Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  (And as tough as it would have been for me and Danny to coach against each other, it would have been even tougher for my wife, Chris. Talk about being torn!)

  Bobby, meanwhile, didn’t take such a direct path to coaching. Like his younger brother, he also came to work with me for a year after he was done playing, but he wasn’t so sure coaching was for him. Anyway, for a while his focus was elsewhere. He kept his hand in the game as an advance scout for the 76ers, but his main interest once his NBA career was over was in racing and breeding horses. He stayed around basketball, did some color commentary, coached a little bit at the youth level, but then, as time went on, he started to realize the horse business wasn’t the way to go—and it was around this time that Danny was offered the head coaching job at Wagner, so the two of them got to talking.

  It’s funny, the way opportunity finds you when you’re not really looking for it. Bobby wasn’t ready to give up on the horse business just yet. He was building a horse farm in Ocala, Florida, where he was planning to breed and train thoroughbreds. Danny was teaching history and coaching at St. Benedict’s and starting to think he’d be happy making a career there, and all of a sudden there was this college job at Wagner that Danny had to consider. It was a whole other level of coaching, an exciting challenge, and Danny knew he was up to it, and he knew Bobby would be a tremendous asset to him on the bench and in practice. I couldn’t have agreed with him more. I mean, Bobby had played for Mike Krzyzewski, he’d played in the NBA, he’d scouted in the NBA, and he’d even had that year coaching with me at St. Anthony, so he clearly had the pedigree.

  The only question, really, was whether Bobby was too far removed from basketball to make an impact—but that was never an issue as far as I was concerned. You have to realize, this was a kid who’d lived and breathed basketball his entire life. That doesn’t change just because you step away from the game for a while—and happily, it worked out that the two of them went to Wagner and transformed that program. The team had been 5–26 the year before Danny took over as head coach, and after two years they’d improved to 25–5, one of the most dramatic turnarounds in NCAA history, and folks took notice. All of a sudden, Danny was getting a lot of well-deserved attention as one of the best young coaches in college basketball. His name was mentioned for just about every coaching vacancy that came up, particularly at schools in the Northeast, where it was thought he wanted to remain. Sure enough, at the end of the 2011–12 season, Danny accepted the head coaching job at the University of Rhode Island. It was a chance to compete in the Atlantic 10 Conference, on a much bigger stage, so of course he grabbed it. Bobby went with Danny as his assistant.

  My daughter, Melissa, has also made her mark. She graduated from Monmouth University with the best grades of any of our kids and ended up taking advantage of a special education program being offered in Jersey City. The way it worked was, if you came in as an inclusion teacher, working with kids who’d been mainstreamed, you’d earn a master’s in special education along the way, so she set off in this direction and found some of the same fascination and satisfaction in working with these students and their families that her brothers and I did as coaches. And lately she’s been an enormous help to me, keeping me connected to my players in meaningful ways off the court, away from the gym. Why do I need her help in this way? Well, I don’t text. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter. But these days that’s how high school kids communicate, so Melissa keeps me plugged in. She stays on top of all this social media stuff and makes sure I’m never out of touch.

  (Or, at least, never so out of touch that I can’t get a message to a kid on my team.)

  As a bonus, she married a coach. Melissa’s husband, Gabe, is a terrific high school soccer coach, so now it looks like all of my grandchildren will grow up in coaching households—and Chris and I look on and think this is a great good thing.

  After all, we tell ourselves, our kids didn’t turn out too bad. They know what it means to set and keep a goal. They know what it means to work hard. And mostly, they know what it means to win.

  7.

  1995–1996: GUARDING KOBE

  NO ONE HAS EVER DROWNED IN SWEAT.

  —Lou Holtz

  I’VE MISSED MORE THAN NINE THOUSAND SHOTS IN MY CAREER. I’VE LOST ALMOST THREE HUNDRED GAMES. TWENTY-SIX TIMES, I’VE BEEN TRUSTED TO TAKE THE GAME-WINNING SHOT AND MISSED. I’VE FAILED OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN MY LIFE. AND THAT IS WHY I SUCCEED.

