By Jerry Dowling

It could have been a lot worse. The first reports of Bob Huggins' arrest for driving while intoxicated suggested he was on a drinking binge with the family of a recruit under circumstances forbidden by the NCAA. Some kind of memorable recruiting visit that would've been.

By now, illegal recruiting seems to be off the table, but then who could fathom the despair if Huggins hadn't merely been pulled over but actually plowed into another car and caused fatalities? No, this is one of those lucky catastrophes without any real damage done.

But it is a cautionary catastrophe, the sort of event that seems to creep up on the University of Cincinnati basketball coach. Stripped of the extras, the latest on Huggins becomes a man's struggle with himself, with the unrelenting work ethic that shaped him, perhaps with alcohol reliance and the very real limitations of his body, which are crying for him to slow down.

Less than two years off a heart attack, reportedly under a doctor's restriction of one glass of wine per day, he's driving with vomit on his door, unable to count backwards from 67 to 54, unable to summon enough breath for the blow test.

Huggins hasn't yet been tried for the incident occurring in Fairfax on the night of June 8, and we should be careful to respect due process. That said, it's hard to believe the Fairfax police would make up the story about drunken driving told in their report.

Whatever happens with Huggins in the legal process, the episode coupled with Bob Goin's testimony leaves little doubt that Huggins has been on a trajectory that would meet disaster. Once again, though, Huggins is lucky. It's not as disastrous as it could have been.

Anyone can get a DUI. People drive drunk every night, many are cited for DUI and they all should be grateful they were stopped and awakened before something terrible happened. A person with one DUI might be a fool or a producer who bombs himself with alcohol to relieve stress, but he isn't a menace to society. If we're honest about freedom, we'll allow people to screw up once and take the lesson, provided there's no harm and no foul.

Now, when people come back for two or three DUIs, their freedom is a menace and they need to get off the road. The mistake becomes forgivable if it isn't repeated. But one who repeats the mistake hasn't learned to keep the common interest sufficiently at heart and thereby becomes an all-too-willing social threat.

So even if the legal matter comes out with a conviction, it's way too early to put out the call for Huggins to be removed. He's never been charged before with driving under the influence. There's nothing to gain from applying some final solution to what could be a one-time error.

Fortunately, UC has chosen to not make Huggins into a moral issue, posturing about the purity of the institution by casting him off for impugning its sacred name. Other universities have been more severe. The University of Alabama bounced football coach Mike Price for an episode involving heavy drinking and strippers, which is nowhere near as dangerous to the society as driving under the influence.

The very idea that athletes and their coaches ought to be upheld as moral exemplars has no friend in this space, so neither does the idea of making Huggins into an example. He already is example enough in that he's a high profile guy going through a drunken driving case.

In matters like this, being a high profile guy is a blessing and a curse. If he's received a break or two from the police in the past, as reports indicate he might have, everyone knows hauling Huggins in for DUI would cause a firestorm.

More than perhaps any other athletic personality in Cincinnati, he lives with and in the city and -- this just in -- Cincinnati is a town in which people like to go out and drink beer. The number of people in the past 15 years who have seen Huggins with a beer in hand is much greater than 10.

We've often been reminded of the virtues Huggins learned during his upbringing in eastern Ohio, where lots of people who might have struggled just to get by ended up making worthy lives through hard work and respect for the hard work done by others. And if they're living lives in which they're never far from losing it all, it's a sad reality that many of these men work themselves to death just to keep it.

Removed from the humble comforts and persistent demands of the upbringing that taught him the values, Huggins is on the verge of working himself to death, despite the comforts and the margins he's earned through those values. The virtues that have made him great are on the verge of eating him alive. Taken too far, they no longer are virtues.

Hats off to Goin, UC athletic director, for recognizing this and acting on Huggins' plight by keeping in mind the causes. It's remarkable that Goin had before asked Huggins to take time off. Such a request is almost unheard of, considering the salaries going to coaches. But it shows the depth and duration of Huggins' difficulty.

Perhaps Huggins is a workaholic, burying his his problems in work. In that case, it's necessary also to have someplace to bury work. And if he's used alcohol for that in the past, that's fine.

Young people can get away with it to the extent their bodies can absorb the abuse and bounce back. But people who burn into their forties often are confronted with the puzzle that Huggins faces today -- the alcohol strategy for pain killing begins to cause even greater pain.

Huggins has been through his own heart attack, the death of his mother and now this in the past couple years, and that's to say nothing about the stuff that really drives him crazy, the works of his basketball teams. So the university can call it a suspension, but it's truly a vacation and it sounds like Huggins needs one badly.

Give Huggins a year off so he can sit on top of a mountain, go to a beach, backdrop himself against the awesome breadth of nature and see where he fits. The mind needs rest and reorientation. Goin's probably right. Huggins could come back better than ever if he can take the day-to-day worries of work out of his life for a while, as most people do.

And why in heaven is a 50-year-old man drinking this much on no food and four hours of sleep? Memo to Hugs: You're not a kid anymore.

It's fine to push a work ethic past the limit, but if you don't have to and probably shouldn't push the body past its limit through heavy work and drink, then don't do it. A laudatory approach to life becomes a recipe for suicide if it's applied to a life that doesn't need to apply it so stringently. The body needs rest.

It would be truly tragic for Huggins to kill himself by living the way he's been taught to live. No one doubts he's learned well the lessons of his upbringing. But has he also learned them poorly?

Now, one hopes, Huggins will learn the lessons of his adulthood so he can have more of it.