Chasing Perfect

by Bob Hurley

  On Thursday, St. Anthony was finally able to open its doors—but for whatever reason, Rashon and Anthony didn’t make it in that day. Anthony told me later that he just assumed we’d be closed, since he had two siblings in Jersey City public schools and they were closed that day. And Rashon insisted that he had followed protocol and called the school office that morning—but before the office had changed its outgoing message from the day before, he said.

  So there we were, a day before the biggest game of our season to date, facing down the best high school basketball player in anyone’s memory, a kid who’d probably be a starter in the NBA in less than a year, and two of my best players couldn’t even make it to school. This was a problem. A big problem.

  The way it works is you have to be in school in order to practice. If you’ve got a game on a school day, you’ve got to be in school in order to dress for the game. It’s a state law. But on top of that, I have my own law. I take it one step further. I tell my guys that if they don’t practice the day before a game, they can’t play. It’s cut-and-dry, plain and simple. Naturally, there are times I want to sit a player during practice, because maybe he’s nursing an ankle sprain or he’s been out sick and we want to give him one more day of rest, but he’s there in the gym and only sitting out on my say-so. If you miss a practice under that scenario, I might not let you start in a game the next day, but I’ll bring you off the bench and let you do your thing.

  This put us in a tough spot in terms of Rashon and Anthony. It didn’t put me in a tough spot at all, as a coach, because it was a no-brainer. It was tough only because these two kids had now put their teammates in a tough spot; here they were going up against a once-in-a-generation high school talent like Kobe Bryant without our one and our two. Folks outside our program couldn’t understand why Rashon and Anthony weren’t dressing for the game. It’s not like we called a press conference or anything, but those who knew me understood the deal.

  If you don’t practice, you don’t play.

  Like it or not, agree with me or not, no one player was bigger than the team. Heck, no two players were bigger than the team. But there was a lesson here that was bigger than any one game, against any one opponent—even if that one opponent was Kobe Bryant.

  Even Kobe couldn’t help but wonder why Rashon and Anthony weren’t dressed for the game. He came over to my guys during warm-ups, saw them out of uniform, and figured out they weren’t playing. They knew each other from all these different camps, and they had a good, friendly rivalry going, so he asked them what was up.

  Don’t misunderstand, I hated like hell that I was in this spot, but at the same time I liked the opportunity I could now give to two other players. One was a guard named Ali Abdullah, who played a lot of meaningful minutes for us, backing up Rashon. He was a talented young player who ended up getting a Division I scholarship to Howard University, even though he never started at St. Anthony. He was stuck behind a bunch of strong players his whole career, but he made things happen when he got into the game, and he was always a key player for us coming off the bench.

  The other was a role player named Gary Dunbar, a good, hustling athlete who never really played an impact role for us other than this one game. He started in the frontcourt in place of Anthony, which came with the double-edged assignment of guarding Kobe Bryant. Can you imagine? First game as a starter and you draw Kobe’s number? But Gary, to his great credit, didn’t shrink from anything. He stepped up his game and went up against Kobe like he was any other player—like he did this sort of thing all the time instead of … well, never.

  The game was back and forth, up and down. We were playing each other close with just a couple seconds left in the first half. On any other night, if we’d been playing at full strength, this would have been a good showing, because I always liked our chances when it came to conditioning and mental toughness. Over a long, hard-fought game, that’s what usually wins out, and more times than not we’d pull away in the second half, only here I worried that without two of our key guys the rest of our group might lose focus or run out of gas.

  On what should have been the last play of the first half, with Lower Merion up by a point, they inbounded the ball to Kobe Bryant, who started advancing it up the right sideline. Gary Dunbar was playing him tight, and on the third or fourth dribble he noticed Kobe wasn’t doing anything to vary his rhythm. He was being careless with the ball, nonchalant, like he didn’t think Gary Dunbar, this player he’d never even heard of, would be someone he’d have to worry about.

  But Gary was a smart kid. Kobe might have never heard of him, but Gary had heard of Kobe. In his own head at least, this gave Gary a kind of edge. He had something to prove—but even more than that, he knew the kind of player Kobe could be, so he tried to take him out of his game. He saw that Kobe’s head was someplace else. He timed out Kobe’s first couple dribbles and then reached in for the steal. He caught Kobe completely by surprise—and caught enough of the ball to tip it toward our frontcourt and drive with it toward our basket.

  Man, it was something to see.

  Now, a play like that, it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t lead to points, and here’s where our coaching kicked in. We have a drill we run into the ground during practice where we follow our own guy to the hoop every time there’s a breakaway. We call it “covering the backboard.” It’s one of our rules, to always, always, always cover the backboard—because you never know. What it means is that the closest kid to the play, wherever he is on the court, he has to bust his butt and break for the basket as hard as he can, hopefully in time to grab the ball and tip it back in that one time in a hundred when our guy misses an easy, fast-break layup. It’s the same play that beat us in that Miami Senior game, when Rashon went for that steal instead of giving a foul, and here our closest man was Delvon Arrington, who together with Rashon and Anthony was part of our go-to trio of players that season. (Delvon ended up playing at Florida State, where he was team captain—and where he still holds a bunch of school records.) It fell to Delvon to pick up a lot of the scoring for us that night, with Rashon and Anthony on the bench, and here he was out at half-court when Gary Dunbar started his drive.

