by Bob Hurley
Bobby’s injuries were so severe, most people wouldn’t have survived them. The trauma of being thrown that distance from the car and hitting the ground with that kind of impact tore his windpipe. He broke his ribs, and both lungs were collapsed. Amazingly, the injuries seemed to match up almost exactly with the new surgical procedures that had just been outlined by Dr. Sawyer and Dr. Benfield in this new book, and Dr. Blaisdell was one of the top automobile trauma guys in the country, so the entire team knew exactly what to look for.
Bobby was taken to Cal-Davis by chopper. The medics didn’t think there was time for an ambulance; it would have taken forever. As it was, Bobby was in surgery for over seven hours. They told us later he stopped breathing on two separate occasions while he was on the table. All of this happened while we were up in the air, flying blind, imagining the worst but hoping for the best.
What we also didn’t know until many years later was that Bobby came to once Mike Peplowski found him in that ditch. Bobby was out, unresponsive, when Mike got to him, but then, as Mike cradled Bobby’s head in his arms, Bobby kept saying, “Mike, am I gonna die?”
All these coincidences, coming together like that … one Mike spotting the speeding car with no headlights and calling it in; another Mike finding Bobby in the ditch; a record-setting drought that left the water levels low; an expert surgeon who’d just written a paper on the procedure Bobby required; another surgeon who’d compiled a book on precisely these injuries and who’d just returned to town and happened to hear about the accident on the radio; and there was still another surgeon on duty who’d devoted his career to working with car crash victims … there’s no way Bobby could have survived if just one of those pieces had not fallen into place.
That’s how it sometimes goes when you will not be defeated. You can be the fittest, most hard-charging competitor on the planet, but you’ll still need to catch a couple breaks if you hope to prevail—and here Bobby caught a whole bunch of them. Of course, you can make the flip-side argument and say that all of this good luck and coincidence wouldn’t have even come into play if everything hadn’t already lined up against Bobby that night. If he’d had a better game and maybe left the arena with Terry Dehere by some other exit. If he’d taken just a split-second longer getting to his car. If the painter in that station wagon had turned on his headlights. Yeah, there were a whole lot of “what ifs” that put Bobby in just the wrong place, at just the wrong moment, same way they put the two Mikes and these fine surgeons at just the right place, at just the right moment, so I’ve chosen to celebrate the positive outcomes to this accident and set aside the rest—otherwise, I’d just go crazy.
And the positive pieces kept on coming. A couple days later, Bobby was a whole lot better; we sat with him for three days, until he finally appeared to turn a corner. We went from not knowing if he would make it through at all to not knowing what the quality of his life would be going forward—but we took it as a good trade at the time. Bobby’s body was completely broken: there were cuts and bruises all over his face, all over his body; broken bones in his arms, his fingers, his wrists; five broken ribs; a shattered left shoulder blade; compression fractures in his back; torn ACLs. Just then, no one was thinking about basketball. No one was thinking anything. We just wanted to get our Bobby back, and whole.
The outpouring of love and support over those three days was tremendous. Mike Krzyzewski flew out immediately. Bob Delaney, the NBA referee, came by, and so did Orlando Magic rookie coach Brian Hill, along with Shaquille O’Neal. Dennis Rodman sent flowers. Bill Cosby called to say he felt a special connection to Bobby, since he’d just been in Philadelphia two days earlier. Ronald Reagan sent a letter telling Bobby how much he and his wife enjoyed watching him play.
Even more incredible than these individual visits and calls were the thousands and thousands of letters and “get well” wishes that poured into the hospital. Bobby had no idea how many lives he’d touched, just by playing basketball—how many people were rooting for him to get better. He was lifted by each note, each call, each visit … we all were, really.
——
It was tough to think about basketball during that time in the hospital, but at the same time it was tough to turn away from it. The game ran through our lives. Every night I was on the phone back home to my assistant coach, George Canda, who filled in for me at St. Anthony. We had our season opener coming up that Friday, December 17, and we needed to go over a few things. George took to calling every night when we got back to the hotel. It was late for us, even later for George because of the time difference, but it was a good distraction. For an hour or so each night, we’d go over practice, talk about our game plan. Our season opener was against a really good local team, Essex Catholic, but our guys were playing well. We’d had a good preseason, so when George called that night to report on the game, I wasn’t surprised to hear we’d won.
It was our second game that would be a problem. St. Anthony was scheduled to play DeMatha, a Catholic high school in Maryland coached by the legendary Morgan Wootten, who would go on to post more wins as a head coach than anyone else in basketball history. Ever. At any level. At that point, Morgan had won more than a thousand games, and George had won only one.
It hardly seemed fair.
Truth was, I’d forgotten all about that DeMatha game, but it had been set up with great fanfare. DeMatha was coming up to Jersey City for a tournament, so folks who followed high school basketball started talking about it like this great big showdown—and I guess it was. Morgan was approaching the end of his career (he’d finish with 1,274 career victories), and St. Anthony had been good for a while, so this was a chance for our two teams to play, but when the game finally came around on the calendar, my head was elsewhere. Still, I wanted our guys to do well, so I spent some late-night time with George on the phone, going over strategy, although in truth I was no help to George at all. DeMatha ended up beating us in a close game, but these early-season games were way beyond my focus.
