by Bob Hurley
That’s three guys I’d been counting on to play a big role for us, unable to make it to our first practice—not to mention Shelton Gibbs, who had to miss our entire first weekend due to the death of his grandfather. There were hardly enough bodies to run full-court, so by the time we got going it was already looking like a long season.
And it surely was. All year long, these clowns were like the old Oakland As of the early 1970s, leaving all kinds of disasters in their wake and still finding a way to get it together by game time. Their school days were one problem after another. Their home lives were filled with uncertainty and tension and difficulty, but their basketball lives were all about raw talent, adrenaline, guts, instinct—almost like they’d been hardwired, preprogrammed, for success on the court, even as they couldn’t help but screw up off the court.
(Here’s a first for our program: Marcus Williams actually fathered a child while he was still in high school. We didn’t find out about it until late in the season.)
I had to lay in a curfew to try and keep these kids in line, which in turn meant I had to lay in some kind of system for checking up on them to make sure they kept to their curfew, so it was just one pain in the neck after another. Their moms didn’t seem to mind if they came home at night, if they slept out at this one’s house or that one’s house, if they managed to eat a hot, nutritious meal after a hard practice. In a lot of ways, these kids were on their own, without showing a stitch of the maturity or levelheadedness that might have justified that kind of responsibility.
In addition to being the wildest group I’d ever coached, it was also the smallest—probably one of the shortest teams in the country that year (or any year, for that matter). Barney Anderson was the only kid over six-two on the team—and at six-four, he wasn’t exactly a towering center. We had kids at six-one, six-two, matching up against power forwards at six-eight, six-nine. On paper, we went into almost every game overmatched—but athletically, these kids were something to see. “On paper” meant nothing to this group. As dysfunctional as they were, as unreliable as they were, they had a feel for the game like nothing I’d ever seen. Marcus, at six-one, was able to team with Barney and dominate around the basket, and we’d play off of them and usually run a three-guard set with Derrick, Ahmad, Sean, and Shelton sharing time in the backcourt. Individually, they weren’t stand-out offensive players, but as a team, as a unit, meshing and gelling and coming together, they were tremendous. They knew each other so well from all those years playing together, I could sit back and imagine they were like the high school version of those great New York Knick championship teams. DeBusschere, Bradley, Frazier, Reed, Monroe, Barnett …
In the run of play, each kid could predict what every one of his teammates would do in any given situation, and if you’d ask him about it later, maybe break it down and see if there was anything we could learn from what just happened so we could call on it again, he’d just shrug his shoulders and roll his eyes and wait impatiently for me to finish talking to him. Even Sean McCurdy found a way to knit himself competitively into this group; socially, the others kind of stiff-armed him from whatever was going on at school or on weekends, but that was just as well with Sean. He stuck to himself, to basketball. But on the court he became another key piece of our well-oiled machinery; he fit himself in like he’d been here all along.
As a team, we did get a little bigger midway through our season, when Ahmad Nivins joined our program. Ahmad was a skinny, six-eight transfer from County Prep, a technical school on Montgomery Street in Jersey City—a personnel move that had no business working out but one that worked out just the same. You have to realize, adding a transfer from County Prep was not a whole lot better than adding a kid with only club or intramural experience. Basically, this kid hadn’t played any organized ball—certainly not at our level—but he had size, which we desperately needed.
Ahmad Nivins had been a baseball player all his life. That was his focus, his passion. But as he grew, as I saw him on ball fields around town, I kept telling his dad to encourage Ahmad to give basketball a try. His size was too much of an advantage to ignore. I didn’t care so much whether he played for us at St. Anthony or for some other school in the city, but I really thought this kid had a better shot at a college scholarship on the court than he did on the diamond—and finally, he came around.
