by Bob Hurley
But that’s not quite how things shook out.
As juniors, it looked for a moment like this group would have a shot in 2002–2003 to help us “three-peat”—a phrase that had lately burst onto the sporting scene, thanks at first to Pat Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s and then to Phil Jackson, who’d managed to string together two back-to-back-to-back championships with his great Jordan-Pippen tandem in Chicago and was now fresh off another back-to-back-to-back run with his Shaq-Kobe Lakers. Our season came down to the final minutes of the North Jersey final against St. Patrick. As it happened, the game turned on what should have been a coachable moment—assuming, of course, that I’d had a group of coachable players. In any case, it was a moment I’d love to have back, so I could go at it again. We were led that year by a six-four forward named Obie Nwadike, the blood and guts of our team, but Obie had a bad ankle sprain and could only play limited minutes for us in that game against St. Pat’s. Even without Obie at full strength, we were up a point with a little more than a minute left to play, when we sent our opponent to the line. This alone wasn’t troubling, but we lined up in a way that came back to bite us—and the way we lined up was an indication of the frustration to come.
When a right-handed shooter misses a free throw, the ball typically comes off the right side of the basket—more than 60 percent of the time. What this means on defense is that you want to play the percentages and line up your big men on the right side of the lane. Basically, you stack to the right. My guys know that, same way the opposing coach usually knows to line up his bigger guys on the right side as well. We drill it into our players in practice to where it’s something they don’t even have to think about during games—only here it’s like they actually did stop to think about it, and that’s what screwed them up. They were at the other end of the floor, away from our bench, and St. Pat’s switched up late, and our guys blindly followed the man they were guarding on defense.
I don’t mean to put this entirely on my players, because in the end it’s on me as their coach. I could have found a way to signal my guys on the floor, maybe call a time-out to make sure we were set defensively, but in the split second I had to think things through I must have calculated that the odds of the St. Pat’s shooter missing the free throw, together with the odds of the ball bouncing in just the wrong way, were still pretty damn long. Already, we were overmatched, because Obie was out of the game at this point, so it ended up we had Marcus Williams, a six-one junior, trying to box out St. Pat’s Grant Billmeier, a six-ten presence who went on to play for Seton Hall, and when the missed free throw bounded to the right side, Billmeier simply plucked it out of the air and put back an easy bucket. For good measure, almost like he was gift-wrapping the game for St. Pat’s, Marcus fouled the big man in the act of shooting, making it a three-point play and basically putting an end to our season.
Even if I’d thought to call a time-out, I didn’t have any left in my bag of tricks because our point guard Derrick Mercer had burned them all. Derrick was only a sophomore, and he was only playing because I’d had to suspend Ahmad Mosby for missing a couple practices, and Derrick was just overmatched, overwhelmed. He was facing a talented guard on his way to play at Villanova, and Derrick just couldn’t keep up, so whenever he got into trouble he called time to bail himself out.
One by one, the links in our chain of championships were coming apart, so that now, when we got the ball back, down two, we were unable to stop the clock and set up a play, which against a good, well-coached team like St. Pat’s meant we couldn’t get off a decent shot.
And that was that—and in the postgame analysis it wasn’t hard to see where we broke down.
It wasn’t all on Marcus, that one play where we lined up the wrong way on the free throw. It wasn’t all on Ahmad, that he’d missed a couple practices and earned a suspension just before the postseason tournament. It wasn’t all on Derrick, that he burned all of our time-outs. But I mention all these lapses because, taken together, they represented the kinds of bonehead, knucklehead moves this group would make more often than not. They played with flash, but not a whole lot of sense; they played hard, but not smart. And the most frustrating piece to this loss was that we had a fine group of levelheaded seniors on that 2002–2003 team, guys like Obie and Terence Roberts, who I thought might have been a positive influence on these younger players—but they had no better luck with them than me or my coaching staff.
A lot of coaches will tell you they learn as much from their players as their players learn from them. It’s a nice line—but a lot of times it’s just that, a line.
And yet here it rang true. Here I learned from my players that poise and polish are not traits you can simply hand down from one group of graduating seniors to the next. Here I learned it didn’t matter how much I yelled, how much I threatened, how much I willed these kids to carry themselves the right way … they’d still find a way to mess up.
This was a shame and a worry. It was a shame because I would have liked to send that group of seniors out on a winning note, and it was a worry because I now had the entire off-season to figure out what the hell I was going to do with these returning kids. I was bringing back a bunch of juniors—Marcus Williams, Otis Campbell, Ahmad Mosby, Lamar Alston, and Shelton Gibbs. Sophomores Derrick Mercer, Sean McCurdy, and Barney Anderson would factor in as well. They’d been around, this group. They’d played with some talented upperclassmen, and even after our last-minute mix-up against St. Pat’s, we were still holding out hope that at least some of the good habits of the older group would rub off on these younger guys, but it’s like they were immune to good habits.
They’d play the game their way or not at all, and as our next season approached I looked up and down our lineup of returning players and didn’t see a single guy I could pick out who might lead this team in a positive way.
