Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  I know it’s going to be a good test for us, only our guys aren’t exactly up to it. Jerome Frink, one of our two returning starters from last year, is out with the flu, so I try to slot in Jimmy Hall, who’s been in and out of my doghouse almost from the day he joined our program, and Kentrell Brooks, a lanky, six-eight junior, but we don’t move the ball all that well with either one of these kids in the big man role.

  We’re getting our first real look at Kentrell, who came to us last year from Christ the King in Queens. He’s a bright, coachable kid, commutes to us all the way from the Bronx, so you know he’s a dedicated player. That’s usually how it goes. The kids who come a long way to school, just for the chance to play at St. Anthony, they tend to be my most motivated players. They’re giving up a lot just to be here. The only knock on Kentrell’s game is his size. He’s rail-thin—only about 170 pounds, which is next to nothing on his giant frame. Clearly, his best basketball is ahead of him, when he puts some meat on his bones, but for now we’re hoping we can toughen him up, and even if we’re not in for some of his best basketball just yet, hopefully we’ll get some pretty darn good basketball out of him along the way.

  Not today, though. And it’s not just Kentrell—the entire team is off. We’re flat, stagnant. There’s no cohesion. We’re not connecting on our passes. Our shots don’t fall. Defensively, we manage to keep the other team in check, but we can’t get anything going on the offensive end, and it starts to worry me. Not a lot, but some.

  This stage of the season, while the team is still taking shape, there’s a lot that starts to worry me. Doesn’t take much.

  Kentrell played some meaningful minutes for us in the summer and fall. In fact, he started a lot of games, after Jimmy Hall and Rashad Andrews got themselves suspended. I don’t think it’s fair to Jimmy or Rashad to share the details of their suspensions, but it’s public knowledge that they missed most of our summer, and here at Gill St. Bernard’s anyone in the gym can see Rashad Andrews is not with us. Anyone who follows St. Anthony basketball knows we’re counting on him to be a starter for us, but almost as soon as he finished with his summer suspension he went and made some other trouble—which I also won’t go into. However, the upshot of this second misstep is that I decided to suspend him for the first thirteen games of the season, which feels like an eternity right about now.

  It’s early yet, and the idea of these scrimmages is to feel your way, to work on what needs working on, but at the same time you play to win. You play the game like it matters, because it does. You call time-outs to stop a momentum run. You pull out your guys when they make a bonehead play. You go to your bench when one of your starters gets into foul trouble. You draw up a new inbounds play if you think you need to switch things up.

  At some point late in the game we’re down six or eight points, and I lean over to Ben Gamble, my assistant coach. I’ve got a lot of assistant coaches, but Ben’s my main guy, been with me for over ten years. Ben used to play for me too, back when I was first starting out. He helps me out with a lot of our pregame scouting, our preparation, our strategy.

  Ben’s thing is to look at video. He likes to see the run of play. Me, I try to take in a bigger picture. I eyeball everybody, everything. I pay attention to how a team warms up before a game, at halftime. I watch the bench. I consider all the little things, all the little tells. I look at body language. Ben will cover the basics, but I’ll stand back and see how the other team’s point guard interacts with his coach. This is the kid who’s supposed to run the team on the floor, so I want to see him communicate with the guy who runs the team on the bench. Does the coach have his arm around his star player when they talk before the game? Does the kid respond positively, respectfully, to what the coach has to say? Is there a dialogue between the coach and his players? Or is it more of a dictatorship-type deal?

  One of our team mottoes, this year as in years past, is “Victory loves preparation.” We wear the phrase on our maroon warm-up shirts. We put it on signs. We repeat it in practice. Really, we can’t stress the point enough, and Ben’s the guy who handles a lot of that prep. He gets our kids thinking through what they can expect in any given situation, against any given opponent. But the preparation doesn’t stop once we take the floor to start the game. There’s all kinds of information that keeps coming our way—during the warm-up, during the game itself—so we never stop scouting until the clock winds down.

