NEW YORK -- Bob Huggins shuffled into the suite at the Essex House reserved for the ESPN interview Tuesday night. Less than a month after suffering a heart attack, at first looking a bit reserved, Huggins almost appeared timid about the attention he was receiving for simply showing up at a Jimmy V Classic dinner at the New York Athletic Club.

But that was just a cover. Huggins is a throwback, one of the last remaining tough, intelligent old-school coaches, not about to let something like a heart attack slow him down.

Setback? Certainly.

Nuisance? You bet.

Life changing? Well, he's required to sleep more, take medicine, exercise on a daily basis and alter his diet. But don't expect any changes in his coaching style, which means his healthy passion for the profession is intact.

Even honoring commitments such as Tuesday night isn't going to cease. Sure, Huggins might make fewer appearances outside of Cincinnati, but he's not going to disappear. Hardly. ESPN didn't force him to attend the dinner, but Gonzaga's Mark Few, Oregon's Ernie Kent and N.C. State's Herb Sendek wouldn't have complained if Huggins took a pass. (Coaches of teams in the Dec. 17 event are essentially required to attend.)

Huggins may have taken a friend's private jet from Cincinnati, and a nap was built into his schedule, but that was the extent of any special treatment. Huggins was as sharp as ever when it was his time to speak at the dinner, tossing zingers around at those in the profession and leading the audience into laughter with witty stories of his days at Jesuit-based Walsh College, not to mention those as a player who struggled to pass a one-question oral exam on where Jesus was born (The punchline? The player kept guessing cities like Scranton and East Stroudsburg, saying he knew it was somewhere in Eastern Pennsylvania).

It was classic Huggins. Expect the same on the sideline when the season starts.

"I haven't changed my coaching," Huggins said of his assistants doing a lot of the work in practice while he oversees the entire operation. "I'm doing the same things. I don't know initially if I had the same kind of energy the first couple of days. I just kind of walked out of the hospital and into practice, so it's a little bit different."

But is his intensity the same?

	Don't call Bob Huggins' return to coaching "remarkable." He wouldn't be coaching if he didn't have the desire.

"Why wouldn't it be?" Huggins said. "If you don't have the passion for what you're doing, then why do it? When the time comes that I don't have the passion or enthusiasm for what I'm doing then I'll get a job or something with less stress.

"I'm not going to change. I mean I can't change. I mean if I change then I'm not me and if I'm not me then I don't need to do this anymore. I need to find something else to do."

Huggins said the only thing he would change is to "win more games."

"You guys are probably a big reason I have so much stress because you're on me so much," said Huggins, taking a shot back at the media. "As you get older you calm down some. I've done that in the last few years because I'm older, but ... then hopefully I'm smarter. I'm not going to change much. I've been this way for 49 years."

And the yelling? That too, Huggins said, is overexposed. Huggins claims television cameras are focused on him more than any other coach in the nation, so that when he does yell at a player or an official, it's always captured. With this year's Bearcats as young a team as he has had since 1994, he anticipates teaching more, and that means yelling at times at this group.

"What am I going to yell and scream about?" Huggins said. "Once in a while I do it and I happen to get caught doing it. Other guys don't get caught. I don't hide it and run in the locker room and do it. In four years I may have raised my voice once to Kenyon Martin. Not sure if I ever did to Pete Mickeal or DerMarr Johnson. If I need to do that, I do that. There could be weeks where I don't raise my voice."

Already known as a quiet talker away from the court, Huggins could hardly speak when the heart attack started. He was returning his rental car in Pittsburgh on Sept. 28 when he got nauseous. He managed to return the car, make his way in front of the airport, but when he went to pick up his bags and was ready to walk into the airport for a flight home to Cincinnati, he realized he couldn't make it into the terminal. He had to sit down on the curb outside.

"I'm smart enough to know when I can't go anymore," Huggins said. "I couldn't breathe. I usually can breathe, so I knew what was going on."

The ambulance arrived within minutes, where an unbelievable coincidence occurred. A cousin of Memphis coach John Calipari was one of the EMT workers.

"He said he couldn't let me die until Cal beat me," Huggins said. "I was shocked it was Cal's cousin, but he did a great job."

Huggins is able to add a bit of levity to the situation now, but he had a 90-percent blocked artery. He received attention so quickly after his initial chest pains that he wasn't scared. Surgery consisted of a common procedure performed immediately where a balloon is put in to open up the blood flow and a stent to keep it that way.

"You don't have time to be scared," Huggins said. "I mean, I was trying to breathe. I honestly wasn't scared. It doesn't do any good to be afraid. Of what? I mean when God says it's time to go, you go. I wasn't scared. I just know I couldn't breathe."

