Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  I left thinking we could run circles around the competition.

  The way the game shook out, we were up by more than twenty points for most of the second half, and I sat on the bench once the game was in hand knowing this Friars team had a chance to do something special. Remember, we’d gone down to Florida and beat Miami Senior, the number-two team in the country. Then, a couple weeks later, we went to Arkansas and beat Flint Hill, the new number-two team in the country. Doesn’t matter that we were the number-one-ranked team each time out—it’s still a difficult assignment to knock off two number-two teams, almost back to back. And yet I worried we might be peaking too early. There was no good reason to worry—no logical reason, anyway—but I worried just the same. That’s how it goes when the breaks of the game are falling your way—you still find a reason to worry. What you want, as a coach, is to build a certain kind of momentum into your season. You want to make strides every game, every week, always with a goal in mind, but here we were looking ahead to a mostly local schedule for the next six or seven weeks, against teams that really didn’t match up with these Miami Senior and Flint Hill squads, and the danger was that we’d coast for a while, maybe become a little too complacent, a little too full of ourselves.

  Turned out we almost didn’t get out of Arkansas. There was a problem with our plane, and we spent most of the night in the airport in Little Rock. We were sprawled out on the floor by the gate, propped up against our bags, trying to catch a couple hours’ sleep, but a lot of our kids were restless and wired from the game. I tried to catch a couple winks, but it was useless—and besides, somebody had to keep an eye on all these restless and wired kids. All these years later, I still remember Danny and a couple of the other guys just yukking it up, middle of the night, giving the business to one of our players, Darren Savino, for the patented up-and-under move he’d tried to pull against one of the Flint Hill big men.

  Darren Savino was a kid from the neighborhood who’d grown up with Danny and Bobby. He’s now an assistant coach at the University of Cincinnati, and it’s possible he would have never gotten into coaching if he and Bobby hadn’t been such great pals when they were all little. Same way Bobby and Danny were bitten by the basketball bug, Darren was bitten too, by association. He was a role player for us, didn’t get a whole lot of minutes, but when he played he went at the game with a big man’s mentality. That’s been his strength as a coach, working with players in the post. He was only about six feet tall, but he was like an undersized post player, and toward the end of the game he was being guarded by the backup Flint Hill center, who must have been about six-eleven. They made an odd picture, the two of them, battling for position, because the big kid had almost a foot on Darren. So what does Darren do? He gets the ball beneath our basket at one point and pump-fakes like he’s taking it hard to the rim, tries to get the big man to commit, and as soon as the kid leaves his feet, Darren kind of ducks beneath the defender’s outstretched arms and scoops the ball underneath for an old-school layup. For some reason, this struck our guys on the bench—Danny especially—as just about the funniest thing in the world, and as our long night dragged on, stranded in the airport, they started razzing poor Darren pretty good.

  Oh, one thing I forgot to mention: the six-eleven Flint Hill kid who was guarding Darren just kind of swatted the ball away. Like it was an annoying mosquito. It was a pretty emphatic rejection. If Darren had sunk the layup, our guys would have had no reason to ride him about the shot, but because he’d made such a soft, dainty move and still managed to get rejected like that, it was open season. And there was no end to it. At one point, I opened my eyes and saw Danny, his hand still in the cast he wore the first month or two of the season, doing his version of Darren’s up-and-under move to howls and howls of laughter from his teammates. At four o’clock in the morning, it was even funnier than it had been during the run of play—but Darren shouldered the ribbing with great good cheer.

  It was a tight-knit group, that team. They’d been playing together for a long, long time. They’d gotten used to winning—and winning big—but they could always find a way to laugh at themselves.

  You know, in many ways this 1988–89 team was blessed. We were blessed with enormous talent, excellent team chemistry, and a couple tough matchups that happened to go our way. But we were also cursed. For all of our triumphs and hard-won glory, there’s a pall that hangs over that season for me and my guys. It’s been less than twenty-five years since the seniors from this team graduated high school, and already we’ve lost three members from that core group—four if we include a young man who’d played with us the season before, when our key guys were still juniors.

  That’s a heartbreakingly big number from a team of just fourteen or fifteen players. And it’s not like these kids had to wait all that long to start facing their own mortality, because one of our players didn’t even make it out of high school. Jermaine Rivers, David’s brother, would have been a big part of this special season, but he succumbed to a brain tumor during his junior year. He was another one of Bobby’s pals, another kid from the neighborhood. We used to pick him up every morning on the way to school, along with Jerry Walker. Jermaine stopped playing ball in his sophomore year, when the treatments became too much for him, but he hung in there at school for as long as he could. He never really made it all the way into a varsity uniform, although we had him pegged to make a contribution as an upperclassman. Guess you could say he was more like an honorary member of this group, and here the emphasis would have been on the word honor, because the way he shouldered his illness was such an inspiration. His death was such a devastating sadness for Jermaine’s family. For the entire St. Anthony community. It hit my boys especially hard, because they’d all been close. In fact, it hit the entire team pretty hard, because Jermaine died just before the start of this charmed season, and these kids were all friends, so his spirit kind of filled the gym as we went about our business.

