MIKE BURKE
Allegany Radio Corporation Sports
It’s so hot … Even though we’re not in Nevada, Arizona or New Mexico (well, one of you are), it’s so hot.
Oh, and this just in: It’s going to get hotter.
Personally, I like it hot — not quite this hot, mind you; but I don’t like it cold. Air conditioning, you see, is not my friend, even though I just had the air conditioner guy over the other day to fix the air conditioner. Good man, that Tyler …
Anyway, I was driving home yesterday with the windows down and the heat was really strong, and I thought of the opening scene of “Rear Window.”
Rear Window, the classic 1954 film starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Raymond Burr, Thelma Ritter and Wendell Corey, is my favorite Hitchcock movie, and one of my favorite movies of all. If you’ve seen it, you know; if you haven’t seen it, you need to know, so watch it.
Normally, I watch Rear Window in the winter, because there is nothing else to watch because it’s not baseball season, and because it reminds me of summer during the very moments I am furiously cursing winter. It’s the perfect movie to watch in the winter for anybody who hates winter (pick me!), because Alfred Hitchcock creates on a movie set, among many other things, the heat and the sweltering summer of New York City in just a matter of moments in the very opening scene.
As Michael Warburton writes, “In just the opening few minutes Alfred Hitchcock packs in more character info, content, clues, location and narrative than you can shake a genius stick at.”
And what he also gives us is the sultry sense of summer, keeping in mind, of course, that a lot of folks didn’t have air conditioning in their homes in 1954 (thank you, again, Tyler).
Still, I believe we all would agree that the sense of being warm, and even hot, beats the hell out of being cold and shoveling snow.
So that’s all I have there. It’s just one of those columns, okay? Still, whether you’ve seen it before or not, watch “Rear Window.” There is no such thing as a perfect anything, much less a perfect movie; but “Rear Window” and “The Sting” are the closest things, in my view, to being perfect movies as any of them.
What else do we have?
Well, like everybody else who likes bad television, I’ve continued to follow the Bob Huggins saga at West Virginia University and, folks, in the immortal words of Coach Richard F. Bittner, “It is not good.”
Sadly, Bob Huggins, the native of Morgantown, academic All-American guard and graduate of West Virginia University and College Basketball Hall of Fame coach, has gone from being the guy WVU could never do without to being the guy it can’t make disappear soon enough.
Well, guess who ain’t going nowhere? (As they say in film noir). Not Huggins, that’s who; at least until a judge tells him down the line to get lost, and that’s what might just decide it either way.
Oddly enough, in reading Huggins’ recent statements that he did not resign, that he did not email his resignation and retirement to the people his working agreement states he must contact in the event of his resignation, that he did not write the message to the WVU fans, that he did not tell his players he was resigning and retiring (even though five of the players entered the transfer portal soon after the meeting he held with the team), there’s just something that tells me he might be onto something about all of this. Call it a hunch.
Could be wrong, of course, but it just seems, either way, that the time has never been better for Huggins to simply move on. Yet, if he feels this strongly about it, I doubt he’s going to move on until this goes to court, which I suspect it will since he is so hard-headed and the WVU administration, led by President E. Gordon Gee, perhaps out of the realization that they screwed the pooch on the process (which they seemingly did) isn’t going to back down either.
In the end, it doesn’t seem Huggins will be back, though I’ve been wrong many times before. But it does just seem to be the time for him to be gone, given the headaches he has caused for the university since May.
I just don’t think he’ll give it up until he has no other choice. Nor do I think Gee will give it up and will likely end up firing Huggins as any other university employee, including Gee, would have been fired in May when Huggins likely should have been fired.
Gee, of course, could be told to resign as well from what I’ve been told. Either way, it seems, we’re going to have a court case on our hands.
Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected] and [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @MikeBurkeMDT