As a late transfer, he wasn’t eligible to play for us straightaway, and the way he finally joined us was interesting. The first game he could play for us came midway through our season, against St. Joe’s Metuchen, and it just so happened that St. Joe’s had its own big man making his debut for them that same game. That big man? Andrew Bynum, who had to sit out the first half of his season after transferring from the Solebury School in Pennsylvania. The great revelation that came out of this game was that Ahmad Nivins could play.
As I write this, Ahmad’s playing professionally in Spain. He was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks in the second round of the 2009 draft—and if you read between the lines of the Dallas–New York trade that brought Tyson Chandler to the Knicks, you’ll note that New York now controls Ahmad’s draft rights, so he might yet make an impact in the NBA. But back when he was a skinny teenager, just learning the game, we had no idea what to expect out of Ahmad.
Against a top player like Andrew Bynum, Ahmad Nivins was able to make an impact on the game—and for the first time I started to think this group might have a shot in the tournament. I mean, it was one thing to rack up all these wins in the regular season, even against some talented teams, but I didn’t think these kids would do any kind of damage against the top teams in our state. Not with the way they carried on like a bunch of lunatics. Not without any size. But once Ahmad Nivins announced himself as a player for us, that all started to change. Well, maybe not all of it. We were still a bunch of uncoachable bozos, but at least we had a guy underneath who could grab a couple rebounds, maybe push some people around.
It’s hard to be good. It is. I don’t mean just on the basketball court. It’s hard to be a good person, to make smart choices, to put yourself in a consistent position to succeed. It takes work. It takes focus, a certain determination. And a lot of times it takes a good deal of help, so that’s one of the things we try to do when we see a kid headed for trouble. We surround our young players with older role models, with coaches who keep a constant eye on them, and we give them specific guidelines we mean for them to follow. That’s where our “contract” comes from. It steers them through all the different situations that might come up in school, on the street, or on the court.
Probably, the toughest rule we have to instill in our players is to be on time. It’s fundamental. We insist that, whatever it is, you have to arrive fifteen minutes ahead of the scheduled time. This way, you’re waiting, you’re prepared for whatever is going to happen in that class, that practice, or that part-time job. Whatever it is, you’re there early and ready to go.
Lately, we’ve taken to calling this “Tom Coughlin time,” in a nod to the New York Giants coach. Every meeting Coach Coughlin calls, the New York Giants players are expected to be there fifteen minutes early. That’s his thing. In his mind, you’re late for a 9:00 A.M. meeting if you’re not sitting in your seat at 8:45. You’re not prepared, and if you’ve ever heard Coach Coughlin interviewed, you’ll know he puts a ton of weight on being prepared. Everything else falls from this right here. He’ll even fine his players if they’re not there early, to where the NFL Players Association tried to weigh in and complain. But Coughlin wouldn’t budge. When I heard that, I thought it was just the greatest thing ever, so we started using “Tom Coughlin time” for our own practices and other team events. We tried to let our kids know that the person who comes rushing in the door for a meeting is invariably unprepared for that meeting. If you’re in a school setting and you rush into class just as the bell starts to ring, you’re not organized, you’re not focused, you’re not ready to learn. You won’t be able to compete with the other kids in that class who’ve
gotten there early.
Every game we played, our aim was to have these kids ready to play one full hour before tip-off. We never wanted them to arrive as something was getting ready to start, and it was a tough sell for this group—at least at the beginning. They went at things in their own way, on their own time, so it took awhile to get them to adjust their clocks and meet our expectations on this. It was easy enough if we were on a team bus, if they were a captive bunch, but it was sometimes an adventure getting them all to practice on time or to team functions. Unless they were on a basketball court, most of the kids on this team were extremely immature. They weren’t ready for college. No one was ready to step up and be any kind of team leader.
