by Bob Hurley
Turned out there was an easy fix. We put Josh on a program where he was able to get a good hot breakfast at St. Anthony’s every morning and another hot meal at lunch. Together with my assistant coaches, we tried to monitor how he was feeling before he took the floor, and there was a complete turnaround. And I don’t think it was just the undernourishment piece that turned Josh’s game around, although obviously that was key. No, I think the biggest reason Josh was able to lift his game was because we showed him we believed in him. We showed him we cared. And he responded by playing the best basketball of his high school career. Keep in mind, he’d already played at a high level from time to time—high enough to sign a letter of intent as a junior to play for Temple University. But now it looked like he’d be able to keep playing at that high level consistently. Now he would have an opportunity to thrive—and he did. On the defensive end, down the stretch, he was our most valuable player, and here against Gill St. Bernard’s, a team known for its ball movement and three-point shooting, he did as much as anyone in a St. Anthony uniform to set the tone and stamp the game and make it our own.
The turnaround with Josh got me thinking that this was a team of survivors, so that’s another angle I started to mention when I talked to reporters about our season. I mentioned it to my players as well, tried to use it as another motivator. I kept telling them we were here because of them, because they’d each found a way to survive a season of turmoil and uncertainty. I made it a point not to mention the fact that we were undefeated on the season, because I never wanted that string of victories to get in the way of what we were trying to accomplish one game to the next. That stage of the season, when a single hiccup could end our year, no victory was as important as the next victory. As far as I know, the players didn’t talk about it either. It just kind of hung in the air, that streak, hovering over our season.
It was for others to talk about. It was for us to play ball.
And here we were, still playing. We’d seen a bunch of players go, but the ones who remained had kept us in the fight. As individuals, a lot of our guys had managed to overcome some obstacle or other. Kyle Anderson had found a way to make the best of a bad situation when he learned that Paterson Catholic was closing its doors. And here he was. Josh Brown had found a way to get past my doubts about his off-court behavior and get his body to perform at an optimum level and lift his game right along with it. And here he was. Tariq Carey had transferred from a program where he wasn’t encouraged to play to his strengths and he had survived a bunch of midseason struggles with me to become an important player for us off the bench. And here he was. Jerome Frink had powered past a couple nagging injuries and a brief bout with the flu to emerge as a dominant big man, coming into his own as a player at just the right moment, while he was still being recruited by a number of college coaches. And here he was.
But it was as a group that these kids really dug in and came together. This alone was surprising, because as a group they looked nothing like the team I thought I’d be coaching this year. Remember, we’d graduated four players from our undefeated national championship team of the year before, but then we went and lost another seven players who figured on making a contribution to this year’s squad. Seven! As a coach, you try to prepare for these kinds of disappointments, but that’s a big, big number. There’s no way to really prepare for that kind of turnover in personnel. We’d lost these players to injuries, suspensions, and preseason or midseason transfers—all of which meant there was now an opportunity for seven other players to step up and fill those roles.
Somehow we’d found those seven players.
Somehow we’d helped those players find their way into the mix.
And now we’d go off into battle with this new and improved group. The survivors. The last guys still standing.
No question, defense wins championships—and here our swarming, suffocating style of defense had taken us to another state title. Now it only had to see us through a couple Tournament of Champions games to put a cap on our season—but this was no small thing. As I’ve written, these games became tougher and tougher each year because we’d be coming off a big adrenaline-high in winning the state championship. That was always our goal, what we played for. The other teams in the field were facing down the same deal, of course, so what you usually wound up getting was a group of talented teams staggering to the finish line. Doing what they could to keep on keeping on. It was almost like taking a victory lap when you were already tapped and being told you still had to beat all these other runners taking the same victory lap. In theory, these Tournament of Champions games were an exciting add-on to close out the season, but it was hard to keep our kids focused and playing at an all-out level.
And so we staggered on.
We beat Atlantic City in the tournament semifinal by another big score, 72–42, which set us up for a final-round showdown against Plainfield—another frame to our season. We’d already faced Plainfield back in February, when Jimmy Hall was still with us, and we’d managed to beat them in their gym by a dozen points, but they were a tough draw. Frankly, I would have much preferred to go up against St. Joseph’s, Plainfield’s semifinal opponent, if only because they hadn’t seen us before; we didn’t have any real history. But we don’t get to choose our opponents, so we prepared for a real grudge match. Plainfield had been the best public school team in the state for back-to-back seasons. After beating them in the Tournament of Champions final the previous year, I’d pronounced them the favorites to win it all this year, because they’d have their entire team back. We were losing four key players, and at that time it didn’t appear that any of our younger players could step up and fill those roles.
But here we were, back in the finals, a rematch of last year, and I wanted to eat my words. That regular-season game in Plainfield, the final score didn’t reflect how we dominated. We missed a ton of easy shots and should have won by a much bigger score, and I mention this here not to thump us up but to show that our guys had every reason to feel confident going into this game. They’d outplayed Plainfield on both ends of the floor, so they were liking our chances.
Me, I liked our chances as well … but I still worried. Always, I worried. And as it shook out, I had good reason. Plainfield coach Jeff Lubreski had figured us out.
He’d seen us last year, to end his season.
He’d seen us this year on his home court.
And he’d seen enough.
Our guys came out listless, made a couple stupid fouls early on. Josh Brown got into foul trouble in the opening minutes, so he had to sit. This was a problem, because he’d been guarding Plainfield’s best guard, Sekour Harris, and now, with Josh out, the game opened up for Coach Lubreski. Plainfield began playing at a high tempo and getting a bunch of open looks, while our guys were scrambling.