  Typically, Ben will sit in the seat immediately to my right on the bench. I like to have him nearby during the game in case there’s something I want to say, something I need to hear.

  Like right about now.

  “Might be a long season,” I say, our guys on the short end of a seven- or eight-point margin as the final buzzer sounds.

  “Got some things to work on,” Ben agrees. “But we’ll be okay.”

  2.

  Warming Up

  PLAY HARD, PLAY SMART, PLAY TOGETHER.

  —St. Anthony Friars team motto, origin unknown

  WHAT TO DO WITH A MISTAKE: RECOGNIZE IT, ADMIT IT, LEARN FROM IT, FORGET IT.

  —Dean Smith

  I’m the oldest of four children. My sister, Sheila, is three years younger than me, and she was followed by my brother Brian two years later, and my brother Tim four years after that.

  My father, Bob Sr., wasn’t always a cop. When he came back from World War II, he worked for a time in the pressroom at the Observer newspaper in Hoboken, until the paper merged with the Jersey Journal in 1951 and he was out of a job. So he took the civil service test and went to work for the police department.

  My mother, Eleanor, was a nurse. She always worked, back as far as I can remember, mostly part-time. She wanted to make sure someone was around for us kids, and with a nine-year difference between the oldest and the youngest, there was always a baby at home, so she did what she could to match her schedule to ours. For a long time she worked as the nurse at our local ice skating rink, which meant we all grew up on ice skates. I went skating every day after school, until I could start playing football in eighth grade. That was like our day care. For two hours each afternoon, we’d circle the rink, around and around, over and over. Eventually, you’d develop a whole lot of leg strength, but it got boring, going around in circles all the time. There was no ball, no way to keep score. It was pretty monotonous. After a while you just didn’t want to go in the same direction as everyone else, so you’d turn and go back against the grain. Or you’d set up a roller derby–type game with your friends, and you’d all hold hands and whip the last one in line up the boards. We’d found all these different ways to amuse ourselves, to make a game out of it, which meant we ended up spending a lot of time in the penalty box. They had guards on ice skates patrolling the rink, trying to keep order. We weren’t making trouble so much as letting off steam. The guards were always going to my mother, complaining about my behavior, and she was always telling me I had to set a better example for my sister and brothers.

  Saturday mornings we’d hit the rink again, usually from nine to noon. After that I’d go home and listen to Notre Dame football on the radio with my father. That was his thing, because his brother, my uncle Dan, was a priest who taught at Notre Dame. My father was more of a baseball fan than a football fan. He absolutely loved baseball. He pitched on a semipro team in town. He was a terrific all-around athlete, and baseball was probably his best sport. But Notre Dame football was a big deal in our house, and then when they started putting the games on television, it was an even bigger deal. Everything stopped when there was a game on television. We raced home from whatever we were doing to watch. To the day he died, literally, my father kept tabs on the Fighting Irish. If he couldn’t watch the game himself, he’d call me or my brothers on the phone to see how it went.

  Sundays we’d usually go out for a drive as a family. We’d pile into the car and head west, on the Belleville Pike, to North Arlington. There was a hot dog place we all loved called Egan’s, so that was one of our frequent stops. Ther
e was also an ice cream place out on Route 46 called O’Dowd’s, which was always a great treat because they had real homemade ice cream, with great sundaes and a classic double-dip cone. It wasn’t just an ice cream shop—it was a giant dairy operation. There was a lot to see and do, and I remember those Sunday drives as a special time in our family. I hated the driving part, though. I used to get carsick, so I had to weigh the benefits of an ice cream sundae and getting out in the country against getting nauseous in the backseat.

