Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  Year after year.

  It’s like the game became a kind of maypole and the fates and fortunes of the school itself began to swirl around it.

  Slowly, the culture of the St. Anthony student population began to change. Up until this time, our students tended to reflect the makeup of our basketball team, but by the late 1970s, early 1980s, our classrooms were starting to look a little different—basically because our neighborhoods were starting to look a little different. A lot of our middle-class families were moving out of the area. It used to be that if you lived in Jersey City and were looking to give your kids a coed Catholic school education, you had four options: St. Mary’s, St. Michael’s, St. Aloysius, and St. Anthony. But St. Michael’s closed in 1983, and all those kids had to go somewhere else to school—and in later years St. Al’s and St. Mary’s would close as well.

  All along, there had been three parishes in the city with deep Polish roots: St. Anne’s, up on Tonnele Avenue, Mt. Carmel in Bayonne, and St. Anthony. Traditionally, those three parishes would feed our school, which had been up and running since 1952. Before that, the building was a public grammar school, but it had been abandoned by the Board of Education in the early 1950s, when the archdiocese purchased the property; it was never meant to house more than 250 to 300 students, but we’ve never really gotten close to those high-end numbers.

  (St. Anthony historians take note: nothing’s really been done to the physical plant of the school in over sixty years, other than a new coat of paint every here and there, so the place looks pretty much the same.)

  Soon after the archdiocese took over the building, it was decided that we couldn’t support the grammar school, and soon after that, we decided that we couldn’t house all those Felician nuns in the convent either. Middle-class Polish families were moving away from downtown Jersey City and the parish kept getting smaller and smaller. By the time David Rivers came to school, we only had one Polish kid on the team—Joe Mikewicz—and only ten or fifteen more in our general student population. Ten years earlier, most of my kids had at least one parent who’d gone to college. Now most of them didn’t, and more and more, our students were coming from single-parent households where college was hardly a given.

  The dynamic of the school was tough to figure. It was a giant cultural shift, but on the court it was much the same. Didn’t much matter what was going on at home—basketball was basketball. It was in the classroom, in the hallways, that you really noticed the difference. On paper, it was an archdiocesan school, but it started to feel like we were connected to St. Anthony Parish in name only. Only a small number of our students now came from St. Anthony families, and there were fewer and fewer of them each year. As a result, the parish was less and less likely to fund whatever budget deficits we carried, because it was less and less involved in the school. Without anyone really realizing it, or planning for it, or even adjusting to it, the identity of the school had changed—and for a while it’s like we didn’t even have an identity. If it weren’t for the extra efforts and enthusiasm of good-hearted leaders like Sister Alan, I don’t think the school would have had any personality at all. There was no sense of community to tie all these kids together. But then our teams really started to take off on that huge championship run, and folks started to take notice. Players started coming from all over the city to be a part of our program. They saw that our guys were playing at a high level and realized that if they were able to play at that same high level, they might be able to play their way into college.

  Gradually, a new picture of St. Anthony High School started to emerge—and a new identity along with it.

  Basketball—that would be our identity.

  5.

  1988–1989: FAMILY TIES

  GREAT TEAMWORK IS THE ONLY WAY WE CAN CREATE THE BREAKTHROUGHS THAT DEFINE OUR CAREERS.

  —Pat Riley

  NO ONE PLAYS THIS OR ANY GAME PERFECTLY. IT’S THE GUY WHO RECOVERS FROM HIS MISTAKES WHO WINS.

  —Phil Jackson

  Growing up, the only time my sons Bobby and Danny ever played together on the same team was in the Our Lady of Mercy Pee Wee Basketball League, run by Father Miller. Their team was the Bucks, and I remember sitting on the sidelines and thinking ahead to their high school careers. Even then you could see they played with a little extra something. They worked off each other on the floor, looked for each other off the dribble. I don’t mean to come across as a proud father, but they had a feel for the game. I could close my eyes and fast-forward to a time when the two of them might play together for the St. Anthony Friars.