	“	You don't have time to be scared. I mean, I was trying to breathe. I honestly wasn't scared. It doesn't do any good to be afraid. Of what? I mean when God says it's time to go, you go. I wasn't scared. I just know I couldn't breathe. ”
		— Bob Huggins on suffering a heart attack Sept. 28

In a heart attack, time is muscle, according to Leonard Ganz, the director of cardiac electrophysiology at the University of Pittsburgh medical center. Ganz, who didn't treat Huggins, but was familiar with the procedures done on Huggins, said the difference between a heart attack and full cardiac arrest is that a person who has the latter, 95 percent of time, dies.

Huggins was hospitalized for 11 days between Pittsburgh (Beaver Medical Center) and Cincinnati before being released. Two weeks ago, he had a Guidant Defibrillator implanted. He was at practice the next day. The defibrillator is implanted in the skin and monitors a person's heart rate, like a pacemaker and can shock the heart's pulse back into rhythm.

"The devices have proven to be life saving," Ganz said. "But the problem is we don't identify enough people who need them before they have a cardiac arrest. The heart muscle damage from a heart attack can't be regenerated. People get a scar from a heart attack and the damage can decrease through medicine, but having a defibrillator means the person is less likely to die from sudden death. Cardiac arrest is the single biggest cause of death in the U.S."

The procedure Huggins had was similar to vice president Dick Cheney's. But Huggins downplayed having the defibrillator implanted.

"It's two different things because (having a defibrillator put in) is for your electrical system," Huggins said. "I'd never had a problem with my electrical system. I've had a problem with my plumbing. If the same thing happened again then it wouldn't make a difference. It's a different deal if you have blockage in your arteries. That doesn't have to do with your electrical system in your body."

The Huggins family has a history of heart disease, with his father suffering a heart attack before he was 40. But there were other factors in Huggins' suffering a similar attack.

"I didn't take good enough care of myself as far as getting annual checkups," Huggins said. "But three weeks before I had a change in my life insurance policy and they checked my cholesterol, my heart rate and did an EKG and pronounced me fit as a fiddle, so it's probably genetic. Maybe if I ran five miles a day then I could have prolonged it until I was 53. But it was inevitable. It was going to happen. It was genetic."

	Bob Huggins seems to always has at least one camera focused on him.

Huggins had the occasional stogie and a drink but there's no proof that contributed, either. And, what about his diet?

"I'm a coach," said Huggins, who has lost 20-plus pounds over the last month. "I was on the move. Hamburgers. I didn't eat that much fried food other than hamburgers. I'm not a late-night eater. I'm not a guy that eats pizza at 3 in the morning. I don't do that."

But he does find himself getting tired more often since the attack.

"I don't have the endurance that I used to have," Huggins said. "I don't have the energy that I used to have and I'm sure a lot of that is because of the medication and part of it is my body went through a tremendous shock. But I'll get that back."

If anything positive came out of the attack, his friendships, even those that appeared to be strained, are stronger than ever. A number of coaches visited him during his stay in the hospital, rivals like Calipari and former Xavier rival and present Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser.

Even Temple coach John Chaney sent a gift. Chaney, remember, was at odds with Huggins just last year after it was revealed that Cincy assistant Andy Kennedy negatively recruited against the Owls when they were both pursuing present Temple freshman Keith Butler. Chaney was even more upset with Huggins and Cincinnati after the Bearcats backed out of a return game to Temple last season.

"We're all very competitive, but we as coaches, all care for each other," said Huggins, who just as quickly shows a little more of his wit. "I got a fruit basket from John Chaney. I had my wife eat a piece of fruit and wait a couple days to make sure it was all right before I ate it. But John was great and sent a great note. To say we don't get along is a false perception. We do the same things by trying to change someone's life and we have mutual respect for each other."

Huggins, who nearly took the West Virginia job at his alma mater this past April, was overwhelmed by the support he received in Cincinnati. Fans sent him cards and he received letters and e-mails from various people from all over the country. His former players sent gifts, like flowers from Nick Van Exel, and his present players visited him. They were nervous at first but then were at ease as they exited the hospital.

"A lot from people who watch us play on television and appreciate how hard our kids play," Huggins said. "They said they liked what we stood for. (Players) have been wonderful. They keep asking me if I'm all right all the time. That didn't used to happen until we lost a couple in a row."

Huggins said his team of doctors never put restrictions on his coaching.

"What am I going to do, sit at home?" Huggins said. "Sit in my office, while they're practicing? I couldn't do that. I know when enough is enough. I know when I'm tired and can't go on.

"I don't want to coach until I can't do it. I could quit right now except I really like doing it."

Still, it is remarkable that Huggins is already traveling, coaching, and will be on the sidelines, uninterrupted for the start of the season.

"Remarkable? I don't know what is so remarkable," Huggins said. "If I couldn't do it, I wouldn't do it. People need to understand that. I've got a great family and I'm not going to jeopardize being around my family to go out there and coach a game.

"But I'm not going to run and hide, either. It'd be easy to say, 'Well, I'm sick, I'm not going to coach this year, we don't have anybody returning.' But I'm not going to do that. I want to coach and do the best job I can. Have them play and see what happens."

Andy Katz is a senior writer at ESPN.com.