Meanwhile, off the court, there was an endless series of headaches and heartaches. The biggest of these had nothing at all to do with basketball—at least, nothing directly to do with basketball—although it set in motion an agonizing, emotional few years when a lot of us at St. Anthony took turns wondering about the future of our basketball program, even the future of our school. Everything turned on the sad news that Sister Alan Barczewski had been diagnosed with liver cancer. For years she’d been such a force, such a presence in our building, and such a powerful, positive influence in the lives of our players—only here we were all forced to start thinking about what our lives would be without her. This year, for the first time, Sister Alan couldn’t be in our building every day, and even when she was present, she was less and less available to our kids. You’d think the fact that she was battling cancer might have been enough to inspire a group of high school kids—but this was a group that needed Sister Alan’s sure, guiding touch more than any other group of kids ever had, so they were even more restless, more distracted than usual. They didn’t always make it to their classes or to practice or to whatever it was that was expected of them. Sister Alan had always been great at cracking the whip, keeping our most difficult kids in line, but that year her focus was elsewhere.
Our focus was elsewhere.
Happily, mercifully, Sister Alan wasn’t going anywhere just yet, and in fact her doctors gave her a good fighting chance, but nobody quite knew what course her illness might take. Nobody quite knew what would happen to our fund-raising efforts without Sister Alan’s full support and enthusiasm. Nobody quite knew how we’d coordinate our basketball program without Sister Alan on top of things. Nobody quite knew how to motivate these kids, to make sure they’d be able to graduate with their class and remain NCAA-eligible.
Most years college coaches lined up to recruit our graduating players, but this group was a tough sell. It’s not like they weren’t capable of playing at a top-tier college program, but a lot of these top-tier coaches just weren’t interested in taking on the hassle. I had to be honest with them. I had to let them know what they were getting into—for their sake and for the sake of my players. I knew my guys needed to be in a structured, supervised environment, but then I’d arrange college visits for them and they would find a way to blow them off. A couple times I even drove to their apartments to pick them up to visit a junior college coach, and the kid would be a no-show.
My one hope for this group, in terms of college ball, was to get them out of Jersey City. None of them had the grades or the credits to play Division I ball, even though they all had the talent. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t play Division II ball or maybe go to community college for a while, so I looked long and hard for programs that might be a good fit. I finally found what I thought was the perfect environment—in Florida, at Pensacola Junior College. I went to visit the school myself when I was down there for a clinic and talked for a bit with the coach, who used to be an assistant at Northwestern. I gave it to him straight, and he was very encouraging. We worked it out so that I could send Marcus, Otis, and Ahmad Mosby down to see him for a campus visit at the end of the season—and if everything worked out, he’d offer them scholarships, and after two years they’d each have their associate’s degree and some good basketball under their belts and be able to transfer to Division I schools.
Other than that, though, there wasn’t a whole lot of recruiting activity going on with this group during the season—another way this team stood apart from most of the other teams I’d coached. At times we were more concerned about making sure these kids graduated from high school than where they’d go to college, so we took a “first things first” approach.
It was maddening, dealing with these kids—and yet they kept winning. To this day I’m convinced that the main reason we did so well on the scoreboard was that other teams just couldn’t figure us out. We played a willy-nilly style of ball—more like street basketball than organized basketball—and we just ran through the field in the state tournament and the Tournament of Champions. We played big when it counted, and there’d be times when I was watching these kids run up the score with such joy and abandon that I realized what was so special about this group. They thrived on the court, I think, because their lives were so difficult away from the court. The gym was the only place where they could have any kind of peace of mind, any kind of assurance that things would shake out to the good; during our games they could feel like they were in control.
The kicker to that Pensacola Junior College story was that we did manage to get these three knuckleheads down there for a visit. My hope as they left on their trip was that at least two of them would decide to attend. It seemed perfect. The basketball team played at a high level for a junior college program. The school wasn’t too far from the beach. There were shuttle buses available to take students to the beach, to the airport, to the mall, so it’s not like our guys would need a car. And the best part? It was far, far away from the long list of negative influences they’d learned to attract in and around Jersey City. So what happened? They came back complaining that there wasn’t anything to do down in Florida, so we were back at square one.
