Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  I was still learning, still figuring out what kind of coach I wanted to be. Whenever I could swing it, I’d go to coaching clinics, and if I saw something I liked—a drill, a set play, a defensive scheme—I wasn’t shy about borrowing it. In fact, I made sure to tell the coach that I was planning on stealing from him, and whoever it was, to a man, they never seemed to mind. Mostly, they were flattered—long as I didn’t come back and use whatever I’d stolen against them in a game. I accepted every invitation I could to work various summer camps in the area, and here too there was a lot I could soak up, just from being around. It was like hanging out with John Ryan all over again, doing Xs and Os over beers, so each season I’d come to our first practice with a list of new things I wanted to try.

  My personality on the bench and during practice … that was on me. My style with my players was a lot like it is now. I tended to yell a lot in practice, which I found was the only way to get some of these kids to listen to you. I yelled during games too, but a little less loudly; I didn’t need to chew someone out in front of his friends or his parents, although from time to time I couldn’t help myself. I expected my guys to focus, to prepare, to play hard. I took an in-your-face sort of approach. In the beginning, I think I had to overcompensate in this way because I was so close to my players in age, but as I got older and had a little more time and success (and probably confidence) under my belt I kept yelling. More and more, my players started coming to me with a level of built-in respect. It wasn’t something I had to keep earning each time out—but that didn’t mean I dialed down on the yelling. No, sir. If anything, I might have started yelling even more, even louder, because I finally had their attention, and once I did I pushed them. Hard. It was no longer about me earning their respect—it was about them earning mine.

  And then, the next day in practice, they had to earn it all over again.

  I was tough, but I tried to be fair. I gave my players the benefit of the doubt, but only once. If they messed up a second time or missed an assignment, I was all over them. And their teammates too. If one player couldn’t follow a play or a drill, I let it be known that it was on everyone else, not just him. It was up to each player to lift the others.

  Looking back, I think a lot of my demeanor as a coach came from the work I was doing as a probation officer. Wasn’t just the hours that fit together well; there was a lot of the same mind-set, the same persona. I needed to be a kind of drill sergeant on the job, so it made sense that I became a kind of drill sergeant in the gym. Folks who know me, guys who’ve played for me, might tell you I’m a drill sergeant with heart, but I tried not to let them see the heart part. Same thing for my guys on probation. When I started out in December 1971, as a provisional (or temporary) hire, I was given a caseload of about 150 men on probation. It was an eye-opening experience. I was assigned to the Greenville section of Jersey City, where I’d grown up, but this was a whole new world to me. I’d lived a certain way as a kid, ran with a certain crowd. Yeah, I hung out on a lot of street corners, but only with guys just like me—guys who played ball all the time. We didn’t know all this other stuff was going on, and now I had to walk these same streets, looking out for heroin addicts and gang-bangers, people involved in all kinds of things. Like I said, it was a whole new world even though it was right in my own backyard, so I had to develop a tough exterior to get these guys to take me seriously. Some of my cases, I knew the family, so it was a big adjustment—for them, for me, for the folks we knew in common. You grow up looking at the world a certain way, and then you cross to the other side of the same street and look at the world a whole other way … it shakes things up, I’ll say that.

  The biggest adjustment from working as a provisional to being hired off the list on a full-time basis was in our training. It was the same job essentially, only now someone took the time to tell me what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Before that, filling in, they just expected us to wing it. All along, my guidelines had been common sense and whatever seemed reasonable, but I had a lot to learn. My caseload stayed about the same in terms of size, only now I had to track the same cases over a longer period of time. Now I had to do a little more than just hope for the best. I wasn’t just subbing or covering someone else’s book.

  The other change, obviously, was in the job security. I finally had a steady paycheck and a pension. It meant I didn’t have to go chasing all these odd jobs. It meant Chris and I could maybe settle down and focus on starting a family. For the first time, I had a set schedule, which fit in great with my coaching schedule, and I could finally feel like I was building something for our future. When I was just starting out full-time working for the state of New Jersey, just finding my legs as a coach, I thought of myself as a probation officer first and foremost. It was who I was, most of all. The basketball stuff—the coaching, the leagues, the clinics—it was all a sideline, something I was passionate about, something to do to keep me sane and whole. But there’s no way I could have relied on basketball to make a living, so I never thought of myself in those terms.

  Even with my full-time job, we were on a tight budget. We lived for a time with my family on Linden Avenue. My folks owned a small building with four apartments, so we rented one and lived right upstairs from the apartment I’d grown up in. My siblings were still living at home, so we were like a Jersey City sitcom—one really big family living underneath one not so big roof. Chris and I kept our own kitchen, did our own thing, but there was pretty much an open-door policy between our apartments. What happened in one house tended to spill over into the next.