  —Michael Jordan

  Sometimes the game gives back to you and your players way more than you put into it—and when you’re fortunate enough to find yourself in the middle of a season for the record books, it makes it so much sweeter when you’re able to send your players off the court with a couple lessons learned, to go along with your string of victories.

  It doesn’t always work out that you’re able to set the right example, the right tone for your players and still find a way to play at the highest level, but it’s something to shoot for. That’s how things shook out for our 1995–96 edition of the St. Anthony Friars—a team that featured several players who’d won the state championship the year before and the Tournament of Champions that followed it, with just a couple bumps along the way. In fact, we only had two seniors on that team—Ned Felton and Eugene Atkinson, who both went on to play for Lefty Driesell at James Madison University—so we had every reason to think our returning squad would be strong. We ended the season as a nationally ranked team—after losing an important Christmas tournament in Florida, along with a couple other tough losses early on—so I was excited about our returning group.

  I thought we had a shot to do something special.

  When I think back on our 1996 team, I think of Rashon Burno. It wasn’t all about him, of course, but he was key. As much as anybody else on that team, whatever happened that year, good or bad, he seemed to have a hand in it.

  Here’s a kid who had a real rough patch. Rashon had lost both of his parents by the time he was out of grammar school, ended up being raised by a grandmother who had to cash a Social Security check each month to put groceries on the table. He lived in the Duncan Projects, surrounded by all kinds of negative influences. Those buildings were a real blight on the community (they were recently knocked down), a magnet for trouble, but somehow Rashon managed to emerge as close to unscathed as any angel could have hoped.

  Guess you could say that angel was Rashon’s grandmother, and she did a good job with him early on, but then she was in and out of the hospital with Alzheimer’s and Rashon was pretty much left on his own. He didn’t have a whole lot of support in that kind of environment. At some point, he drifted down to the Boys’ Club and started playing ball with my friend Gary Greenberg. Guess you could say Gary was another one of Rashon’s angels, because he was looking out for him. This alone wasn’t so unusual, because a lot of kids from the projects found their way to Gary’s gym, but in Rashon’s case, he didn’t seem to have the build for basketball. To this day he’s barely five-seven in his high-tops, which meant there was no NBA in Rashon’s future, but he was able to turn his difficult surroundings into a fierce competitiveness and mental toughness that came out in the way he played. This kid, he would not be denied. He would not quit. Didn’t matter what kind of lousy hand he’d been dealt—he’d find a way to persevere and play it to some kind of advantage.

  Just to give you an idea what the game meant to Rashon—and what it continues to mean—he went on from St. Anthony to a first-rate career at DePaul, where he was a three-year captain. After graduation, he became a financial planner in Chicago, and he was doing well, but after a couple years he found himself missing basketball, so he started coaching high school. It was something to fill in the spaces where the game had been. And that’s all it was at first, but then he found those spaces were bigger than he’d thought. He took a head coaching job at a prep school just outside the city, and from there he moved to an assistant’s position at Towson, under Pat Kennedy, who had been his coach at DePaul. Now he’s moved on to
another assistant job at Florida, and it’s a real wonder to talk to this kid and hear his philosophies on coaching.

  Rashon first popped up on our radar when he was in grammar school. He showed up at one of our camps when he was ten or twelve years old, and after that he kept coming. And like I said, Gary Greenberg had his eye on him as well. The thing about Rashon was that he was smart enough to see basketball as his ticket. A lot of times kids get caught in the swirl of what goes on in public housing and can’t see their way out of it. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. They only know what they see, and they mimic what they know, but Rashon got hooked on basketball just in time. He saw enough kids get their shot, either playing with me or playing for another one of the good competitive programs in the area. I’m not so full of myself as to think I’m the only coach who could have whipped this kid into shape and sent him on to college. St. Anthony isn’t for everybody, and I’m certainly not for everybody. Basketball, that’s what this kid needed. A lot of it. With a heavy hand to guide him.