  He was with us even when he was no longer with us—and for every good turn that found us, for every big win, there was an aching reminder that one of our own wasn’t there to share in it. Even now, all these years later, when I sit with my boys and think back to this one season, I think of Jermaine and what he missed. Not just on the court, of course, but how the rest of his life might have gone. We talk about how he would have fit himself into the mix. He was a part of what we accomplished that year, even though he couldn’t be a part of it.

  And lately, my thoughts drift to three other players as well—Mark Harris, Sean Rooney, and Sydney Raeford. Mark, first guard off the bench for us while Danny was out, was hit by a rare form of cancer—the same cancer that claimed Walter Payton. Mark’s death was tough to accept for his St. Anthony basketball family, because we all knew Mark as an incredible physical specimen. No one wanted to face this kid in practice, because he would pound the crap out of you. He fouled you every which way, just about every time he touched you. There was nothing dirty about the way Mark played, but he was relentless. He was all muscle and bone; if you ran into him, you got hurt, and it was a kind of art form with him, getting opposing players to run into him. Really, he was the prototypical practice player, the kind of guy you want on your side, because he went at it hard. Like he had something to prove. And he did. Every time he took the floor, he played like his role on the team depended on it, and the starters used to bellyache every time they scrimmaged against him, because they knew they’d be black and blue the next day.

  At the time, I used to think Mark’s hard-charging work ethic in practice made us better as a team. It pushed Bobby and Terry to a whole other level. With Mark, it didn’t matter if you were his teammate or his best friend—he played like it meant something, like whatever was going on in his life, in school, in Jersey City, in the whole wide world, basketball mattered most of all. And then, when I learned he’d been diagnosed, after he’d been out of school a couple years, I remembered how he’d carried himself as a young man. I heard about his illness one Thanks
giving, just as our season was getting under way. I figured Mark would put up a good fight. I figured he’d beat the crap out of his cancer, same way he used to beat the crap out of his teammates, but by the end of March he was gone—and to this day it strikes me as a cruel irony for such a beast of an athlete to be cut down at such a young age.

  Sad to say, we’ve lost a bunch of former players over the years. That’s what happens when you’ve been coaching high school basketball as long as I have, but we’ve never lost so many, so young … from the same group. It’s a sadness on top of another sadness. And it would get sadder still. We lost our starting center, Sean Rooney. He died of a massive heart attack just a couple years ago, and his loss struck me like a punch in the gut. As hard as Mark Harris used to play in practice, that’s how hard Sean Rooney used to play in games. He just wouldn’t back down from a fight—and as we saw in that game against Miami Senior, he’d sometimes start one, just for the hell of it.

  When I heard the news about Sean, that a kid who’d played with so much heart and absolutely no quit somehow had his heart quit on him during what should have been the prime of his life, it shook me up pretty good. Sean always played with such joy, such abandon. He didn’t have the pure athletic talent of a Jerry Walker or a Terry Dehere, but he was just as determined to win, just as passionate about the game—and he played just as big a part in our success. He didn’t always fill up the stat sheet like Bobby or some of his other teammates, but he made his presence known every time he took the floor.

  Sydney Raeford graduated a year before this group, but they all played together on the 1988 team. He’d come to us from the Number 14 school in Jersey City—another kid from the neighborhood. Sydney went to Xavier on a basketball scholarship, finished his career at St. Peter’s College, then fell to cancer too. That’s three kids out of this one group who’d all grown up within a couple blocks of each other, all struck down by some form of cancer, way before their time. Syd grew up on Atlantic Street, Mark was on Virginia, and Jermaine’s family lived on Ege, so of course everyone assumed there was some environmental trigger. I guess it made sense folks were thinking that way, because there was a lot of industry in that part of the city; there’d obviously been a lot of dumping over the years, but no one was ever able to make any kind of definitive connection, so all we could do in the end was chalk it up to a run of devastating bad luck—one sadness after another.

  Don’t think I’ll ever get used to the idea that these good kids are no longer with us. It’s not supposed to happen that a high school basketball coach outlives his players, but sometimes life gets in the way of what’s not supposed to happen. Life … and death. And now I can’t look back on the great success we enjoyed that year as a team without thinking of the pieces that are now missing. It doesn’t take anything away from what we were able to accomplish during this one perfect season, from the great run we had with this core group. But it colors the time we all shared and leaves me thinking about why we play, why basketball matters.

  It does matter, I’ve come to believe. Because, while we’re playing the game, it’s who we are. And when we’re through, when we leave this world, it’s how we’ll be remembered.

  Back to basketball.

  There weren’t a whole lot of teams in a position to test us that year, especially the teams close to home. Elizabeth High School was probably the second-best team in the state, and we’d beaten them handily in a game at St. Peter’s College, winning by about twenty points. They had a left-handed seven-footer, Luther Wright, who’d started his career at St. Anthony, so it was a bit of a reunion for some of our guys. Not exactly a grudge match, but there was a little extra incentive for us to play well—and a little extra pressure on Luther to give his old teammates a push, maybe hand us our first loss of the season.