  It was a great setup, but only for a while. Things got pretty crowded, pretty quick. Bobby was born in 1971. Danny came around a year and a half later, and somewhere in there Chris’s dad passed away, so her mom came to live with us as well. We only had a four-room apartment, and we were running out of room, so when Bobby was starting first grade, we scraped together what we could and bought a small home in Country Village, just a couple short city blocks away. Same neighborhood basically, but to me it felt like we were on the other side of the city. I can still remember what we paid for that first house—$32,000, a big number at the time, although I’ve since bought cars for more money than that, so it’s hard to remember what that money meant when we were just starting out except that it was just barely within reach.

  The few thousand dollars I earned from basketball—a stipend from St. Anthony and a small fee from the city for running the leagues—really helped fill in some of the gaps for us, especially once Chris stopped working and it fell to me to cover the shortfall. But our needs were not so great, so we considered ourselves extremely fortunate; we had just enough.

  Once Danny was born, Chris and I had to stop double-teaming Bobby and pay attention to his little brother. The old joke, which you hear a lot in basketball families, is that when the third kid comes along, you switch from man-to-man to a zone. But even with just two kids, we were spread pretty thin, so I started taking Bobby with me to the gym on Saturday and Sunday mornings, just to give Chris some alone time with Danny. Bobby was too young for basketball, of course. He’d only been walking a couple months, so the only kind of dribbling he was doing was down his chin. Still, I packed up some of his toys and made a kind of playpen area for him in the corner of a gym, throwing a couple chairs together to protect him from any loose balls and keep him from running out onto the floor during our scrimmages. From time to time, I had the team manager check in on him to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble, and it seemed to work out fine. It got to where Bobby started looking forward to these trips to the gym. He was like our team mascot, and as soon as Danny was old enough to join him, I brought him along as well so Chris could use those mornings to recharge her batteries.

  From that point on, Bobby and Danny were fixtures of our program—two Hurley mascots for the price of one. They were always around, always with a ball, always playing. And always together. They were close enough in age that they could have been twins, and on the basketba
ll court they were inseparable. Unfortunately, there was no room for a hoop in our yard at the Country Village house, just a small patch of indoor/outdoor carpet we laid down in the back, so I’d take the boys to the park and we’d shoot around, maybe get a pickup game going. When I started running summer basketball camps in 1975, they’d come along and soak up what they could. They became real students of the game, took to it naturally—which I guess made sense, because they were basically born to it.

  We suffered a great sadness during this period: Chris and I lost a child, our son Sean, who was born prematurely. There was a problem with the pregnancy, and he only weighed about two pounds, and we were all devastated. He lived a little less than a week. We were already preparing ourselves for the worst, but as a parent you can never get your head around the loss of a child. It knocks you down and sends you reeling—and even now, all these years later, I choke up when I think about Sean.

  There will always be a hole in our lives that he was meant to fill.

  Obviously, this was a difficult, anguishing time for our family, and Chris and I have always been private about it, but I mention it here to give a sense of how things were for us back then. How we grew as a family. On the one hand, I felt incredibly blessed for the riches we had—two healthy sons, a comfortable home in a great neighborhood, a solid career, and a fulfilling sideline in high school and rec league basketball. But on the other hand, we were racked with grief and shaken over the loss of little Sean. The boys were too young to really grasp the heartbreak of losing a baby brother like that, but I do recall that they’d been tremendously excited to become big brothers. And Chris and I both remember some painfully difficult conversations with Bobby in particular (Danny was a little young), trying to help him sort through his emotions and understand what was happening.

  And so we pressed on—what choice did we have, after all?

  ——

  Soon as it made sense, we started thinking about having another child, and Bobby and Danny finally got the chance to be “big” brothers. (I know, Bobby was already a big brother to Danny, but the two of them were so close in age, I don’t think he saw himself that way until much, much later.) Our daughter, Melissa, was born in October 1980, and almost from the moment her little hands could hold a basketball she started going through the same motions as her older brothers. She played all through grammar school, same as them. But basketball was never her “thing,” the way it was with Bobby and Danny. She played softball too, and by the time she started high school at Holy Family Academy in Bayonne, basketball was just another after-school activity. It was a take-it-or-leave-it sort of deal. No big thing. Melissa played for a couple years, but then gave it up—and at first I was disappointed she didn’t stick with it. Chris too. Melissa knew the game better than most of the other girls who played; she had good size, good skills. But she preferred to watch our games at St. Anthony, where basketball mattered most of all.

  The culture of our program really started to change around the time Melissa was born. As I’ve written, during my first decade as head coach of the St. Anthony varsity, we were a strong, solid team—again, good but not great. Up until 1977, 1978, the team consisted almost entirely of kids in our neighborhood. We found our strengths wherever we could and learned to play to them—where we were weak one year we were strong the next—and even though the goal at the start of each season was to win the state championship, the realistic expectation was to make it to the postseason and put up a good fight. That’s all. But then, slowly, we started to see a shift in Jersey City basketball. Hudson Catholic was probably the first school in the area to draw kids from all over the city instead of just one community. We followed soon after, beginning in the early 1980s. We had a really good team in 1980, and again in 1981—led by Ben Gamble, who’s been my top assistant for a bunch of years, Mandy Johnson, Phil Robinson, Felix Rivera, and Jared King, mostly local guys who just happened to come along at the same time.

