Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  It means a lost weekend for us—and a missed opportunity. It also means that whatever rhythm we’ve managed to achieve over the first month of the season is now completely out of whack, with just one game in a two-week period, so I go from thinking we’re moving in the right direction to thinking we aren’t going anywhere.

  We aren’t just snakebit on the calendar. There are a mess of personnel issues that threaten our season. Jimmy Hall has been in and out of trouble, in and out of my doghouse, to where I never know if I can count on him, one game to the next. At six-eight, he’s our starting center, and he’s got good skills, good athleticism, good presence down low—but the problem with Jimmy’s game is Jimmy himself. Even when he’s on the floor, you never know what you’ll get out of him in terms of effort.

  Jerome Frink is nursing an early-season ankle injury, and he’s off and on, hot and cold. He was a mainstay of last year’s national championship team, so I’ve been counting on him to return to form, but he hasn’t been right in the early part of this season—and I catch myself hoping that when he’s back to 100 percent physically, the rest of his game will follow.

  You have to expect a certain number of injuries, but we also had a couple midseason and preseason defections that left some big holes on our roster. Rashad Andrews got himself suspended again and ended up transferring to Boys and Girls High School in the city, so he’s out of the mix. Jordan Forehand, a sophomore guard who looked like he might make a real contribution over the next couple years, wasn’t happy with his minutes, so he transferred to St. Benedict’s. Chris Regus, a junior guard who’d played big for us in the tournament last year, and Paul Collado, a transfer from Memorial High School, were also gone from the team, along with a guard from last year’s JV team named Tyrinn Shannon, who ended up as the starting guard at Ferris, a public school around the corner from St. Anthony.

  That’s a lot of talent to shed from your depth chart. A lot of holes to fill.

  A few too many question marks.

  Despite our unblemished record, our season has been a crapshoot. We’re 19–0, going into tonight’s game, but it’s like we’re treading water. I’ve taken to telling reporters we’re a “perfectly imperfect” team, because that’s how it feels. Like at any time we’ll start sinking.

  All of which takes us to today’s game, the new centerpiece on our schedule, against one of the top teams in the country—Huntington Prep Basketball Academy from West Virginia. We’re coming off a hard-fought contest against another state power, Plainfield, in a rematch of last year’s Tournament of Champions final. That game was a struggle. Our outside shooting was dreadful—by my count, we were 1–16 from fifteen feet out. You can’t win with outside shooting like that, especially against an efficient team like Plainfield. And yet we once again played a pressure cooker–type defense; we chased down every rebound; we kept the game close and pulled out a double-digit win—despite ourselves.

  At the end of the game, the Plainfield coach, Jeff Lubreski, told a reporter that our team played more the way we wanted to play, while his guys played less the way they wanted to play, and I read the comment in the paper and thought, Yeah, that about sums it up.

  This Huntington Prep team, though … I’m not so sure we can dictate the terms of this one. When I accepted the game, I knew next to nothing about the program. We were supposed to face them at the Prime Time Classic, over in Mercer County. We’d always gotten some pretty good games at that tournament, so I figured they’d push us, but then the tournament organizer called and told me the sponsors had pulled out. This Huntington Prep team still wanted to play us, however, so I took the game, so long as we could keep it local. We didn’t have the budget for a bus ride to West Virginia, but money didn’t seem to be a problem for these guys. They were happy to come to us, and since they’re a big draw, with a national profile, we needed a neutral site to accommodate a good turnout.

  So now here we are at Roselle Catholic High School in Union County, in front of a couple thousand fans, taking our warm-ups. We’re on the floor first, which is not the way I like to play it. I like it when the other guys take the floor ahead of us. It gets in their heads a little bit, worrying what we’re up to, what’s taking us so long—only here we’re the ones doing the worrying. Here they’re in my head. Ben Gamble has done his usual thorough scouting job, but I still don’t know what to expect. Their starting lineup stands six-ten, six-seven, six-eight, six-six, and six-three. They’ve also got a seven-two kid on the bench and a six-eight junior who might not even get into the game and who’s still being recruited by some top schools. Not to mention their sixth man, a six-six forward who’ll be playing in the Big East next year, for South Florida.

