.”
Huggins would learn quickly what Rose meant to Cincinnati and its people.
“In Cincinnati, everybody knows everybody. You know the Bengals; you know the Reds. In most places, football players aren’t as easy to see as they are in Cincinnati, for whatever reason. They were out in the community and there’s so many things going on in Cincinnati ... from golf outings to scholarship banquets, you name it, they have it going on.”
Huggins and Rose struck up an acquaintance and Huggins soon came to see beyond the national image of Rose he had gained. This was a different kind of person.
“If you happened to be around him, you liked him. There was no doubt about that,” Huggins said.
Ask him just how important Rose was to the people of Cincinnati and Huggins offers this anecdote. He had been invited to an event run by Rickelle Ruby, wife of prominent restaurant owner Jeff Ruby, at his popular Waterfront Restaurant on the Ohio River.
Ruby had gotten his start in the business partnering with Rose and Bench to found his first restaurant, The Precinct, which would grow into a regional chain of 5-star Jeff Ruby Steak Houses.
“I go in and I’m kind of hurrying and somebody yells at me and Marge Schott is sitting at the bar,” Huggins began, referring to flamboyant owner of the Reds.
Marge Schott fit right in with Rose and Huggins, a controversial character to say the least. She was the owner of the Reds and ruled the roost with her ever present Saint Bernard dog, “Schottzie.”
“Honey, come here,” she said to Huggins. She called everybody honey. “Sit down here and talk to me.”
So Huggins joined her.
“We’re sitting there and I’m listening to Marge and I said, ‘Marge, I got to go. I got to go to this event back here. Rickelle is expecting me back there.’”
Huggins remembers Marge Schott looking him in the eyes.
“She said, ‘Honey, you don’t know Cincinnati very well because this damn event won’t start until Pete gets here.’”
Rose was that big.
“I guess part of it was because he was a hometown guy,” Huggins said.
Cincinnati had a host of heroes from Bench to Oscar Robertson to Tony Perez to Sparky Anderson to Bengals’ quarterback Ken Anderson talk show host Jerry Springer in those days.
“But you name any of those guys and nobody could hold a candle to Pete,” Huggins said. “Everybody had their turn in Cincinnati ... Johnny Bench was big, but he wasn’t Pete. All the baseball guys, all the football guys, Oscar Robertson ... but nobody was Pete.”
As the Huggins’ fame grew in Cincinnati, he achieved the legendary status that he has in Morgantown. Except ...
“We got pretty good as a basketball team,” Huggins said. “We were pretty well noticed around town, but the older guys would come up to me and say, ‘You know what, boy. When you get to thinking you own this town, just look around again. You ain’t Pete Rose.’ I heard that all the time there.”
Now they are joining forces for an important cause. It should be quite a show.
Follow @bhertzel on X (formerly Twitter)
Or is it hell?
Guess it depends on where you live.
But Bob Huggins hosts his 12th Annual Fish Fry Saturday night with the doors opening at 5:30 p.m. at Mylan Park and his special guest for the evening is Pete Rose, a marriage of two of the most polarizing sports figures of all time.
Love or hate them, you have an opinion on them. You argue about them, acknowledging their accomplishments in basketball and baseball, and you have an opinion on the troubles they each have brought upon themselves.
But put them together and give them a microphone and you have an evening that promises to be one not soon forgotten, all in the name of helping establish an effort to help find a cure for cancer and establish a regional cancer treatment center at WVU. It’s been a dream of Huggins’ through the Norma Mae Huggins Endowment established in his mother’s name that took a huge jump toward reality on Wednesday.
That was when it announced that the Hazel Ruby McQuain Charitable Trust is donating $50 million to the WVU Cancer Institute to help establish a state-of-the-art, comprehensive cancer hospital that is part of the WVU Medicine J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital complex in Morgantown.
This fish fry marriage of Huggins and Rose puts together not only the Hall of Fame basketball coach who once was the toast of both Morgantown and Cincinnati, and baseball’s all-time hit leader in Rose, whose gambling misdeeds cost him a spot in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., but could not shake his popularity in his hometown of Cincinnati.
Both, of course, made mistakes that cost them their jobs and tarnished their reputations.
“Tell me someone who hasn’t made a mistake. We’ve all made mistakes,” Huggins said in a recent interview this week. “The difference is, everybody else’s mistakes aren’t thrown out there on television and radio and newspapers and social media, which has changed the world today.
“When I lived in Cincinnati a lot of guys did a lot of stuff. In today’s world, it would be a lot more magnified than it was then,” Huggins continued. “You think about it, listen to some people talk and you look at them and think ‘You’re talking about me and you don’t think I know what you did?’”
Rose went out and reinvented himself as a commodity, selling autographs and memorabilia, making appearances out of new home base in Las Vegas, hoping to gain a chance to be declared eligible for election to the Hall of Fame but baseball commissioners over the years have refused to lift his ban even though legalized gambling has become one of the sports backers.
Huggins, like Rose, holds out hope to find another basketball coaching job. Like Rose, he is reinventing himself, stopped drinking alcohol, lost weight and staying in the public eye but in this round of college basketball coach hiring, no one offered him a job.