  It’s no coincidence that Sister Alan Barczewski came along at St. Anthony at around this same time. Back then, most of our teachers were Felician Franciscan nuns, and most of them lived in a convent around the corner from the St. Anthony grammar school, on Sixth Street. Sister Alan joined the nuns at a young age, and this was one of her first assignments, but she took to the school immediately. She was a great sports fan, from Philadelphia, which meant she was fiercely devoted to her Phillies, her Eagles, her 76ers. She was also a big Villanova fan—she went to masses there. We hit it off immediately. We talked a lot of sports at first, but she taught English and history, so we were also trading books and ideas, and it worked out that her arrival as a young teacher came about a year or so before our guys really started to gel on the court. She really warmed to this group—and they responded to her as well—and in a whole bunch of ways she started doing more and more to help us out.

  Sister Alan was a terrific supporter, showed up at every home game; she even took the bus to some of our away games. But she also took on a lot of the responsibilities of our athletic director, Tony Nocera, the guy who’d hired me. Tony was only a part-time AD; his real job was in the sheriff’s office, so there was nobody around during the school day to arrange gym time, to schedule games, to deal with all the different things that come up during the course of a basketball season. Gradually, Sister Alan took on some of this role. She also let me know if she didn’t like a substitution I’d made, late in a game, or if she thought one of the guys on my bench wasn’t getting enough playing time. She really knew her stuff, and she wasn’t shy about letting me know it.

  More than anyone else on the St. Anthony faculty, in the parish, in the archdiocese, Sister Alan was the one who helped to integrate what we were doing on the court into what we were trying to do in the classroom. Over the years, first as a classroom teacher and later on as the school’s athletic director and vice principal, she lifted our basketball program to a place of real significance at the school—and she became our biggest fan.

  That 1980 team, with Ben Gamble and them, seemed ready to take us to a whole other level. We had a deep, talented bench, which allowed me to push my team in practice and all during the season—because, let’s face it, when you’re only five or six deep in talent, it’s tough to motivate your guys to play at any kind of optimum level. As a coach, you want your players to compete for their roles on the team, the same way you want them to compete to win.

  The real change came in 1981, with the arrival of an incredibly gifted freshman named David Rivers. David actually started that season on the junior varsity, but I let him run with the varsity at the end of the year and dress for our games, and that team went on to win the state championship, so the idea that we’d be returning a core group from that team and adding a talented sophomore for the 1981–82 season was terrifically exciting. And David exceeded all of our expectations. As a sophomore, he was named Player of the Year in Hudson County, and he led our team to the county championship. By the time he graduated two years later, he’d become the most heavily recruited basketball player to ever play at St. Anthony. It felt to us like every major college coach in the country came by to check him out, including Jim Boeheim from Syracuse, Jimmy Valvano from North Carolina State, and Digger Phelps from Notre Dame, where David ultimately went to play.

  What this meant for St. Anthony was that a whole new set of eyes was watching us. It meant the basketball world was taking notice, and all of a sudden we started seeing a different caliber of ballplayer, from other parts of Jersey City and beyond. All of a sudden, kids wanted to be a part of whatever it was we’d started to build with David Rivers—as we set off on a record run of nine consecutive state championships. Nine! I can still hardly believe it, but one good team led to another. In 1985 we were led by Kenny Wilson, who went on to Villanova, and things really began to accelerate from there, and by the time Bobby got to high school, there was a tremendous culture of winning and excellence that had taken shape. It was a wonderful thing to see, but we didn’t go looking for it.


  Meanwhile, David Rivers had an outstanding career at Notre Dame, where he set all kinds of school records. He played in the NBA for a few years—first with the Lakers, later with the Clippers—but his professional career never really took off in the States, so he went to Europe. He played in France, he played in Italy, he played in Greece and Turkey. He was the first American to earn European League MVP honors, which was a great big deal. David ended up having an outstanding career overseas, played for well over a decade, and I couldn’t have been prouder of the ways he carried himself after leaving St. Anthony. He’s now gone on to become a successful entrepreneur down in Florida, and he’s one of those guys, with the opportunities he had at Notre Dame, who really built a life on the back of basketball. And along the way, he helped us build a championship mentality. We still talk every couple weeks, and I often point out to him what he meant, what his place is in the history of the St. Anthony Friars. Really, he was the catalyst for the next phase of our program. He was the spark. He was like a Pied Piper–type character—all the kids in Jersey City, from Bobby’s age on down, wanted to be like David Rivers. They followed him around. They’d seen him play on television, and whenever he played, the play-by-play guys would almost always mention St. Anthony, so we started seeing these talented kids from all over the city, wanting in. David’s last couple years playing for me, there was such tremendous excitement, the whole school was connected to it. And not just the school—the entire community was lifted by what our teams were able to do on the basketball court.