  If I had to summarize my childhood and look for themes that maybe contributed to my career as a coach, I’d point to my parents’ work ethic as the biggest takeaway. We didn’t have a lot as kids. We didn’t go away on fancy vacations or drive a fancy car. We had just enough, but not a whole lot more—and what we did have was hard-earned. My parents were always working two or three jobs to help cover our bills, but they never shrunk from that responsibility. I never heard them grouse or moan about having to go to work. It was just something they had to take on in order to provide for our household, and they did it in such a way that one of them was almost always around to look after us kids. Sometimes this meant bringing us with them to work, like how we used to follow my mother to the ice skating rink, but family was a priority. Education was a priority. Faith, too. We were a churchgoing family, only we didn’t always go at the same time, as a family. In our parish, there was a kids’ service early on Sundays, and the adults went later on in the afternoon, so we split up. But going was important. Work was important. Putting our best and fullest effort into everything we did … probably most important of all.

  When I was about eight years old, we moved into an Italian neighborhood in Jersey City. I didn’t know it was an Italian neighborhood at the time, but looking back I realized that up and down the street our neighbors and all of my friends had Italian last names. We Hurleys were Irish, on both sides, but when you’re a kid this kind of thing doesn’t come up. It didn’t really matter where you were from. It only mattered that you were there—and in my crowd, that you could play ball. I only mention it because our next-door neighbors, the Iorios, had a son named Sam who had a basketball scholarship to go to Villanova, where he played with Bill Melchionni, who went on to win an NBA championship with the 76ers and an ABA championship with the Nets. And then, next door to the Iorios, there was my buddy Paul Lenzo, who was my age, and the proximity and influence of these two families probably had as much to do with my basketball development as anything else.

  Paul’s dad put a basket up on the garage, with a plywood backboard, and we used to play there all the time. It ended up, he had to put chicken wire over the windows facing the court, because the ball kept breaking the glass. You take enough shots, you send enough balls bouncing this way and that way, you’re bound to break a couple windows, right? That was my first taste of basketball. Mr. Lenzo invited me to come by and shoot whenever I wanted, even if Paul wasn’t around, and I took him up on it. For years afterward, Mr. Lenzo used to joke that he should never have made the offer, because I was there all the time. Even when the other kids lost interest, I would show up to play. Even when the sun went down and everyone else raced home for dinner, I would stay out there and shoot. The hoop was set up in such a way that there was a ledge in the right corner of the court, which fell into the yard of the house next door. I spent so much time in that corner, I developed a killer fadeaway jump shot, falling onto the grass with my release.

  A couple years later we started going up to the next corner, where there was a little park on Linden Avenue, and we played there. We grew our games from one-on-one to two-on-two half-court, to three-on-three. With each man, the game took on a new dimension. We might have played full-court, but there was only one basket. At the other end of the court, there was a hole in the concrete where the basketball pole used to be, but the city never got around to replacing it, so that kind of put a cap on our game.

  As we got older we found a park with a full court, and our games got more and more competitive. We played to win, which to us was the same thing as playing for fun. We also played touch football, stickball, box ball, punchball … as long as it had some kind of ball and some way to keep score.

  My father didn’t know a whole lot about basketball. Baseball, that was his sport. He used to take us down to Roosevelt Stadium to have a catch—me and my brother Brian. After a while Timmy would join in too. Sometimes my father would bring a Wiffle ball bat. If there were other kids around, he’d bring them along and we’d make a game of it. This was our routine a couple nights a week, but then I started spending more and more time playing basketball, and he didn’t really have a way to help me with that. It’s not that he wasn’t supportive—just a little out of his element. I was in uncharted waters, in terms of my family, but that was okay, because you could go it alone on a basketball court. You could find a way to amuse yourself or work on your game even if no one else was around. Even if your father couldn’t teach you how to shoot or pass or execute a pick-and-roll.

  Here’s what I learned from the game of basketball early on: if you kept at it, you got better. If you kept firing up those fadeaway shots from the corner of Paul Lenzo’s court, they’d start to fall more often than not. If something was difficult at first, you could make it easier if you worked at it; you could figure it out as you went along.