  I wasn’t like a lot of the dads in our neighborhood. I couldn’t coach my own kids, or even help out in practice, because my time was never my own. Between work, coaching at St. Anthony, and running summer leagues and clinics, it was all I could do to get to my sons’ games from time to time. It was a priority, just as it was a priority to get to Melissa’s activities, but there were a whole lot of priorities back then.

  Of course, when your kids are eight or ten years old, you can’t know how they’ll develop or where their interests might take them, but I had a pretty good idea Bobby and Danny would be playing ball. They grew up as gym rats and lived and breathed basketball the same way their old man lived and breathed basketball, so I knew that’s where they were headed. It was in their blood. They played baseball too. They ran track. But it was clear early on that basketball was their thing. Almost as soon as they could walk they were out on the floor at halftime during St. Anthony games, dribbling up a storm, bending their little knees to get enough ooomph on their shots to reach the basket. Soon, they were raining/draining threes, dazzling the crowd with their ball-handling skills, running the floor like they belonged no place else.

  At St. Anthony home games, their antics were always appreciated; everyone knew them, rooted for them, wished them well. But when we were the visiting team or away at a tournament, folks didn’t always want Bobby and Danny on the floor. No one ever stopped them of course. They’d sneak onto the court, and after just a couple minutes they’d have the crowd with them, and they’d run and shoot and dribble their little hearts out—sometimes while a school or arena representative tried to chase them to the sidelines.

  All season long, year after year, that was the routine.

  Like me, Bobby and Danny were late bloomers in the height department. The Hurley men are pipsqueaks starting out, but we grow into our frames soon enough. And the silver lining to our short stature is that we’re forced to develop our dribbling skills right away; we’ve got no choice but to work on our handle, our passing, our outside shooting … it’s all we’ve got, so we grab on to whatever edge that’s within reach.

  The boys had been coming to the gym with me for so long, it was almost inevitable they’d wind up playing for me—but it almost didn’t work out that way. In 1985, when Bobby was finishing middle school, I got an offer from a friend of mine that Chris and I felt we had to consider. The offer came from Pete Gillen, who for years had coached high school ball in Brooklyn. We’d worked together at the Five Star Basketball Camp and remained friends. In fact, Pete went on to work with Digger Phelps as an assistant at Notre Dame, and he’d been instrumental in recruiting David Rivers from St. Anthony. When Pete left Notre Dame to take the head coaching job at Xavier, he started recruiting me to join him as an assistant.

  He made a pretty strong case.

  Now, I’d gotten a number of college offers over the years, but I’d never been all that interested. I liked working with high school kids. I liked that we were laying in a kind of template they could maybe follow the rest of their lives, to help them recognize and achieve their goals. I liked the hours. I liked that I didn’t have to deal with alumni or recruiting or young men with puffed-up egos who thought they knew more about the game than their coaches.

  This last issue was key. High school kids coming into their own are like a blank canvas; you can work on their game and their character and their approach; you can even help them reach their ful
l potential as players and grow into the young men they’re meant to be. Usually, they respond—and a lot of times, if they don’t respond, it’s on you as their coach. It means you haven’t found a way to reach them. College kids, you sometimes have to sort through a bunch of bad habits and negative influences to get the most out of a player. A lot of times, if they don’t respond, it’s on them; they’re who they are, for the most part—not quite fully formed or fully developed as players, but close enough to get them thinking they have it all figured out. There’s just no way to reach some of these kids after a certain point, and I didn’t think I had the head for that. I needed to see the upside in my players; I needed to know that they wanted to grow their game and that the extra efforts we were putting in on and off the court might amount to something.

  Plus, I was a homebody. I’d never even been on a plane until Chris and I went to Miami on our honeymoon. I liked living in Jersey City; I’d been there my whole life, so I knew where everything was. But then Pete went to work on me, and I started to see the benefits of a college gig. The money was pretty great—way more than I was making on my civil servant salary, even with the modest stipend I was getting for coaching at St. Anthony, which back then was up to about three or four thousand dollars. Things went far enough on this Xavier job that Chris and I flew out to Cincinnati to meet with Pete, and he took us around to look at houses and schools for the kids. We came away thinking this was the right move for us as a family—but Bobby and Danny turned us back around. When we got back home and told the kids our plans, they kicked up a real fuss.