  Delvon broke for the basket without even thinking about it. I expected as much, because we work on that drill every day in practice. We’ve got a whole sequence of board drills that come from Jerry Wainwright, who used to be the head coach at Richmond and, later on, at DePaul. An excellent college coach. I saw him run these drills at a clinic, and I grabbed at them.

  We’ve been using Jerry’s drills for years. In one, we have our guys work just on tipping the ball. The ball comes off the rim, and we have them practice tipping it righty or lefty. Over and over. If the ball falls to the right side of their bodies, they’re supposed to use their right hand; if it falls to the left, they go left.

  We had run those drills so many times, and hollered at our guys to cover the backboard so many times, that Delvon didn’t even have to think about it—and sure enough, Gary Dunbar’s shot rimmed out toward the left side of the basket. When it did, Delvon was there to tip it in with his left hand, just as time was running out, and we closed out the half with a one-point lead and all kinds of momentum.

  Just on the back of that one play, the game seemed to turn.

  Really, our guys were pumped, watching Gary take it to Kobe like that and turning the scoreboard around for us. Everyone in our locker room was excited about it, and I imagine the reaction in the Lower Merion locker room was completely opposite. In fact, when Kobe came out to start the second half, you could see his body language was all off, like he was in a funk. That one play had pushed him off his game, and we took advantage of it, running the lead to seven, eight points in the first minutes of the second half. We kept the lead the whole rest of the way, going on to win the game by about fifteen, and it all goes back to these two kids, two of my stars, having to miss out on one of the biggest games of their careers.

  A lot of coaches, they hear how I ha
ndled Rashon and Anthony on this, they don’t get it. They can’t understand how I’d jeopardize a meaningful game or a couple notches in our national ranking just to prove a point—but I wasn’t out to prove a point. These kids messed up, that’s all. When you mess up, there are consequences. When you mess up, you have to be accountable. Doesn’t mean I was throwing in the game, just that I would now give two other kids an opportunity to come up big for us. And they did … they surely did.

  Our next big test as a team came at the Above the Rim Holiday Classic in San Diego. We’d gotten into the habit of traveling to out-of-town Christmas tournaments, and this one was a particular favorite. Our guys always looked forward to it, for the adventure, but more than that it was a chance for them to see a different type of competition, beyond the Northeast—and a chance for them to be seen by coaches outside the region. A lot of times, close to home, they ended up knowing a lot of the players on the other teams, from camps, clinics, AAU ball, whatever, so it was good for them to match up against an opponent with no shared history.

  Our big showdown came in the finals against Crenshaw, a Los Angeles public school with a strong basketball program and a big reputation. It was still somewhat early in the season for us, just a couple weeks after the Lower Merion game; we hadn’t really hit our full focus as a team, even though we hadn’t lost a game. Still, I thought Crenshaw could give us trouble. They were beating up everybody in the tournament; to hear the other coaches talk, to listen to the fans, they were certainly the favorites. But that was just on paper, and I didn’t know that just yet. All I knew at the time was that when you take a bunch of Jersey City high school players all the way to California just to play a couple games, you might as well win the championship. Like I said, I hate to lose, and the only thing I hate worse than losing is traveling a long way to lose a game. Makes the trip home pretty unpleasant. So when we learned we were going up against Crenshaw in the finals, I wanted to be good and ready.

  Turned out we were in their heads too, only Crenshaw’s strategy was to press us, all game long. Unfortunately for them, we were able to counter it almost every possession, so we had an easy time of it on the scoreboard. Ended up crushing them, actually. Basically, we kept running the same play, pitching it long to our big man, Ajmal Basit, who finished with thirty-six points in the game and was named MVP of the tournament. Ajmal took twenty shots against Crenshaw, all of them layups, and almost all of them on fast breaks to beat the press. It wasn’t exactly a typical game for Ajmal, who also grabbed fifteen rebounds, but when your opponent keeps giving you the same opening, you have to take it.

  Don’t get me wrong, Ajmal was a talented player. He had a lot of big moments for us and filled a big role. He went to the University of Massachusetts–Amherst on a full scholarship and finished his college career at the University of Delaware. After that, he played pro ball in Europe for a good long while, and these days he coaches high school ball in Georgia, so he’s clearly made a life in the game. He took a lot of heat from his teammates that day in San Diego, though, despite his MVP honors—or maybe because of them. When we got back to the locker room after the game and the championship ceremonies, Ajmal’s teammates started booing him mercilessly. It was just a bunch of good-natured razzing; the entire team was in on it, the coaches too, and I’ve got to give Ajmal credit because he shouldered it well enough. The whole way home, the guys kept on him about giving back his MVP award, because all he did was score a bunch of layups, and he just smiled and went along with it.