Not one.
Now, in fairness to these kids, I should point out that almost all of them came from single-parent homes, and it’s tough to work against that as a coach, as an educator—heck, as a caring, feeling human being. You see a kid struggling like that, the deck stacked against him, your heart tells you to cut him some slack, give him a couple extra benefits of the doubt. But your head is supposed to know better. Your head is supposed to know that sometimes you need to be hardest of all on the kids who have it tough enough already—and this group certainly had it tough. Marcus Williams was being raised by his mom. Ahmad Mosby was being raised by his mom. And on and on. Make no mistake, these were all good-hearted, hardworking people, but there were very few positive male role models in the lives of these young men. Even worse, my returning players tended to live in some of the worst parts of the city, surrounded by all kinds of negative, even dangerous influences. Marcus lived in the Curries Woods projects, one of the most violent housing projects in the United States. Just to give an idea of his home environment, the Spike Lee movie Clockers, based on the Richard Price book of the same name, was set in Curries Woods, and the place was so unsafe, so unwelcoming to outsiders, the film crew had to use another set of buildings in New York for their location shooting.
I knew the area from my time as a probation officer, so I knew Marcus was up against it, which was why I might have been rooting for him a little more than I was helping him throughout the four years he played for me. That was the great puzzle of this group. They were likable kids, all around. As individuals, one-on-one, it was possible to see all kinds of hopeful potential in each and every one of them. They were a maddening bunch to have to coach, and they were difficult to get under control, but deep down I believed in these kids. Deep down I knew their actions didn’t always match up with their intentions, so that’s why I found myself pulling for a kid like Marcus.
Same goes for Otis Campbell, who lived off Fulton Avenue in one of the worst parts of the city, not far from Shelton Gibbs. They went to the Number 34 school growing up. They’d both been living by their wits for so long, darting in and out of trouble, it’
s a wonder they managed to make it to high school.
(Shelton actually moved out of Jersey City during his senior year after he was mugged at gunpoint; he ran away and held on to his money, but his attacker fired his gun, and that was enough to convince Shelton’s parents to leave the area.)
Ahmad Mosby lived in the Hudson Gardens, another rough housing project, across the street from Dickinson High School. Most of the males in his family were either deceased or in jail—and if it wasn’t for the positive influence of basketball, Ahmad and his buddies might have turned down a couple wrong roads before they ever made it to high school.
The only returning player with a positive, hard-charging work ethic was a talented junior guard named Sean McCurdy, who came to us from all the way up in Connecticut. Sean was a bit of an outsider among this group. Not because he was white, or from more of a middle-class background, but because he seemed to want it. Basketball, college, opportunity … whatever you set out in front of him, he longed for it. Sean was the only kid on this team without any Jersey City roots, one of the only kids with two educated parents (along with Shelton Gibbs), and one of the only kids for whom college was not a reach but a given (again, along with Shelton). Sean saw the game for the tremendous opportunities it offered, and he had the drive and the discipline (and the talent!) to take full advantage. He came to us because he’d met one of my assistant coaches at a basketball camp one summer and drove down from Connecticut with his mom just for the chance to play during one of my open gym sessions. End of the session, Sean’s mom came over to me and said, “Coach, Sean has something he wants to say to you.”
Now, I’d been on the receiving end of that conversation a hundred times. A kid comes by to run with us, then his parents or his older brother or whoever it was who made the trip with him encourages the player to come by and introduce himself and thank me for the chance to play.
I wanted to save this young man the trouble, so I said, “That’s all right, Sean. No need to thank me. Come by whenever you want. Gym’s always open.”
But Sean had something else in mind. Oh, he was grateful for the opportunity to play, but he wanted to talk about maybe transferring to St. Anthony. He said, “My mom and I have talked about this. We’ve heard a lot of good things about your program.”
I wasn’t expecting this. Normally, a kid wants to play for St. Anthony, he’s got some sort of connection to the program, to Jersey City. By this point, after I’d been coaching almost thirty years, I was starting to see a lot of kids whose dads used to play for me, or maybe their dads had played against one of my teams. Almost always, there was some kind of link, but here with this kid the only link was basketball. He’d come from a well-known Indiana basketball family. His grandfather was a legendary high school coach back home. His uncles had played college ball. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I learned it soon enough. I also learned Sean and his mom had done their research and decided St. Anthony was a good breeding ground for guards, so that’s where he wanted to play, where he thought he’d get the best shot at a college scholarship in a big-time program.
He played with us another time or two, and each time Sean drove down with his mom from Connecticut they looked at places where they might live in Jersey City, in a stopgap sort of way. Their idea was Sean’s brother and sister would stay in Connecticut with their father, while Sean and his mother would get an apartment nearby.