  Rashon came up with another freshman, Anthony Perry. Rashon had gone to Number 39 school, and Anthony went to Number 14—two of the worst grammar schools in the city. Gary Greenberg kept bringing them out to see our games, even our practices, to give them a goal. He’d say, “You want to play for Coach Hurley, you’ve got to stay off the street corners.”

  My big concern with Rashon when he first joined us was whether we could build enough of a family around him to help him. Like I said, he didn’t have that at home. Anthony, he was being raised by his mom, but Rashon was on his own more and more, at a time in his life when he was having more and more freedom, facing more and more temptations, and that was a bad recipe. It’s tough enough stepping up to our program as a freshman, but without some solid footing at home, it can be damn near impossible. I expect a lot from my players. They’ve got a lot of pulls on their time, and school of course comes first, but I can be pretty demanding, and if you don’t have a responsible adult at home helping to keep everything straight … well, it can get away from you quick.

  In forty years as head coach, I’ve only had about ten freshman players make the varsity, and here again I had two in the same season. It was easy to work Anthony into a lot of what we were trying to do as a team because he was tall—probably six-two that first year. He wound up leading our team in scoring, as a freshman, so he made the adjustment.

  Rashon, his contributions were more subtle at first. A lot of the older kids, they could see Anthony putting up all those points, so it was maybe a little bit easier for him to feel accepted. His efforts were right there on the scoreboard. With Rashon running our offense, I’m sure some of my guys felt like this kid was taking away their minutes, but by the end of that first season even the seniors had to admit this kid was something special. I didn’t start him, because I felt that Ned Felton, one of our seniors, deserved to start, but Rashon came off the bench and became an integral part of the way we played.

  Still, he had a lot to learn. There was one game his sophomore year when I realized I had a lot to learn as well. This was one of the bumps I hinted at earlier, a rough patch that found us on the way to the 1995 state championship. We were playing Miami Senior late in that key Christmas tournament game. We were up by a point with seven seconds on the clock, and we had a foul to give as the other team prepared to inbound the ball. We’d just missed the front end of a one-and-one, and Miami Senior had called a time-out. In high school ball, you don’t automatically move the ball to half-court on a change-of-possession time-out, so we had them pinned at their end. I liked our chances, but only if we played it smart. I told my guys during the time-out that we wanted to let them burn a couple dribbles and then give a foul. This way, they’d have to take the ball out again and there’d be even less time on the clock for them to run a play.

  Well, Rashon’s man got the ball on the inbound play, and it turned out Rashon didn’t quite know what it meant to “give a foul.” Instead, he went for the steal, but all he could do was wave at it, and his man drove to the basket for what should have been an easy layup to win the game. But it’s never easy, is it? This kid from Miami Senior missed his “gimme” layup, but two of his six-eight teammates crashed the boards behind him, and one of them tipped it in at the buzzer.

  As I watched that play unfold, my heart sank. Then, on the miss, it lifted. Then, on the tip-in, it sank all over again—this time all the way to where I couldn’t shake this one loss. If there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s this: I don’t like to lose. My wife knows this. My kids know this. My players know this most of all. Really, it just about kills me to lose. Stays with me a good long while. And when we lose a close one … well, then it kills me in a dozen different ways.

  And yet this loss was on me. Why? Because the longer you do something, the more you realize that people who are really good at something tend not to talk about it. They just get it done. That’s how it was with Rashon Burno. The game came easy to him. What he didn’t know, he made up for with his athleticism and his instincts. He just didn’t know that the phrase “give a foul” meant I wanted him to intentionally foul an opposing player, and he didn’t know to ask. He understood the concept—because, hey, you play enough ball, that kind of thing is innate—but he didn’t get the language. He’d never heard the phrase before.