  I did fairly well in school. Not at first, but soon enough. In third grade, I moved from St. Patrick’s grammar school to St. Paul’s, which was a difficult adjustment. St. Paul’s was a much more rigorous school, and in the beginning I struggled to keep up. If it hadn’t been for the nun teaching my class, Sister Anita Claire, I don’t think I would have gotten by. She was tough. I can’t remember how many times I got slapped on the head, or had my ears pulled, or got my knuckles whacked with a ruler, but eventually I got the message. I had no choice but to catch up and pay attention to my work because I was so afraid of Sister Anita Claire—not because her slaps or whacks were truly painful, but because they were embarrassing. I hated being called out like that in front of the rest of the class, so I pushed myself to learn.

  I did well enough at St. Paul’s to get accepted to St. Peter’s Prep, which was the best school in the area. At the time I didn’t care that it was such a good school, only that it had the best sports teams. That’s where my priorities were back then, and I took full advantage. I played football, basketball, baseball. I changed with the seasons. My interest in sports even spilled over into my first part-time job. My mother had started working at Bamberger’s department store in Newark as the in-house nurse. She got me a job in the sporting goods department, which I thought was just the greatest setup in the world. I had to wear a jacket and tie, and I had to take the number 9 bus to Communipaw Avenue, near where we lived, and then switch to the 108 or the 1 to Newark—well over an hour each way. But I didn’t mind the commute or the dress code, because I got to sample all the new equipment. And I had an employee discount, which I used to buy gloves, bats, balls … everything under the sun. I’d buy them for my friends or my brothers, or I’d pick up a bunch of old equipment from the warehouse. There was even a basketball hoop hanging in the store, and when things were slow I could clear out a little area and work on my shot. So all in all, it was an ideal job.

  While I was in high school I don’t think I gave any real thought to what I might do for a career. If I thought about it at all, I might have imagined myself playing professional basketball—that’s how laser-focused I was on my game. But somewhere in there, in the back of my mind, I started to think I might like to be a teacher. A history teacher probably. For that, I credit a teacher I had during my sophomore year named Richard Hollander. He was one of those rare, dynamic teachers who really made an impression. He made the material just jump off the page. Whatever book he had us reading, he had stories for each chapter, so the history really came alive in the classroom, and it left me feeling like this was something I could do. Or at least, something I wanted to do, because I never in a million years
thought I could do it as well as Mr. Hollander. In any case, he left me with a real love of reading and history, and for the first time I allowed myself to think of a life beyond sports, beyond basketball.

  That would come later—only not exactly in the ways Mr. Hollander had me thinking.

  I still had my sights set on a collegiate basketball career, which, as I’ve already detailed, didn’t exactly go as planned. And out of that I managed to parlay my love of the game into a couple volunteer coaching gigs, which ultimately led me to my first job at St. Anthony, coaching the freshman team. It was the fall of 1967. I was twenty years old.

  This was around the time I met my wife, Chris. I was going into my sophomore year at St. Peter’s, just getting used to the idea that a playing career wasn’t in the cards for me. Chris was going into her senior year in high school. I thought she was just about the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. She lived in the next parish, on the south side of the city. There was such a big percentage of Catholics living in Jersey City back then that this was how we defined our neighborhoods. When you met someone, you never asked what street they lived on or what part of town they were from. You asked them their parish. I was from St. Paul’s. Chris was from Sacred Heart. When I was growing up, our parish district covered a huge area. By the time my youngest brother was in grammar school, they had divided the district into two parishes—St. Paul’s and Our Lady of Mercy—but in my day our classrooms were overflowing with kids. There were over two hundred kids in my graduating class in grammar school, crammed into just three classrooms. Looking back, it’s amazing to think we learned anything at all, with just one nun assigned to each class, responsible for every subject, but by the time I started at St. Peter’s Prep I was as prepared as any other kid. I had a solid foundation.

  Chris and I hit it off right away. We’d had a lot of the same experiences growing up. We’d come from the same place—different parishes, but essentially the same place. We both had deep roots in Jersey City and wanted to make our lives there. Plus, we were in love, and it wasn’t long before we decided to get married. We waited until I finished school. I was twenty-three years old; Chris was twenty-one.