“All I know is I have tried my best pretty much to emulate how my grandfather treated people, how my mother treated people. I think to a large degree the reason the people in West Virginia love me to death to this day is because I was kind to them,” he said.
“I was approachable. I love being home, I love being here in West Virginia, I love the people in West Virginia. I’m not going to get caught up in all the B.S.
“This is nothing like Cincinnati and what they get away with saying about people. I’m just running around trying to help people. I went down and helped Willie with the Willie Akers Classic. I’ve been all over the place. I’m actually going to Wheeling to help a guy that would be a great governor. I’ve been a bunch of places with him and everywhere I go people have been terrific.
“There’s nobody that comes up and says ‘You’re an a—hole. Why did you do that?’ People are really nice. If it wasn’t for social media, where all the cowards hang out, nobody would know anything.”
The two got to know each other in the city, Rose as a Cincinnati Reds’ legend and Huggins as coach of the University of Cincinnati basketball team but Huggins was well aware of Rose as player through his days leading up to and during his days as a WVU player.
In fact, style of play at WVU and coaching was very much a hardwood, hard-nosed version of Rose’s play that earned him the nickname of Charlie Hustle, given to him by no less a player than the New York Yankees’ great Mickey Mantle after watching him run full speed to first base on a walk in a spring training game.
That summarized the style of play that led Rose to perhaps his most famous quote, noting “I’d walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball.
Huggins marveled at Rose’s popularity when he got to Cincinnati.
“Pete was the King of Cincinnati when I was there,” Huggins admitted the other day.
Huggins’ arrival in Cincinnati to coach the Bearcats in 1989 coincided with Rose’s suspension from the game by commissioner Bart Giamatti after he was found to have bet on baseball while managing the Reds.
Huggins was named to coach Cincinnati on March 29, 1989, while on August 24, 1989, Rose voluntarily accepted a permanent suspension from baseball.
As Huggins’ legend grew at UC, Rose’s popularity waned across the country, but not in his hometown.
‘’In Cincinnati there’s probably three golf outings a day,” Huggins said. “I would see Pete at all different kinds of events. When you first get to a place like that [as a coach], the first thing they tell you is you need to get out in the community.
“So, initially I went to virtually everything I could go to. Pete was pretty much the star of everything ... him and Johnny Bench.”
Huggins would learn quickly what Rose meant to Cincinnati and its people.
“In Cincinnati, everybody knows everybody. You know the Bengals; you know the Reds. In most places, football players aren’t as easy to see as they are in Cincinnati, for whatever reason. They were out in the community and there’s so many things going on in Cincinnati ... from golf outings to scholarship banquets, you name it, they have it going on.”
Huggins and Rose struck up an acquaintance and Huggins soon came to see beyond the national image of Rose he had gained. This was a different kind of person.
“If you happened to be around him, you liked him. There was no doubt about that,” Huggins said.
Ask him just how important Rose was to the people of Cincinnati and Huggins offers this anecdote. He had been invited to an event run by Rickelle Ruby, wife of prominent restaurant owner Jeff Ruby, at his popular Waterfront Restaurant on the Ohio River.
Ruby had gotten his start in the business partnering with Rose and Bench to found his first restaurant, The Precinct, which would grow into a regional chain of 5-star Jeff Ruby Steak Houses.
“I go in and I’m kind of hurrying and somebody yells at me and Marge Schott is sitting at the bar,” Huggins began, referring to flamboyant owner of the Reds.
Marge Schott fit right in with Rose and Huggins, a controversial character to say the least. She was the owner of the Reds and ruled the roost with her ever present Saint Bernard dog, “Schottzie.”
“Honey, come here,” she said to Huggins. She called everybody honey. “Sit down here and talk to me.”
So Huggins joined her.
“We’re sitting there and I’m listening to Marge and I said, ‘Marge, I got to go. I got to go to this event back here. Rickelle is expecting me back there.’”
Huggins remembers Marge Schott looking him in the eyes.
“She said, ‘Honey, you don’t know Cincinnati very well because this damn event won’t start until Pete gets here.’”
Rose was that big.
“I guess part of it was because he was a hometown guy,” Huggins said.
Cincinnati had a host of heroes from Bench to Oscar Robertson to Tony Perez to Sparky Anderson to Bengals’ quarterback Ken Anderson talk show host Jerry Springer in those days.
“But you name any of those guys and nobody could hold a candle to Pete,” Huggins said. “Everybody had their turn in Cincinnati ... Johnny Bench was big, but he wasn’t Pete. All the baseball guys, all the football guys, Oscar Robertson ... but nobody was Pete.”
As the Huggins’ fame grew in Cincinnati, he achieved the legendary status that he has in Morgantown. Except ...
“We got pretty good as a basketball team,” Huggins said. “We were pretty well noticed around town, but the older guys would come up to me and say, ‘You know what, boy. When you get to thinking you own this town, just look around again. You ain’t Pete Rose.’ I heard that all the time there.”
Now they are joining forces for an important cause. It should be quite a show.
Follow @bhertzel on X (formerly Twitter)
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