At one point, I went to Obie Nwadike and Terence Roberts, who were graduating, wanting their take on how Sean would fit in with our returning group, and they both agreed that this kid, as a sophomore, was way more mature, way more focused, way more coachable, than the group of juniors I had playing for me already. This was true enough—only one thing I hadn’t counted on was how tough it would be for Sean to fit in with this group away from the court. You have to realize, this was a tight, homegrown bunch, so they tended to ignore Sean in school and around town, but Sean didn’t seem to mind—or if he did, he never let on. They worked well enough together in the gym, and that seemed to be Sean’s bottom line, so we left it at that, and as our season got under way I didn’t quite know what to expect, had no clear idea how things would go.
Our season didn’t get off to the most promising start—and this presented a kind of double worry for me and the St. Anthony administration because I’d agreed to allow a sportswriter full access to our comings and goings as a team, in preparation for a book on a season with the St. Anthony Friars. The sportswriter, Adrian Wojnarowski, covered basketball for the Bergen Record, and his book, The Miracle of St. Anthony, would go on to become a big bestseller, but as he was working on it, hanging around our school, our players, our games, I had no idea what kind of picture he was getting.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. I had a very good idea what kind of picture Adrian was getting. What I didn’t know was what he’d choose to see in that picture, or how that picture might develop. I worried Adrian would take one look at these kids, at the way they wore their do-rags to school or skulked around our hallways and in and out of detention like punks, and come away thinking we were running some sort of reform school for derelicts and no-accounts. Always, when you allow a reporter into your environment to see what he might see, you want to put your best foot forward—and about the only place these kids came close to doing that was on the basketball court. (Even then, I could never be sure!) For our program, it was important that Adrian’s book shine some kind of positive light on our school, but I didn’t think that was possible with this group.
As it turned out, Adrian got a good story out of the deal, and he even found a way to put a positive, hopeful spin on it. Somehow our guys kept winning and winning, despite digging themselves into all these different holes along the way, and as I write this now I can’t help but realize it’s almost always worked out to the good whenever there’s been a reporter tracking our season for a book or a documentary or some other media project.
Consider: Adrian threw in with us before the season, with no way to know that we’d find a way to scrape past our difficulties and finish with yet another state championship, yet another undefeated season.
A couple years later, I agreed to allow an outfit called Team-Works Media and director Kevin Shaw to bring their cameras behind the scenes to chronicle our 2007–2008 season. The resulting documentary, The Street Stops Here, offered an inside glimpse at what once again turned out to be a magical season. Another perfect record. Another “mythical” national championship.
It happened again in 2010–2011, when CBS News producers shadowed us all during the postseason for a 60 Minutes profile with reporter Steve Kroft, and we once again finished undefeated, at the top of the national polls.
And now, for good measure, we’ve run the table again, after I decided to write about our 2011–2012 season for the book you now hold in your hands—and I don’t mean to give away the ending or suck the tension from these pages, but it’s pretty clear from the table of contents how our season just ended.
But all of that is getting ahead of the story; it’s interesting, but a little beside the point. First order of business heading into our 2003–2004 season was to get Ahmad Mosby back in line after the way he’d blown off our practices down the stretch the year before. I brought him in and told him he had to convince me I could count on him going forward. Told him he’d let his teammates down by blowing off those practices down the stretch. I laid it on thick. I also told Ahmad it was time to make some changes in his life, that he wasn’t a kid any longer, that he had to start acting like an adult and taking responsibility for his actions.
One way we would do this, I said, was to lose the nickname Ahmad had carried since childhood. He’d been known as Beanie, going back as far as anyone could remember. In his family, he was known as Beanie. In our hallways at school, he was known as Beanie. On the streets of Jersey City, he was known as Beanie. At the Jersey City Boys’ Club, Beanie.
“Beanie’s out,” I told him. “Beanie hasn’t been doing so
well. From now on, you’re Ahmad. Ahmad will do better.”
It felt to me like we had a good talk, like we were turning a page and starting fresh, but then Ahmad pulled a Beanie move and found a way to miss our first practice. Wasn’t entirely his fault, but he should have seen it coming, and now he had to accept responsibility for it. What happened was, he was up in Irvington, New Jersey, with his family for Thanksgiving, about forty minutes west of Jersey City, and he woke up on the Friday after the holiday and couldn’t get anyone in his family to drive him to practice. Any other kid, these same circumstances, I might have let it go, but with Ahmad it struck me as just the latest version of “more of the same.”
Otis Campbell checked back in with me, start of his senior year, and we had a similar talk. He also had a lot to prove, because another sidebar drama of the previous postseason was that he couldn’t dress for the state tournament after deciding it was a good idea to glue one of his teachers’ possessions to her desk—but then he went and dragged his feet on his physical, had to miss our first week of practice. (Really, it was always something with this group.) This was especially infuriating, because every year a good friend of mine, Dr. Steven Levine, volunteers his time and comes to the school and does the physicals for all of our athletes, so the medical clearance shouldn’t be a problem for any of them, but Otis found a way to make things difficult yet again—and here too we were back in “more of the same” territory.
Lamar Alston spent much of his off-season bending so many different rules I had to bounce him from the team before we were even under way, so in my head he wasn’t even in the mix as we jump-started the season. More of the same.