  They made a pretty strong case too. They’d had their hearts set on playing basketball at St. Anthony, it turned out. We’d never really talked about it, except I guess it was always assumed that this was how things would go. Bobby and Danny didn’t want to leave their friends. Melissa was still young at this point, so she didn’t really have an opinion one way or the other, but the boys felt strongly about this. Bobby most of all. He was about to start high school. He had his basketball career all figured out. In his head, he was going to play for me at St. Anthony and then move on to North Carolina to play for Dean Smith. That was his plan, his dream. He didn’t want to have to start from scratch with a whole new group of kids in Cincinnati.

  What Bobby didn’t say, what Danny didn’t say, what I didn’t say, was that we’d all been looking forward to this time in our lives for as long as any of us could remember—but there it was, and it took my kids to point it out and remind me it was something we’d been waiting on all along.

  Sister Alan was another big reason I stayed on at St. Anthony. Already, by the time Bobby started high school, she’d become a fixture at the school. She gave the place a winning personality and helped our program enormously. Without Sister Alan, I would have never been able to build our schedule or deal with all the paperwork and organizing and nonsense that came with coaching. She ran interference for us with the administration, with the parish, with the archdiocese. She also had me convinced that our success on the court would in some way contribute to our never-ending fund-raising efforts, though I must say, I didn’t see how the one had anything to do with the other.

  Over time Sister Alan turned out to be right about this, as she was about most things, but for the time being the school was doing okay financially. In fact, Bobby started high school at a time of peak enrollment for St. Anthony, so we were in good shape—at least for the next while.

  It was a mixed blessing to be able to coach a kid like Bobby. For years I wasn’t sure how I’d respond, whether I’d play favorites and cut my own kid a little more slack in terms of playing time, opportunities, expectations. If anything, I worried for poor Bobby, because I knew I’d go out of my way to make things a little tougher on him, to make him work a little harder than everyone else, to hold him to a higher standard. Not because I was out to bust his hump, but because I wanted to make double-sure no one ever accused me of playing favorites. That no one ever said Bobby was there on anything but his own merits as a player. For my sake as well as Bobby’s.

  Whenever I think back to that time in our lives, with Bobby about to start high school, I remember a comment Al McGuire made when he was coaching his son at Marquette and the kid was competing for minutes with another player. Al said, “If you’re just as good as my son, you’re in trouble, because he’s my son.”

  I had a different view. I took the position that if you’re my son, you need to outplay the other guy so nobody second-guesses your role. You have to earn your way onto the floor like everyone else, but then you have to do a little more besides. That wasn’t exactly fair to Bobby (or, later, to Danny), but he knew what to expect.

  And in some ways, I knew what to expect from my kids. I knew they’d work hard. I knew they wouldn’t back down from a challenge. I knew they’d dive for every loose ball. I knew they’d drive opponents crazy with their ability to dribble and see the floor and find the open man. They played the game by instinct, like it had been drilled into them—and in many ways, I guess it had.

  What I couldn’t know was how they’d develop physically. When Bobby showed up in high school, he was five-four, maybe 110 pounds. Just to look at him, he seemed way too small to play varsity, so he started out on the JV. He wasn’t too happy about it, but I think he half-expected it—and to his great credit, he made the best of it. First few weeks of the season, he was lights out, and when a couple of our varsity guards went down to injury, I had to look to the JV to replace them. Bobby was the obvious choice, even though he’d now give away a couple years, a couple inches, and a couple dozen pounds to his opponents.

  He was up to it, though. First game he played, against my alma mater, St. Peter’s Prep, he fired in the first three shots he took—swish-swish-swish—all from long range. That set the tone for the rest of his career, just in those first few minutes, and by the end of the season he had tallied ten points and ten assists in the state finals, so it was clear to everyone he belonged. He’d made his mark, together with his great buddy Jerry Walker, who started the season as a power forward in our rotation, a key part of our offense and a tenacious defender. So that first year with Bobby was unusual because we had two impact freshmen on the varsity—Bobby and Jerry. Doesn’t usually work out that way, but this too set the tone. I don’t think any of us realized it just then, but we were laying the foundation for a dominant run.