  Looking back, that was an important trip, because it helped knit us together as a team, and because it reminded our players that you can’t always play to an opponent’s reputation. Sometimes you have to play to your strengths and let the other team adjust to you. That Crenshaw team was a perfect example. They’d been running through the competition—not only in that one tournament but all through the season—and the reason we were able to handle them so easily was because we didn’t let them take us out of our game. We’d scouted them of course, same way they’d had a bunch of eyes on us. But that didn’t mean we had to change things up. We knew they liked to run the press—early in games, all game long. And that was just fine with us. We worked all the time in practice on beating the press. Our guys knew their roles, they knew the situation. We had ball-handlers who could handle that kind of pressure. We had a bunch of plays we could run. And we had a big, athletic player like Ajmal Basit, who was a terrific finisher.

  It was a good lesson, going into the postseason tournament. With the Kobe Bryant/Lower Merion game out of the way and the Crenshaw game out of the way, we had a clear path to the Tournament of Champions bracket back home. We’d also managed a couple statement-like wins against two other nationally ranked opponents—St. John’s of Prospect Hall, out of Frederick, Maryland, and St. Raymond’s from the Bronx—so it’s not like we weren’t tested, but it worked out that our tough matchups were spread throughout the season. There were a couple long stretches in there when nobody on the schedule could match up with us, so we tried to keep our guys sharp and give them something to play for.

  A lot of times, when you’re facing a series of weaker opponents, the challenge for a coach—especially a high school coach—is to get your team up for a game. You don’t want your players to become complacent or to disrespect a team on the schedule, because any team can surprise you, at any time. So I try to push these kids by getting them to push each other. I tell them everybody’s spot is up for grabs. Nobody’s minutes are guaranteed. That’s been my approach all along. Even my starters, I want them to feel like they have something to prove, like their teammates are gaining on them. We go at it hard in practice. And in our games too. Doesn’t matter if it’s a tough opponent that matches up well with us or if we’re playing a weaker team that doesn’t expect to compete. We play at full speed, full tilt, full volume, all the time. I’ll stick to my regular rotation. Part of the reason for that is I don’t want to disrespect the other team by easing up, but an even bigger part is I don’t want us to develop any bad habits as a team. You take your foot off the gas in one game, it’s hard to stomp back down on the pedal when you need to, so I want my guys to play every game like their season depends on it—like we’re always, always, always about to be pushed.

  Sure enough, we ran through the field in the postseason tournament, ended up winning the state championship, each game by double digits, but then we had to finish off the season with the Tournament of Champions. As always, we were the smallest school in the field, as winners of the Parochial Class B championship—but still, we were the top seed, over the Parochial Class A winners and the winners of the four public school divisions. Shawnee High School in Medford Lakes, a midsized public school, was the second seed, and they had a particularly strong team that year, so it looked like we would square off against each other in the finals.

  And in fact, that’s just how it shook out.

  There was a lot on the line for us. We were the number-one-ranked team in the country going into the Tournament of Champions, so if we ran the table we’d be national champions. It’s kind of a mythical title, same way it used to be in college football before the Bowl Championship Series took shape and pitted the top two teams in the country in a true national championship game. But we were the consensus number-one team in all the polls—and had been for most of the season, going all the way back to the preseason—so all we had to do was win out and we’d earn the right to call ourselves state champs, Tournament of Champion winners, and national champs—not a bad way to cap our year.

  Plus, there was that unblemished record we had going, so naturally we wanted to keep our perfect season intact.

  Like I said, there was a lot on the line, but even though I didn’t want my guys to focus on any of that, as we breezed through the state tournament and then the semifinal round of the Tournament of Champions, it became a bigger and bigger deal. I couldn’t shut out all those other distractions for trying. It’s like we were playing for posterity, when I
’d have liked it if we could close the door on all that other stuff and just play for the win. Nothing wrong with posterity, but it’s not really something you can shoot for, something you can count on. If it happens, it happens. All you can do is all you can do, and here all we could do was try to control the tempo of the game and play some good solid defense, with intensity. The rest would have to take care of itself. Or not.

  Shawnee came out strong and hard in the finals. The game was at the Meadowlands, which was only about half full, but most of the crowd was with Shawnee. They were such a big school compared to St. Anthony—about 1,500 students to our 240 or so—which meant they outnumbered us in the stands in a meaningful way. I think our guys started to feel like the arena was against them. And maybe it was. We were a little flat to start the game. Our passes weren’t as crisp as I would have liked. We got some good looks, but our shots weren’t falling. We made some stupid mistakes, gave Shawnee some easy second and third chances. Basically, we were playing like underdogs with something to prove, instead of like champions with an undefeated season on the line.

  It was a big game for Shawnee too. We’d beaten them in this same game the year before, when they were the number-one seed in the tournament, so I’m sure they wanted some payback. They wanted to spoil our perfect season and knock us down from that number-one spot. Heck, if I was their coach, I would have used all these things to try and motivate my players. I would have made it so our guys felt like giant-killers. Plus, they had a very good team, a very deep team. They were led by a kid named Malik Allen, who went on to play for Villanova and then for a dozen years in the NBA, so it’s always tough when you’re going up against a singular talent like that—someone who can really dominate.