by Bob Hurley
It was tough enough to step in as a freshman and sophomore and try to make your mark on such a talented team, and I only made it tougher, but to Bobby’s great credit, he hung in there.
Jerry Walker made his own mark his freshman year when we went to a tournament in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A lot of great players had played in this tournament over the years, and before the games began, we took our guys on a little tour, showed them where they kept the plaques for all the past MVPs, the past champions. Guys like Wilt Chamberlain, Hal Greer, and Maurice Stokes—legendary basketball players—had all played in this tournament. And there was Jerry Walker, all wide-eyed and bursting with confidence. He took a look around and said, “I’m gonna be up there with those guys.”
The kid was fourteen, fifteen years old and thinking he belonged with some of the greatest athletes to ever play the game … but that was Jerry. Sure enough, we went out and beat the host team, Johnstown, in the opening game, in their packed gym, and then in the finals we managed to beat Ben Franklin—a big, impressive team from Philadelphia with six kids at six-seven, six-eight, or taller.
After the tournament, Jerry was named MVP, and as the tournament official called his name Jerry turned to me and said, “Told you.”
We only graduated two players from that 1987–88 team with just that one loss to Ferris, and we were returning most of our core group and adding some real talent and depth, so expectations ran high heading into the 1988–89 season. There was even a new wrinkle to the schedule that year. For the first time, the winners of the state championships in every school classification would meet in a season-ending tournament to determine a true state champion. It had always been a topic of discussion in New Jersey high school basketball (and across the country, I imagine), whether a small private school like St. Anthony would be able to beat one of the big public high schools in the state. A lot of folks thought it’d be like comparing apples and oranges, or maybe like pitting a Division I NCAA champ against, say, a Division III NCAA champ. It used to be that there were three designations for parochial or private schools—Non-Public A, Non-Public B, and Non-Public C—and up until 1980, St. Anthony, one of the smallest schools in the state with an overall enrollment of around 240 students, was classified as a Non-Public C school. After that, the B and C groups were combined.
On the public side, dating back to the 1940s, there have been four groups: Public 1 (the smallest public schools in the state), Public 2, Public 3, and Public 4 (the largest). It gets a little confusing, I know, because the public groups go from small to big by number, while the non-public groups go from big to small by letter, but we’ve learned to figure it out.
The conversation regarding a post-postseason tournament to crown an overall state champion had intensified over the past six years as St. Anthony kept winning. We’d play some big public schools like Elizabeth and Camden and Plainfield during the regular season, but people in and around the game wondered how we’d do in a big-time, end-of-season tournament with statewide bragging rights on the line. Frankly, our guys were wondering the same thing, so this was a chance to settle the matter on the court. To really make a statement.
Over the years I’ve come to think of the Tournament of Champions as a drag on the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association’s postseason schedule. It stretches out the season for another week or so and pushes the limits of what we expect of our kids, who’ve been playing hard for nearly four months by the time the state tournament is through. It’s a lot to ask of them, to get up for a run at the state title and then to keep that level of play, that level of adrenaline, going for another two or three games—but the Tournament of Champions is now a fixture on the New Jersey high school sports scene, so we’ve got no choice but to give it our best shot. And for the first couple years at least, we were as excited as any other team in the state to compete on such a meaningful stage.
Really, it was a great big deal—and a great big honor.
In those days, as an independent, we tried not to play the Non-Public B teams in the northern part of the state during the regular season, because we knew we might see them again in the state tournament. There were enough strong teams in the state that we didn’t have to give anyone a free look, so that was an internal, informal rule we tried to follow. Naturally, we’d break our own rule from time to time if we had an open date on the schedule or a long-standing rivalry that was good for the program, and sometimes we’d face a Non-Public B rival in a tournament, depending on the draw, but it was a general strategy we tried to keep in mind. And if it worked out that we were playing a team we thought we might see again in the postseason, we tried to hold back some pieces of our game plan, just so we could throw another look at them when it counted.
The other rule, in terms of scheduling, was that 70 percent of our games had to be against in-state opponents, up until the first Saturday in February. That was a state rule we had to follow in order to be eligible for the state tournament, so we did what we could to balance the formal requirements with our informal strategizing.
And so, heading into this 1988–89 season, there was this whole extra layer of anticipation, because our goal was not only to position ourselves to repeat as Non-Public B champions, but also to continue our postseason run into the Tournament of Champions and have a chance to prove that St. Anthony was a true basketball power.
On a personal note, I was especially looking forward to starting the season with my younger son Danny on the team, playing alongside his brother for the first time since Pee Wee ball, only it didn’t exactly work out the way I’d imagined it. I didn’t figure on Danny starting for us that year, but I expected to him to play some big minutes for us off the bench. He was a good outside shooter, so I was counting on him to spell Bobby and Terry from time to time, but he ended up getting hurt in our very first practice—just a fluke, freak injury.