  I watch the other team step onto the floor, finally, and I wonder what the hell we’re doing here. I turn to my buddy Tom Lalicito, the longtime head coach of St. Mary’s, another Jersey City basketball power. Tom and I have known each other for forty years, and when St. Mary’s was forced to close its doors last spring, I jumped at the chance to bring him on as an assistant. Didn’t matter that we’d been rival coaches all that time. Tom knows the game as well as anyone, and here I catch him looking at these giants and wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking.

  I say, “Pretty big, huh?”

  He says, “Pretty big.”

  One of Huntington Prep’s big guys, the six-seven Andrew Wiggins, is probably the best sophomore in the country. People talk about him like he’s the next Kobe Bryant, and just watching him move in these warm-ups, it’s not hard to see why. Just a tremendous, tremendous player.

  It’s not that there’s something in the water down in West Virginia that accounts for all this height, all this talent. Not at all. Huntington Prep is like a finishing school for college-bound athletes. The players come from all over and live together as a group and attend a nearby high school, but they don’t play for that school. They play their own schedule, do their own thing—and here they mean to do their own thing against us.

  They go out to an early lead—ten points—before I can even think about making an adjustment, but we bring it down to five by the end of the first quarter. Our guys are a little intimidated, I think. They’ve never gone up against such height, such talent, such strength.

  Right away it’s clear Huntington Prep doesn’t have a single weakness. Everyone can play. The only way they’re weak, I realize, is the game itself. I mean, a high school game is short, only thirty-two minutes. That’s not a lot of time, and there’s only one ball, so it’s tough to keep everybody happy on a team like that. Our guys are used to filling different roles; they’re used to sharing the ball; they’ve been playing together for years. These other kids, they’ve been thrown together like a kind of Dream Team, so I start to think, if we keep playing to our strengths, we’ll be all right. If we keep the game close, we’ll be all right.

  We go into halftime down by just four points, and I have to laugh. My players, they don’t know what to make of me, laughing. They don’t get what’s so funny. So I tell them. I say, “This team is unbelievable, but they’re only up by four. We’ve missed a bunch of shots, a bunch of free throws, but we’re only down four.”

  Something clicks, because our guys come out in the third quarter and start hitting their shots. They play a little smarter, a little crisper. Tariq Carey, a senior transfer from East Side High School in Newark, really comes up big for us. He’s one of our best shooters, but he’s yet to put it together in a game—until tonight. Here’s a kid who was motivated enough to switch schools and join our program, where he’d have to fight for minutes and carve out a new role, and I’ve yet to figure him out. He’s got tremendous skills, but sometimes it seems like his head’s not in the games. In practice, he’ll never seem to know what drill we’re running, what’s expected of him, and then when he’s left to kind of freestyle, his instincts kick in and he’ll just light it up. That kind of player can be frustrating to coach, but I’ve learned to hang with them and kind of shoehorn their approach i
nto what we’re trying to do as a team, on the thinking that they’ll eventually come around and make a meaningful contribution. That’s just what happens here. Tariq comes off the bench and hits a three, a layup, plays tremendous defense, gives us a real shot of energy. We end up outscoring them by five points in the third quarter to go up by one, on the back of a couple fast breaks, a couple smart possessions, and a couple big stops.

  All of a sudden, it starts to feel like we can win this thing. Our guys start to feel it too. You can see it in the way they come off the floor at the end of the third quarter. And now the crowd is with us. We’re not used to being the underdog, the Cinderella team, but against these Huntington Prep kids, we’re clearly the fan favorite, so it helps to have the fans on our side. Helps a lot actually.

  All game long, and into the fourth quarter, we’ve taken the paint away from Huntington Prep. We’re keeping them from their game. They’re firing up threes when what they want is to get the ball down low.