We stayed out in California through Christmas. At some point, Danny and Melissa came out. Bobby made great strides, but some days I’d walk into his room and he’d be arguing with the nurses or the physical therapists. He was in a lot of pain. His injuries were no longer life-threatening, but it was like the motivation had been sucked out of him. He didn’t see why he had to move, to sit up, to start in on the long, hard road of rehabilitation. Instead of fighting through the pain, he seemed to want to fight with everyone who wanted to help him. So what did I do? I got in his face, that’s what I did. I yelled at him, same way I used to do in practice when he was flagging. Same way I yelled at all my players. I told him he didn’t have any choice in the matter. It wasn’t about basketball, or fighting back into game shape. That would come later, or not. For now, it was about getting his life back, getting his blood circulating so he didn’t come down with pneumonia, which was a big concern in those first weeks after the accident.
Poor Bobby, he was really down. We all were, but I tried to look past all of that. I told Bobby he needed to lift himself up and out of his hospital bed and back into the rest of his life. The doctors could patch him up and set him right, but now he was on his own. I was hard on him, and it killed me that I was hard on him, but I didn’t see that I had a choice. He had a lot of work to do. We all had a lot of work to do, because it was a full-on family effort. Bobby needed a push, so we took turns pushing. He had to do his breathing exercises, his sitting-up exercises, his moving-around exercises. We couldn’t let him sit still or feel sorry for himself, so every day we’d descend on his hospital room like personal trainers.
For a long time, Bobby wasn’t himself. He was in so much pain, the doctors had him on morphine at first, and they kept him on morphine those first couple weeks, so that kind of sapped him of all his energy, his motivation. This was a kid who’d been like a pit bull his entire life, putting in all those hours in the gym to make himself better, faster, stronger … and here he was in such agony and shot t
hrough with all these poisons, he was out of character. It was like he was in a fog and we were all waiting for it to lift, Bobby included. Soon as they could, the doctors dialed down on the morphine and put Bobby on codeine, and soon after that he was on Tylenol with codeine, and eventually just straight Tylenol. But with each change to Bobby’s prescription, it was like he was going through detox—getting off the morphine especially. He was miserable, depressed. He got these terrible headaches. He was like a junkie, really—going through some of the same things I’d see with my guys on probation.
But he got through it. He did. Somehow, we all got through it together.
Day after Christmas, we took Bobby home from the hospital to his condo in Sacramento. It had been just two weeks since the accident, two weeks since hearing from these doctors that they weren’t even sure he would make it, so he was making remarkable progress. Unbelievable. On the night of the accident, flying crosscountry with all those dark thoughts and worst-case scenarios, Chris and I would have signed on for a two-week hospital stay in a heartbeat. It would have been nothing compared to what we were facing, but now that we were in the middle of it—now that we’d reached the end of it—those two weeks felt like the longest two weeks in the history of mankind. And looking ahead, we worried there’d be no real end to it.
I flew back to New Jersey the next day. Chris stayed out in Sacramento for another couple days, along with Melissa and my brother Brian. The idea was to get Bobby well enough to travel, so he could do his rehabilitation back home in Jersey City, but it would be another month or so before his lungs were healed and the doctors cleared him to get on a plane. Brian stayed with him the whole time, and in that month we started to think about Bobby’s basketball career. I suppose we’d been thinking about it all along, in a back-of-our-minds sort of way, but now we pushed it front and center. Now Bobby started to talk about it. At first we were just worried about his life, and then it was the quality of his life, and then it was clear that basketball was a huge part of the quality of Bobby’s life, so we all started thinking about what it would take to get him back to playing.
Dr. Marder and the Kings were concerned about the ACL tears, because that was potentially the most career-threatening of Bobby’s injuries. They were also worried about his shattered shoulder, and it was decided that they would have their team doctor operate and put a plate in Bobby’s shoulder, because that was something they believed they could fix. The ACL tears, by a whole other miracle, somehow knitted back together and healed themselves.
Bobby flew back to New Jersey with his uncle, and we set him up in our old house on Linden Avenue, in the front apartment upstairs. He started going to physical therapy with Carl Gargiulo and Dan Strulewicz, who used to work with all of our St. Anthony players back then, so Bobby was familiar with them. They set him up with a routine. It was slow going at first. Bobby couldn’t even do five minutes on the treadmill. He could last a little longer on the stationary bike, so that’s how he started working on his cardio, but walking was difficult. His body was completely out of alignment.
I’d spend some time with him each day—and each day it broke my heart to see him struggle, to see him in so much pain.
By mid-March, he was able to move about under his own steam, and he came down to see us play in the state tournament. There was a lot of excitement in the gym when people started realizing Bobby was in attendance. The entire St. Anthony community—heck, the entire Jersey City basketball community!—couldn’t have been more supportive of our family during this time. They loved Bobby. They treated him like a favorite son, so when he turned up to cheer on his old man and his old school, people were pretty emotional.
