Bob Huggins and Bill Cunningham, two Cincinnati characters, were yucking it up Monday like old times. And by old times, I mean the 1970s or earlier, when part of manly banter meant slinging around anti-LGBTQ slurs like it’s the funniest thing in the world.
There were two problems with this Cro-Magnon colloquy: It’s 2023, not the 1970s; and Huggins was live on air on The Bill Cunningham Show on 700 WLW on a 50,000-watt radio station.
In discussing the old Cincinnati-Xavier crosstown rivalry that Huggins once was part of as coach of the Bearcats and Cunningham once was part of as a baseball captain of the Musketeers, the West Virginia men’s basketball coach busted out an old anti-LGBTQ slur. He said it not once but twice, thereby removing the “I misspoke” excuse from his inevitable apology. He went straight Thom Brennaman—but in this instance, Huggins knew he was live on air at the time he tried to light his career on fire.