  We go up one with about a minute to go, when Kyle finds Jerome on a tremendous feed for an easy basket, and after a quick stop Huntington Prep has to foul Jimmy Hall. Jimmy’s a decent free-throw shooter, so I’m thinking he can give us a small cushion, but he misses the front end of the one-and-one.

  Huntington Prep grabs the rebound and calls time.

  We’ve got two fouls to give.

  In high school you don’t advance the ball to half-court on the back of a time-out, so they have to run their inbounds play from the baseline.

  The crowd is going completely crazy. By now, they’re all the way with us, so our guys are drawing on all that emotion, all that energy. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect our one-point lead. We do a good job keeping the other team in the backcourt off the inbounds, and with twelve seconds to go in the game, Josh Brown gives a foul to stop the clock.

  This time the ball is at half-court, so Josh gives another foul. Stops the clock with four seconds left.

  What happens next is kind of amazing. Huntington Prep gets the ball to Elijah Macon, a six-eight kid who’ll be playing for West Virginia next year. Macon gets the ball off the foul line and looks to drive past Jerome Frink toward the basket, hard. Remember, it’s a one-point game, so all they need is a bucket, so this is the right move, but for some reason Macon kicks it back out to the six-six kid on his way to South Florida, who fires up a three at the buzzer.

  The ball rims out, and we win the game, and as the ball drops harmlessly to the floor and our guys start to celebrate I can’t shake thinking why Macon didn’t just take it to the hole. It made no sense. I mean, they’d just come off of a time-out. And another time-out just before that. This kid had to know the score. This was a well-coached group. A top player like that, he had to know a layup would give his team the game. But we’d denied them the paint all game long, so maybe we were in his head. They’d been living by the three-pointer all game long—thirty of their forty-nine points came from downtown—so I guess if you live by the sword you die by the sword, right?

  4.

  The St. Anthony Way

  CHAMPIONS AREN’T MADE IN GYMS. CHAMPIONS ARE MADE FROM SOMETHING THEY HAVE DEEP INSIDE THEM: A DESIRE, A DREAM, A VISION. THEY HAVE TO HAVE LAST-MINUTE STAMINA, THEY HAVE TO BE A LITTLE FASTER, THEY HAVE TO HAVE THE SKILL AND THE WILL. BUT THE WILL MUST BE STRONGER THAN THE SKILL.

  —Muhammad Ali

  IF I WAS GIVEN EIGHT HOURS TO CHOP DOWN A TREE, I WOULD SPEND SEVEN HOURS SHARPENING MY AX.

  —Abraham Lincoln

  I should probably double back and fill in some of the blanks at home, at work, and at St. Anthony, because it adds up to how I found my identity as a coach.

  When Chris and I got married in August 1970, I was still finishing college at night, working a bunch of different jobs during the day, coaching in the afternoons and on weekends. I was also tending bar a couple nights a week at Dahoney’s. Summers, I ran leagues—first for the parish and later on for the Jersey City Department of Recreation.

  Money was tight, but I wouldn’t want to suggest we were living from paycheck to paycheck. We had so many different paychecks coming in, they couldn’t help but add up—and besides, Chris and I had simple tastes, so we were doing okay. Each week we’d sock away a little money for a down payment on a house, and it got to where our only real worry was that we never saw each other. Chris was working as a teller at Chemical Bank in Greenwich Village, which meant one of us was always coming or going.

  Chris worked banker’s hours, so at least her schedule was consistent. My shifts changed with the seasons, and when basketball season came around I was busy on top of busy. Those first few years when I was coaching the freshman and junior varsity teams at St. Anthony, I was also working at the post office for a stretch—and then, for another stretch, in roadway trucking. Whatever I could find, if I could fit it into my days, I jumped at it. I even delivered pizzas for a while—which meant we ate a lot of end-of-the-night leftover pizza.

  (Poor Chris hated all that stale pizza, said it tasted like cardboard, but it was what we told ourselves we could afford—and frankly, it wasn’t half-bad.)

