Waynesboro could learn from WVU Athletics how to handle homophobic slurs

Waynesboro leaders shrugged off the awful gay slur of Vice Mayor Jim Wood directed at a Cabinet member.

The way WVU handled its basketball coach’s awful gay slur stands in stark contrast.

The school is docking $1 million from coach Bob Huggins’ salary, suspending him from the sidelines for at least a few games, and requiring him to undergo sensitivity training.

This is the fallout from Huggins’ appearance on a Cincinnati sports radio show on Monday in which he told a story about fans of Xavier University, a rival of the University of Cincinnati, one of his previous coaching stops.

Huggins claimed that rubber penises had been thrown on the floor, and after one of the hosts suggested that “it was transgender night, wasn’t it,” Huggins responded, “yeah, no, what it was, was all those fags, those Catholic fags, I think.”

There was speculation that Huggins, who was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2022, could lose his job in the wake of the controversy.

ESPN is reporting that Huggins negotiated the million-dollar pay cut, suspension and sensitivity training as a way to keep his job at WVU, his alma mater, which he has led to a 345-203 record, 11 NCAA Tournament appearances and a Final Four.

Back in Waynesboro, where Wood, in a Feb. 15 Facebook talk show that he has since deleted from the interwebs, called Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “ol’ Pete Buttplug, or whatever his name is,” there were calls from city leaders for Wood to resign, but the controversy blew over, and Wood not only didn’t resign, he’s still the vice mayor, and all has apparently been forgiven.

But then, Jim Wood is just a vice mayor, not a basketball coach.