  So now we have a drill called the command drill. In a command drill, I call out what I want my players to do during the run of play. If I call out, “Give a foul,” which I do regularly during the season when I want to get a substitute into the game late rather than use one of my time-outs or watch the clock run down, they know exactly what I expect. There’s no room for doubt or confusion, not anymore. Also, coming out of that one loss to Miami Senior, we now have charge drills, loose ball drills, giving foul drills. We cover it all.

  I learned from that one game against Miami Senior that you can’t assume these kids know anything. They can have all the basketball knowledge in the world and play with all the confidence a coach could want in his players, but if you’re not completely clear with them on every last thing, it can cost you.

  Okay, so that’s the first big lesson this team took in: accountability. In this case, it was up to me to “own” this one mistake against Miami Senior. Yeah, Rashon didn’t do what I’d asked him to do on this one inbound play—but only because I didn’t ask in a way he could understand. Only because something was lost in the translation, because I didn’t take the time to communicate clearly, effectively.

  But Rashon had a couple things to learn about accountability on his own—and here he had some company with his classmate Anthony Perry. Early in their junior year, December 1995, we had a game on the schedule against Lower Merion High School, a public high school on the Pennsylvania Main Line, just outside Philadelphia. A lot of folks who follow high school basketball will know that Lower Merion was where Kobe Bryant went to school—and this was his senior year. You have to remember, the buzz on Kobe Bryant was huge by this point in his high school career. We’d played them at home the year before and managed to beat them pretty soundly. By now, though, it was generally known that Kobe planned to skip college and go straight to the NBA, and it was generally agreed that he would make an immediate impact at the professional level, so last year’s game didn’t much matter. Kobe was bigger and better; his teammates were bigger and better; this would be their last season with one of the greatest high school players to ever get his hands on a basketball, so all season long I had to think they’d be putting it all out there.

  When you look at your schedule at the start of the season, there are certain games that loom larger than others, and this was one of those games. I’d circled it on my calendar. With or without Kobe, Lower Merion was a big-time program. Their fans were real die-hards. They packed their home gym and cheered like crazy, so they had a real home-court advantage. This game was to be played in a sold-out gym at St. Joseph’s University, but it would still be a home game for Lower Meri
on, packed with their own fans, their own energy. It was being shown live on a local cable station, and there were sure to be all kinds of NBA scouts and executives in the arena, so we were expecting a pretty electric environment—and privately I worried that none of that electricity, none of that energy, would be for us.

  It was still early in a long season, but in many ways this game would stamp our year. We had another tough matchup a bit later on, against St. John’s Prospect Hall, another nationally ranked opponent, but other than that, it didn’t appear we’d be pushed until the postseason tournament. And remember, we’d won the state championship the year before—the first of three straight state titles for our Friars. We’d only lost those two seniors to graduation, and now I had guys like Rashon Burno and Anthony Perry, who’d be coming into their own as upperclassmen and full-fledged leaders.

  Okay, so that’s the setup to this showdown with Kobe, and it was lining up to be a real battle, but then nature got in the way—and by “nature” I mean the natural elements as well as human nature. You see, the Lower Merion game was set for a Friday night, but earlier that week there was a killer snowstorm all up and down the northeast coast. The storm started late Monday, and by the time Jersey City woke up on Tuesday the streets had been swallowed up by almost two feet of snow. You couldn’t move, so obviously school was canceled. And then it kept on snowing. Next day, a Wednesday, school was canceled again, but I managed to track down the custodian at the gym we were renting for practice, and he opened the place up for us so we could get in a run and keep sharp before our big game.

  In those days, back before my players all had cell phones, we had a phone chain set up, so we were able to get the word to everyone. By this point, the kids had been trapped in their houses or apartments since Monday night, so they were itching to get out and let off some steam, and I remember leaving the gym that night thinking practice had gone well and that we were in good shape for the game on Friday.