  Bobby filled out, of course. He got taller, bigger, stronger. He went on to do some big-time things on the basketball court, including leading the Duke Blue Devils to back-to-back national championships in 1991 and 1992, as well as setting the all-time NCAA assists record with 1,076. (No, he never quite made it to Dean Smith and North Carolina, but it all worked out to the good at Duke, with Coach Mike Krzyzewski.) Bobby was selected with the seventh pick in the first round of the NBA draft by the Sacramento Kings—and along the way he wound up playing with some great players. And yet, of all these great, great players, he still maintains that Jerry Walker was the single greatest teammate he ever played alongside—and I can’t argue with him. Jerry was an absolutely tremendous player. Fearless. Smart. Talented. And even at fourteen, fifteen years old, he was a powerful presence on the court. He was the first freshman to ever start for the St. Anthony Friars, and he and Bobby had known each other for years and years, so once Bobby came up from the JV and joined him, they made a terrific tandem. Led us all the way to the state championship that first year. And the year after that. And the year after that.

  Those three state championships with this core group, back-to-back-to-back, continued that great momentum run we’d started in 1982–83 with a team, led by David Rivers, that earned us six consecutive state titles.

  (We’d go on to win another three straight, but I don’t want to get ahead of the story.)

  By this point, we’d added Terry Dehere to the mix, which made us the preseason favorites to repeat as state champs in 1988–89. Terry would go on to become the all-time leading scorer at Seton Hall, which helped
to make him a first-round NBA draft choice, but he didn’t start for us on a regular basis until his senior year. We also had a talented freshman on the team that year, Rodrick Rhodes, another future first-round NBA draft choice, and he figured to play a big role for us. So, on paper at least, we were looking like a dominant group. We were coming off a big season, winning our sixth straight state title, beating a bunch of tough, high-profile teams at big-time tournaments across the country—including a first-ever trip to a high-profile tournament in Hawaii, where we beat top national teams like Dunbar from Baltimore (with Sam Cassell) and Tolentine from the Bronx (with Malik Sealy, Brian Reese, and Adrian Autry), only to come back home and lose to a local team, Ferris High School.

  For some reason, we always had trouble with Ferris at their gym, but we came back to beat them in the county final that year. Ferris had also given us our only loss the year before, 1986–87, also at their gym. Both games were at four o’clock on school days—always a tough assignment for a visiting team, but especially tough against Ferris. Not to make excuses or anything, but we couldn’t get our guys out of school and on the road until 2:45 or so, and then we really had to hustle to make it to the gym on time and get our full warm-up in, so we were up against it. We never really had a chance to get focused, but they beat us fair and square. Boy oh boy, those Ferris teams were good at home. They just didn’t crack, and yet I think those lone losses really helped to set us up for our postseason runs in each of those years, because our guys had been pushed. They knew what it was like to lose—and what it would take to keep from losing again.

  Here’s how tough it was on Bobby to play for me. In those days, I was still able to run with these kids in practice, and every time Bobby messed up, I’d chew him out in front of the whole gym, same way I’d chew out any other player. But then, if Bobby messed up a second or third time, I’d pull him off the floor and take his spot in the drill or the scrimmage. I’d yell something like, “Why is this so hard for you?” Of course, some of this stuff was hard for him, because he was being guarded by three guys who’d go on to play in the NBA. It made sense that he couldn’t complete a pass from time to time. Or run a play the way it was designed. So then I’d step in for him to show him it should be done. I was fortysomething years old—way, way past my prime as an athlete—but because I was the coach, these kids would hang back a little on defense. Out of respect, I guess. Or maybe they were afraid to guard me too tight because they thought I’d go off on them. So I was able to do whatever I wanted out there pretty much—whatever I wanted Bobby to do—so it couldn’t have been easy for Bobby.