Basically, I think these kids were afraid to take the next step in life. They desperately needed to get out of Jersey City, to start surrounding themselves with a more positive, more purposeful group of friends, but it was hard for them to pull the plug on what they knew.
Turned out these kids knew better than I did what was best for them. Yeah, they needed to get out of Jersey City, but they also needed to separate from each other. They’d been joined at the hip for so long—on the court, off the court—that they brought out the best and worst in each other. The best came when they were playing basketball; the worst came when they were doing anything else. So they went their separate ways and found ways to thrive. It’s like all that good hardwiring finally had a chance to kick in. In the end, Otis went to a junior college in Hutchinson, Kansas; Marcus went to the Globe Institute in Manhattan; Ahmad Mosby went to Ramapo College, a Division III school in northern New Jersey; and Shelton went to Dominican College in upstate New York. They all continued to play ball. They all found a way to graduate. They all grew as young men. They still get together back in Jersey City, and when they do I imagine there’s a whole lot of “more of the same” as they grab at some of their old habits, but it’s when they’re off on their own, doing their own thing, that we’re able to see that anything is possible.
9.
2007–2008: AT LAST
YOU CAN’T GET MUCH DONE IN LIFE IF YOU ONLY WORK ON THE DAYS WHEN YOU FEEL GOOD.
—Jerry West
A BASKETBALL TEAM IS LIKE THE FIVE FINGERS ON YOUR HAND. IF YOU CAN GET THEM ALL TOGETHER, YOU HAVE A FIST. THAT’S HOW I WANT YOU TO PLAY.
—Mike Krzyzewski
Every winning streak starts with a loss—and for the 2007–2008 group that loss came the year before in the North Jersey final, to St. Patrick. It wasn’t just a simple loss to end our season; it was a no-doubt-about-it, hang-your-head kind of defeat. We hadn’t lost a game the whole year, we were liking our chances, but St. Pat’s just took it to us. They were bigger, better, tougher. They ended up beating us by double figures, controlling the game the whole way, so it sent us into our off-season w
ith a lot of things to think about, a lot of things to work on.
The only good thing to come out of that game was that there was nothing to second-guess. It wasn’t like our guys could kick themselves over this play or that decision. Wasn’t like I could have taken a different approach. We just got beat was all. Crushed. St. Pat’s was a deep, talented team. They had a kid going off to North Carolina (Dexter Strickland), a kid going to Memphis (Jeff Robinson), a kid going to Villanova (Corey Fisher). Physically, we couldn’t compete. Chris Gaston, our best all-around player, was coming back from a knee injury. He was our go-to big guy, and it looked like he’d miss the entire postseason, but he got himself back for this one game, managed to limp through and put up some numbers. Still, it wasn’t enough to turn things our way.
Out of this one loss, we found our focus for the coming season: St. Pat’s. They were in our sights, we knew we’d see them again, and we were determined to be ready for them, but Chris Gaston was graduating and we were returning a team of mostly guards, so it’s not like we would be any bigger or stronger. It’s not like we could prepare for St. Pat’s the same way and expect a different outcome. People always say that’s the definition of insanity—to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. It’s not like St. Pat’s was looking to downsize, to play at our level. They’d be bringing back a lot of strength, including another big man who’d go on to play at Kansas (Quintrell Thomas). On top of that they were adding Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, probably one of the most highly rated, most talked about freshmen in the country (who four years later would lead Kentucky to the national championship, again as one of the most highly rated, most talked about freshmen in the country), so they would be a test all over again.
True, we could have just as easily placed our focus on Paterson Catholic, because they also had a very strong, very physical team. We knew the road to the state championship would go through one of these two programs, but on paper at least, St. Pat’s looked like the team to beat. Plus, telling our kids we were gunning for the team that ended our season the year before made it a whole lot easier to rally the troops; our guys didn’t like the way St. Pat’s had pushed them around, so they were eager for another shot at them.