We’d arranged a three-day preseason training camp in Port Jervis, New York, together with a team from Mahwah High School. We had to do some heavy-duty fund-raising to help pay for the trip, but I thought it was important to take these kids away from their home environment for a couple days, so we could really get our heads around the season. It helped to throw in with another team—to keep a lid on the cost, but also to provide some steady competition, a tough opponent to run up against once we were ready to start scrimmaging.
First day of training camp, I had my guys doing a monkey-in-the-middle type drill to work on mirroring the basketball. It’s a simple drill, but it’s the kind of thing you need to do to reinforce the fundamentals. A lot of coaches, they’ll look to accomplish the same thing with a loose ball drill, where you roll the ball onto the floor and have two players chase it down and try to cover it, but I’d seen too many kids get hurt like that, so I used this drill instead. It was basic—two kids, passing the ball back and forth, with a third kid in the middle trying to intercept, deflect, or upset the pass any way he could.
We were at it maybe two, three minutes, when Danny reached for a ball and jammed his finger in just the wrong way. He was in a whole lot of pain, which is what happens anytime you jam your finger, but we could tell from the way his finger hung from his hand that it was bad. It wasn’t something Danny could just ice and rest. He wound up fracturing his bone at the joint and sitting out the first two or three months of the season, which was a big disappointment and a big frustration for us as a team—and as a family. We’d all been looking forward to this season for years and years, and now Danny could only look on from the sideline.
My heart broke for him, as a dad. Bobby’s did too, as an older brother. And my wife, Chris, was probably more upset than any of us, Danny included, because she’d had her heart set on watching her boys in their one-and-only high school season as teammates. But the focus for us as a team was on the opportunity that Danny’s injury now presented for some of the other players on our bench—and we were a really deep team that year, especially in the post. We had Sean Rooney, our starting center, who wen
t to Duquesne. His backup, Jose Ortiz, went to Radford University in Virginia. We also had a guard on that team, Lamont Street, who barely played a minute a game for us and still went on to score a thousand points in his career at Wagner College.
We went to Florida to start the season, to play at the Great Florida Shootout in Kissimmee. First game of the tournament we drew a team from Edison High School in Miami, and we got ourselves into trouble straightaway. In those days, pre-Internet, we couldn’t do the kind of advance scouting we do today. You’d go to one of these destination tournaments, and you’d check out the rest of the field when your guys weren’t playing. That was the routine. You’d study the brackets and look ahead to your likely opponents in the next rounds. But that first game was always a cold call—you never knew what you might get, other than what you could piece together from word of mouth and anecdotal information.
We got off to a slow start. Jerry Walker committed two fouls in the first minute and a half, so I had to sit him down before he could even break a sweat. This messed up our game plan, of course. By his senior year, Jerry had grown to six-seven, 220 pounds, so he was a real presence for us in the post. Everything we did on the defensive end flowed through him, so as soon as Jerry left the floor Edison started killing us on the boards and in the low post. Luckily, Bobby played pretty well that game, and we managed to hold on for the win, but Jerry never really got a chance to get going, so I worried he’d still need some time to find his game legs as the tournament progressed.
Happily, we got it going over the next couple games and made it to the finals against Miami Senior—the second-ranked team in the country—and here our perfect season nearly got away from us, only four games in. These kids from Miami Senior were tough. A lot of big bruiser types—and a deep, deep bench, with talent all through their rotation. They had the crowd with them, to start. Our shots weren’t falling. We were a little out of sync, but we managed to hang with them well enough, until halfway through the fourth quarter, when we went down by three points. The game seemed to turn on a technical foul. First it turned against us, but our guys found a little extra something and turned it right back around. What happened was, Sean Rooney got clipped with an elbow and retaliated by throwing a punch. It was a stupid, bullheaded response, but in Sean’s defense, his father was a boxer—and a great friend of Chuck Wepner, the heavyweight from Bayonne, New Jersey, who was thought to be the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” character—so throwing a punch was second nature to him, even if it’s not what you want to see on a basketball court. Miami Senior ended up converting the technical, and then on the ensuing possession one of their guards hit a three to give them that three-point lead, but after that the momentum seemed to swing back toward us. Miami Senior was all pumped up following the technical, but then the air just kind of leaked out of them. It was as if our guys needed to dig themselves one last hole before they could think about climbing back out—and somehow they did. Coming out of that three following the technical, we went on a 14–0 run, putting us back up by eleven points, and from there we won the game going away.
We were in a packed gym just outside Orlando, and the fans had been mostly leaning toward Miami Senior, but now they were all the way in our corner, and we rode that energy to really pour it on at the end. We couldn’t miss for trying, and we kept stopping them on defense, and if the game had been just a couple minutes longer, we’d have won by twenty-five points, easy, so it was an important win for us. Sent us home thinking we could match up against the best in the country, even when things didn’t quite go our way.