  Luther would go on to play with Danny, Terry, and Jerry at Seton Hall, and he was a first-round draft pick of the Utah Jazz, but he just didn’t have it that day at St. Peter’s. Elizabeth was a good, deep team, with all five starters going on to key roles at Division I college programs, but we were on an unbelievable momentum run, playing out of our heads. Whatever those public school kids threw at us, we were able to throw it right back, and the game was never even close.

  Probably the toughest game on our local schedule that year was against Solebury Prep, last game of the regular season. We were convinced the entire starting lineup was in their twenties. A lot of programs, they reclassified players of postgraduate age who still had some high school eligibility. At St. Anthony, our guys were all “by the book,” of regular high school age; most of the teams we faced during the season also followed the traditional classification rules, but this Solebury Prep team was one of the schools we faced where it looked like the entire roster had been reclassified. I can’t say for sure, but it certainly appeared that way. The contrast in their physical characteristics was apparent. Even just a couple years, at that age, can make a tremendous difference in the size and strength of a young athlete. Physically, the Solebury Prep players were much bigger, much stronger, but we found a way to outplay them and come out on top—by a comfortable margin that didn’t really reflect how uncomfortable we looked going up against these guys.

  Danny returned from his injury in the state tournament against Don Bosco Tech in a game that turned out to be a real romp—one of the few times in my career a St. Anthony team scored over a hundred points in a game. It happens maybe once every three or four years, and it’s not always a welcome thing. In a thirty-two-minute game, if you get eighty points, it’s a big deal. To score another twenty points … well, the other team is probably cooperating. And it usually means things will get ugly. If you’re in someone else’s gym, you’ll hear taunts and nonsense about running up the score, even though you’ve got your second and third units in. These kids, they’re on the bench most of the season, you can’t exactly put them out there and expect them to sit on the ball. They’ll be looking for their shots—and on this Friars team in particular, that whole second group ended up playing in college, so there was some talent all through our lineup. They were like thoroughbreds, itching to be let out of the gate. Everybody wound up scoring for us in that game. Danny came off the bench in the fourth quarter and poured in ten quick points, and it was good to see him back in the mix. It was a big deal for him to finally be able to contribute, even in a one-sided game. And it was a big deal for me to finally see him on the floor for us. Wasn’t running alongside his brother just yet, because Bobby was out of the game by the time Danny checked in, but it was a glimpse of what this season could have been … and what it might be still.

  Danny’s return coincided with an injury to Bobby’s hamstring. Bobby had suffered a tear in his upper hamstring with about two weeks to go in the season, but he was trying to play through it. The injury had me worried—but not too, too worried. Bobby wasn’t about to miss the last postseason of his high school career, especially with so much on the line, so we kept running him out there. We were careful with his minutes, though, careful with how we used him, and now that we had Danny back, our bench was a little deeper.

  We weren’t really tested in the state tournament that year and ended up beating a decent team from St. Rose in the Non-Public Group B final by a big number. But then we had to look ahead to this new Tournament of Champions format. Any other year, we would have finished the season as state champs, undefeated, the consensus number-one team in the country—but now we had to play another couple games to keep all of that in place. No one could take away our state title, of course, but if we faltered now, we’d lose our perfect season and the number-one ranking right along with it.

  As a coach, you never like to press your luck or keep going back to the same well, over and over. In all my years at St. Anthony, we’ve never shied from a game. We’ll play anyone, so long as we can fit it into our schedule and our budget. But here it felt a little bit like we were pushing the limits on our good fortune. By every measure, we’d had an amazing season—a perfec
tly amazing season. Only here we had to keep it going for another couple games. Bobby was battling this injury, and I would have liked to shut him down and let him get going on his healing and rehab so he’d be fresh and fit and ready to start his college career in the fall. And Luther Wright and his Elizabeth teammates were waiting for us as the number-two seed in the Tournament of Champions—a nationally ranked team looking to avenge their regular-season loss and spoil our undefeated season.

  I tend to be fairly confident as a coach. I always like our chances. But at the same time, I worry. Always, I worry. Ask my wife, Chris, how many sleepless nights I’ve passed, obsessing about our matchup the next day, only to see us win the game by twenty or thirty points. So this was my worry, going into this season-capping tournament. The last time we’d played Elizabeth, it was in Jersey City, so it was essentially a home game for us. Now, meeting up in the Tournament of Champions final, we’d be playing in the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands—a big-time facility in front of what would probably be a big-time Elizabeth crowd. They were one of the biggest high schools in the state; we were one of the smallest. Put together all of their current students, alumni, and boosters, and the Elizabeth community could fill the place. Put together all of our students, alumni, and boosters, and we could maybe fill a couple sections.

  My biggest concern was that we were beat up. Bobby was hurt. A couple of our other key guys were dragging. Terry and Rodrick had been playing well down the stretch, but as a team we were hobbled, hurting. And Elizabeth head coach Ben Candelino was an excellent game strategist, so I knew he’d done a careful study of our regular-season matchup and made some adjustments. We could count on him to throw us a different look and to find a way to counter whatever strengths he’d seen in our game plan and turn them into weaknesses.