We ended up losing in the second round of the state tournament that year, to St. Pat’s Elizabeth, but what’s stayed with me most of all from that postseason was a moment away from the crowds, away from the cameras. We were in the gym for our final practice before the St. Pat’s game, and when practice broke Bobby walked to the basket. Someone handed him a ball, and he rolled it around in his hands for a bit, getting the feel of it. I don’t know if he’d handled a ball since the accident, but it was the first I remember seeing him with a ball in his hands. Anyway, it was the first time he’d had a ball in his hands while standing beneath a basket—so naturally, he tried to shoot it.
Weren’t a whole lot of people in the gym, wasn’t a whole lot of activity, but everything kind of stopped as Bobby turned and squared to shoot. It was like something out of a movie—but it was a tearjerker movie, because Bobby couldn’t even reach the basket. It was a brutal, heartbreaking thing to see. This great, great player who’d lit up this same gym on so many occasions, unable to get the ball over the rim from right underneath the basket because his body was so completely broken.
At that point, a lot of people would have just packed it up and quit, but not Bobby. He was miserable, but he wasn’t done. And we knew he wasn’t done, so we all took turns riding him pretty hard. His brother, Danny. His uncles. His physical therapists. Me. By April he was able to hit a golf ball. In May he ran a twelve-minute mile—a pace that was probably twice as slow as he ran back in grade school, but to us it was like Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute-mile barrier.
Really, he was making phenomenal progress. He was relentless.
First week of July, he played in a Jersey Shore league game. His timing was off, and he was moving slow, but he was playing. To me, that was all that mattered—but to Bobby, he could see how far he still had to go, and he came to me after that first game and said he was thinking about quitting. He said maybe he felt like he was beating his head against the wall, like he’d never be able to play at the professional level. He was pretty down about it, but at the same time he seemed resigned to it. Like he’d given it all he could and had to face reality.
I didn’t want to hear it. I refused to hear it. So I got in Bobby’s face all over again, told him to meet me at the gym after work the next day and we’d see about quitting. I put him through a bunch of drills. Cutting. Shooting. Passing. Running the floor. Worked him hard—harder than he’d been working himself. But he needed this kind of push, he said. He needed to see if his frustration was from the fact that he’d been away from the game for so long or from the fact that he’d never be able to get his body to do the things it used to do. If it was cobwebs or a new set of physical limitations.
We went at it again the next day. And the day after that. Soon, I started to realize that the only thing keeping Bobby from playing at a high level was Bobby. He was rusty, that’s all. He hadn’t played in over six months. So I took him aside and told him there was no reason he couldn’t fight his way back into NBA shape. No reason he couldn’t lift his game close to where it was. Would he ever be able to run the floor like a demon and light up the gym the way he did for the Duke Blue Devils or the St. Anthony Friars? Only Bobby could answer that—but I saw no good reason why he shouldn’t give it a shot.
And so he did.
Now, it would be nice to be able to write here that Bobby returned to the NBA and tore up the league, but that’s not how it went. He did make it back, though. He did return to the Kings in time for their training camp the following season. He did read in one of the California papers that there were some people in basketball—in fact, some people in the Sacramento organization—who thought he’d never make it back, but that just drove him harder to prove them wrong. He did pour in twenty-one points in just twenty-two minutes in his first preseason game, against the Lakers—to go along with three rebounds, five assists, and one steal. And he did manage to honor the balance of the big contract he’d signed with Sacramento when they made him their number-one draft choice; he didn’t miss a game the rest of the way.
But he was diminished by the accident, no question. His body wasn’t right. He could fight his way back into the league and play at a professional level—hey, he even put up a double-double his first year back, also against the Lakers, with fourteen points and seventeen assists—but he wou
ld never lead his team to a championship. He would never dictate the outcome of a game the way he had in high school and college.
And yet it was a thrilling, uplifting thing to see, the way Bobby battled back.
No, he would never be the same, but he would not be denied. He would not be defeated.
——
A final few words on my kids before I turn the focus back to these winning seasons. I’m happy to report that all three of our children have drifted in one way or another into what I guess you could call the family business—coaching, teaching, working with young kids and sending them down some sort of purposeful path. In some cases, that meant drifting away and coming back to it; in others, it meant this had been the goal all along.
My younger son, Danny, was the first to think in this way. Soon as he finished playing basketball at Seton Hall, he went to work teaching at St. Anthony and helping out on my bench. He understood the game as well as anyone, and he understood the culture of St. Anthony basketball, which was just as important. After just one season coaching with me, he moved to Rutgers and spent four years there as an assistant coach under Kevin Bannon, and after that he interviewed with Father Edwin Lahey, the headmaster of St. Benedict’s in Newark, who hired him to be the head coach of the boys’ basketball team, a job Danny held for nine seasons. He had a great run at St. Benedict’s, turning a nothing-special .500-type program into a national powerhouse.
As a prep school, we never met St. Benedict’s in our state tournament, so Danny and I never had to face each other head to head. His team played in the prep school tournament and went to a ton of national events. We didn’t start playing them until Danny left to take the head coaching job at Wagner College, which was just as well with me. It was tough enough preparing to face all these top teams without having to go up against my own son on the other bench.