Our next big test came at the King Cotton Classic in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, just after Christmas. The story of the tournament reached all the way back to the previous season, to that one loss against Ferris. Those key wins against Dunbar and Tolentine had come in the semifinal and final of the Yolani Prep Classic in Honolulu—which also, by the way, came about on the back of a heavy-duty fund-raising effort. We beat Dunbar by a comfortable double-digit margin on our side of the bracket, while Tolentine just destroyed Flint Hill, a prep school team from Virginia, in their semifinal. In the final, we then knocked off Tolentine to take the tournament—another huge win for us, because Tolentine had been the consensus number-one team in the country going into the game. But that was last year. This year, heading into Pine Bluff, we were surprised to see that Flint Hill was seeded first in the tournament, even though we’d beaten the same Tolentine team that had routed Flint Hill the year before.
Nothing against Flint Hill, who’d won this same tournament the year before. That’s how it works in most tournaments: if you’re the returning champion, you’re automatically given the number-one seed. And they were certainly a strong team; after Miami Senior lost to us in Kissimmee, Flint Hill took over as the second-ranked team in the country. They had a six-ten big man named Frasier Johnson, who went on to play at Temple; Arron Bain, who had a fine career at Villanova; George Lynch, who went to North Carolina and played in the NBA for a bunch of years; and Randolph Childress, who played a couple years for Wake Forest before setting off on his own NBA career. That’s a lot of top-tier talent on just one team, so we couldn’t discount them, but I put it in our players’ heads that we were being disrespected by not being the number-one seed—by the tournament organizers, by the local crowds—and I let them think that the Flint Hill players were strutting around the complex like they were the team to beat, which they were, as far as we were concerned.
Jerry Walker picked up on this. He was always good at rallying the troops, getting under his teammates’ skin. He was an intimidating defensive player—he would end up leading Seton Hall to two Big East titles and earning Defensive Player of the Year honors in the conference—but his real value came in the intangibles. Our guys respected him, followed his lead. He knew what buttons to push to get our team going. He hated that we were being treated like a contender in the tournament, and he said as much to anyone who’d listen. He hated that the kids from Flint Hill thought they were the team to beat. He especially hated that they kept showing up late to all the events the organizers had arranged—photo shoots, media interviews, and on and on. He even hated that the Flint Hill players traveled around in a team bus with a banner announcing that they were defending champions. He thought they were arrogant, and he got his teammates thinking they were arrogant. Yeah, they’d won the same tournament the year before, so they’d earned a little bit of swagger, but we hadn’t played in that tournament—and Jerry set it up like we needed to take this team down a couple pegs. It wasn’t just about winning; it was about making sure Flint Hill was denied.
There were other good teams in the tournament, but Flint Hill was the clear strength on the other side of the bracket, so they became our focus. Before we could face them, though, we had to get past a decent Catholic school team from New Orleans in the first game, and then an even better public school team from Memphis in the semifinal, but we were able to put them away without too much trouble. Flint Hill, too, was able to sail through the other side of the bracket, and by the time we met up in the finals, our guys were feeling like they had something to prove. The game was due to be televised on ESPN, on a tape delay, so that became a whole other something to prove—because it would be the first time we played in front of a national television audience. That kind of exposure meant the world to my players in terms of getting seen by college coaches all around the country. It was also an ego boost, a kick, so they had every incentive to want to play well.
One of the ways I like to get my kids up for a game is to really pump up our opponent, to get my kids thinking they need to be lion-killers. I’m pretty transparent about it, to the point where my players know exactly what I’m doing, but it’s still an effective tactic. They see how concerned I am about an opponent, and they become concerned; they take care to put out their best possible effort, to make sure they remember what we worked on in practice that week. I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to motivate your players when they thin
k they’re the underdog than when they think they’re expected to win, and here I liked it that we were thinking like upstarts.
And we did have something to prove—but only to ourselves.
In many ways, that Flint Hill game signaled our arrival as a team. Our guys came out strong, ended up outplaying this team from Virginia in every way. There was one play in particular that seemed to set the tone for our entire season. Bobby made a steal at half-court and pushed the ball the other way. Randolph Childress scrambled back on defense, and he appeared to have a bead on Bobby, but just as Bobby made what looked to be his final move toward the basket, he dumped off a neat little throwback pass over his shoulder to Terry Dehere, who was trailing the play. Terry took the ball and soared to the rim and threw it down, and as he did, Childress kind of turned and stumbled and lost his footing. This alone was remarkable, because Childress was one of the top players in the country, but he was so turned around and discombobulated by our quickness and athleticism that he could barely keep his feet. It was something to see. And his teammates appeared to falter as well. The game went from a convincing, comfortable margin to a rout, just on the back of this one play—really, we sent that team reeling—and I remember looking on at this one exchange with Bobby and Terry and taking it as a sign of things to come.