MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News)   As on-court transgressions go in West Virginia basketball history, guard Erik Stevenson's technical foul due to a crotch grabbing gesture toward former Oklahoma State player Marcus Smart, now a Boston Celtic, in the midst of a rally he had engineered to put the Mountaineers in front in the middle of the second half of a 67-69 loss Monday night hardly stands out.
True, it's importance to the team and his teammates raises its level of stupidity by mega notches, seeing as just two days earlier he had gotten himself a technical foul for committing a nonsensical personal that Coach Bob Huggins felt led to Kansas State erasing a Mountaineer lead and ignited their victory rally.
But we're talking a history rich with inexplicable incidents that included a player, having taken himself out of a game at Notre Dame, standing at a courtside hot dog stand enjoying a wiener while his teammates gathered in the locker room at halftime; another player spitting upon an opposing cheerleader as he headed to the locker room accompanied by a coach after his second technical led to him being ejected from the game; the team's leading scorer being kicked off the squad in midseason for the famous "breaking team rules".
Even Huggins himself carved out a niche for himself when played a crucial game against Duquesne in the mid-1970s he got the fans in Pittsburgh quite riled up when, as someone once described the incident, B.B. Flenory's face inadvertently hit Huggins; elbow.
When that was brought up to Huggins a couple of years back, he responded by saying, "Yes, I think it was something like that."
Stevenson, of course, transferred in with a reputation of being somewhat unstable and irrational on the court.
In fact, early this year in a getting-to-know press conference, Mountaineer teammate Tre Mitchell offered up his early impression of Stevenson.
"I thought he was a little crazy, at first, if I'm to be honest" Mitchell said on Dec. 16. "I was like, 'Why is this dude yelling all the time?' After playing with him, you see the passion he plays with and his hunger and want to win is unmatched. He elevates everyone's level of play."
But obviously, he takes it too far on occasion. When it was mentioned to Huggins after that Stevenson was 'fiery", Huggins interrupted and said quite emotionally:
"Fiery? Kenyon Martin was a fiery guy. Kenyon Martin (an All-American and National Player of the Year under Huggins at Cincinnati) didn't do stupid things to get technicals and hurt his team. But he was a fiery guy. Pete Michael was a fiery guy. I've had a lot of fiery guys. But I haven't had any that hurt their teammates. That's not right."
It happens, though, and probably more in basketball than in any other sport. See, basketball players are unique kinds of athletes, as brawny and powerful as football players, as athletic and graceful as ballet dancers. The game is more of an artistic endeavor as much as it is an athletic endeavor and your artists, they run from Dali to Warhol to Picasso to Van Gogh.
As noted, WVU's had its share of strange characters.
Back in 1996 one of the best players ever at the school and yes, we're talking about a school that produced Jerry West and Hot Rod Hundley, was Gordon Malone, a tall, slender, athletic 6-foot-10 who created magic on the court and dismay off it, enough so that he was the perfect fit for his professional team, the Harlem Globetrotters.
Playing against Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., Malone had a disagreement with coach Gale Catlett on the bench.
Getting no satisfaction from the conversation, he simply took himself out of the game. That apparently did not sit too well with Catlett, especially after he skipped the halftime locker room meeting and was out there, in his uniform, munching on a hot dog at a hot dog stand near the tunnel that led to the locker room.
Turns out the game was more famous for that than being WVU's first road win as a member of the Big East.
A few years later Chris Moss, one of the toughest inside players WVU ever had, was going through personal problems, one of them being his mother's battle with multiple sclerosis.
In a 78-61 loss, also at Notre Dame, Moss had to be restrained after fouling out and was being escorted to the locker room by assistant coach Lester Rowe when the Irish student section began taunting him. He quickly turned and spit toward the crowd, hitting a cheerleader sitting on the floor along the baseline.
Moss issued an apology and took a leave of absence from the team to put his life back in order.
Drew Schifino was the last WVU player to average 20 points a game in a season in 2003 and was off to a good start on the 2004 season, averaging 18 points a game and owning a streak of 48 consecutive double figure games. But facing Notre Dame  there seems to be a trend there  there was something wrong with Schifino's play.
John Beilein was coach and Schifino had 9 points in the game with plenty of time left to reach double figures, but he was mysteriously removed from the game.
"People remember me being dismissed (from the team) instead of remembering I averaged 20 points a game as a sophomore; I broke a Big East record with 11 steals in one game as a freshman, I scored over 1,000 points in two and a half years. People forget the things I did. The last impression is always the one that lasts," he said in an interview more than a decade later.
He transferred, finished his career and became a youth coach.
Huggins has had his own discipline problems, including in 2019 when he dismissed starters Esa Ahmad and Wesley Harris from the team for "violation of athletic department policies" and with Derek Culver when he was suspended for the first semester of his freshman year for missing classes and being late for meetings.
Even last year Huggins had an incident with one of his favorite players, Gabe Osabuohien, also at Oklahoma State. In that game Osabuohien argued with an official, picked up a pair of technical fouls and was ejected. As he left, he said something to Huggins that caused him to jump and shout at the player as he left the arena floor.
Osabuohien was suspended for the next game, Huggins saying, "We don't have room in our program for Gabe's actions. If that was a first, OK, you lost it. I understand, but you can't do that anymore. It wasn't the first time."