  The one constant in that early part of my career was the work in recreation. The other part-time jobs would come and go, but I always ran those summer leagues. Started out running the same league I used to play in as a kid, which for years and years had been run by our parish athletic director, Jack McCoy. It was a good gig. The hours were flexible, and I was already coaching a lot of these young players, so it was no big thing to hire some kids to keep score or keep time, to order a couple boxes of different-colored T-shirts for uniforms, and to coordinate the referees. Didn’t take much to get everybody registered and set up the schedules; once you did it a time or two, it kind of ran itself, so I wasn’t about to give it up. I ran that parish league up until 1978, when I was asked to run a much bigger league in the northern part of the city. By that point, our parish leagues had started to attract some really good teams. The competition was becoming more and more intense, so it made sense to kick it up a notch, and before long these city leagues were drawing some of the best players in the metropolitan area. We had pro players trying to stay in game shape over the summer, college players hoping to lift their games, top-level high school players looking to keep sharp … all playing in this one league. Games were played outside, inside the boards of an ice skating rink. We brought in fiberglass backboards, a twenty-four-second clock, bleachers, a big outdoor scoreboard. It was tremendous. People came out in big numbers to watch all these great players. From all over. We had Kelly Tripucka play with us, when he was home from Notre Dame. We had Butch Lee the summer after he’d been named Player of the Year in the NCAA tournament, for Marquette. We had Chris Mullin, a future NBA Hall of Famer, home from St. John’s. Each team had two or three guys on its roster who were playing big-time college ball, wanting to stay in game shape over the summer.

  Kelly Tripucka was a good example. He’d played at Bloomfield High School, graduated in 1977, and of course he went on to star at Notre Dame before becoming a first-round draft choice of the Detroit Pistons. He ended up becoming an instrumental figure on the Jersey basketball scene. Not because he had a tremendous high school career, which he did, and not because he went on to a great career in college and in the NBA, which he also did, but because his family decided to challenge a long-standing state rule that restricted how or where you could play basketball outside of high school. The case ended up changing the landscape of the sport. It used to be that you could only have two or three kids from the same school on the same summer league team; the idea, for high school athletes, was that you could play, but you couldn’t play together. Kelly’s parents took the position that the state athletic association had no authority over what these kids did outside of the school season. I looked on and thought, Good for them. And, Good for the St. Anthony Friars, because it would mean more time for us to work on things as a team, to integrate our younger guys into the group.

  Eventually, the
ruling came down in the Tripuckas’ favor. After that, teams were allowed to play together during the summer, and a lot of schools took advantage of that. We certainly did at St. Anthony, although I was never really available to coach my guys; there was always a game I needed to ref or some other league business that needed my attention, but I was usually able to recruit one of my former players to help out. These days I have a long list of terrific assistant coaches to fill in for me over the summer, but there were no Ben Gambles back then. My players got the benefit of playing with each other over the summer, but they didn’t get the full benefit the way they would have with a hands-on coach. If I could break free, I’d find a way to coach during their games; sometimes, if I had to ref, I’d be whispering to my guys while I had the whistle. Wasn’t exactly legit, but I made up for it by calling the game the other way; I went out of my way to make sure no one ever thought I was playing favorites. Whenever there was a close call, I went against our group from St. Anthony, so my guys knew they had to play doubly hard to win; if they were fouled, they had to be really whacked to get the call.

  If I had to characterize our program for the first ten years I was head coach, I’d say we were always able to run out a competitive team. We were good, but not great. We won a whole lot more than we lost, and some years we hardly lost at all, but in many ways we were indistinguishable from a lot of the better parochial schools in the area. Put us up against a team from St. Peter’s Prep or Hudson Catholic, Marist or St. Joe’s West New York, and it would have been a toss-up. They were also good, but not great. Like a lot of these more competitive schools, we still tended to draw mostly from the parish district, mostly local kids—in our case, mostly from blue-collar Polish-American families. You never really knew what you’d have to work with from one year to the next; you never really knew which team would be a power from one year to the next; all you knew was that we’d be in the mix.