Soon, Jerome Frink and Hallice Cooke got into foul trouble of their own, so I had to sit them as well.
As the first half wound down, I saw that we’d committed ten team fouls, putting Plainfield in the double bonus—meaning that every one-and-one became a two-shot foul—while our guys had yet to take a single free throw.
We were tied at the end of the first half, 25–25, and we were lucky the game was still close. Plus, Plainfield’s big man, Yale-bound Justin Spears, went down with an ankle injury, and that was potentially a real game-changer, on both sides of the ball. As a coach, particularly at the high school level, you never like it when an opponent is unable to play you at full strength—at least, I never like it, although I’ve met a number of coaches who’ll take a win any way they can. Me, I like to beat a team at its best, so I hated to see this young man go down.
As it happened, Spears left the game in the first quarter but came back in the second half. He was hobbled, but his mere presence on the floor seemed to give his teammates a boost—and now that I look back on it, I wonder how the game might have played out if he hadn’t gotten hurt.
I decided to play it cool in my halftime talk. As always, I
wanted to keep calm and let my kids know I had every confidence in them, only inside I was churning with doubts. Inside, I thought we’d wasted sixteen minutes, a chance to put some points on the board. After two quarters, we were dead even, and it meant Plainfield now only had to shut us down for sixteen minutes more. But I wouldn’t let my guys see my concern, so I said, “We’ll be fine. We just got into foul trouble, that’s all. Let’s keep them off the line and play our game.”
And that was our game plan—the only way to play it. It had been our strategy going in, and it would be our strategy going forward, so long as I could keep my key guys on the floor and they could get into some kind of rhythm. Happily, that’s just what happened as we started the third quarter. We started hitting some big shots and pushed it to an eight-point lead.
Kyle wasn’t having a strong shooting game, but his all-around game was outstanding. He finished with four steals, four assists, five blocks, and six big rebounds, but he couldn’t get some of his shots to fall. As it was, he still managed to score fourteen points and keep us in the game, but his teammates helped him out on the offensive end.
Tariq Carey wound up playing his best half of basketball for us, hit some monumental shots, finished with a season-high eighteen points, but it was Jerome Frink who really came up big. There was a stretch, late third quarter into the fourth, when it seemed like this kid just couldn’t miss, and he ended up with twenty-six points, shooting 13-23 from the floor. Curiously, amazingly, twenty-one of Jerome’s shots came from inside ten feet, and yet he didn’t draw a single foul. Plainfield kept going to the line and hitting their free throws, and we just couldn’t get a call, even with Jerome playing such a physical game underneath our own basket.
Still, we had a dominant ten-minute run to put us up by fourteen with about three minutes to go when the wheels nearly fell off our perfect season. All of a sudden, we struggled. All of a sudden, we couldn’t hit the open man. We couldn’t hit our shots. We couldn’t get out of our own way. We were finally going to the line, but it’s like we didn’t want these easy points—we kept missing our free throws. Turned it over in a couple crucial spots. And in that same “all of a sudden” span, Plainfield started hitting a bunch of threes, and when they hit a final three with about ten seconds to go in regulation, it felt to me like the game was slipping away from us. They’d pulled within three.
The clock was with us. The momentum was against us. And the crowd … well, the crowd always pulls for the underdog. No, Plainfield wasn’t an underdog in any kind of traditional sense, but we were the defending champs. We were nursing a perfect season. Plainfield had been down big and had scrambled back in the closing minutes. Plus, they were a big public school, with its own rich basketball tradition. It was a neutral-site game, but Plainfield had way more students and alumni and boosters than St. Anthony, so the Izod Center fans were now pulling for them … big time.
At this point, late, we were in the double bonus, because Plainfield had to commit a lot of fouls to stop the clock and get back in the game. We shot a lot of free throws, and we missed a lot of free throws.
We inbounded to Hallice Cooke, who was fouled immediately. He had a chance to put the game out of reach, but he only managed to hit one of his free throws, so Plainfield still had a pulse; they could have pushed the ball the length of the floor, drained a quick three, and then hoped like crazy for a quick turnover … but we kept them from getting a good look and that was that.
You never know.
That’s the thing about this game, this season, this team. We’d just come off an absolutely brilliant stretch, playing some tremendous team defense. And here the emphasis was on our team defense, because a lot of our guys were not individually talented as defenders. This is not a knock on any of my players, because they came together and played great, but they did so as a unit. They were fundamentally sound and complemented each other well. Over time our school’s best defensive teams have been teams that were able to defend full-court and pressure their opponents and force turnovers. They were quick, running teams, characterized by quick, running players. But this team was not like that. This team played more of a half-court defense, more of a team defense, and we really didn’t force a lot of turnovers.
We just denied, denied, denied. All game long. We had a lot of guys with long arms, so we were able to use our length to deflect or disrupt passes. To challenge shots. We made it hard for the other team to get comfortable. And then, on the back of that, we were always able to out-rebound our opponents, so we defended in a different way. We attacked the boards. We clogged the lanes. We stood our ground.
All through the tournament, and in the Atlantic City game, our defense was lights out, so it made sense to think that was how this game would go—but, hey, when the prognosticators talk about how a game might go, they don’t really have a clue until the game gets going. And here I was guilty of the same thing. Coaches are the same as anyone else, the way we play the game in our heads before we play it on the floor. That’s what I’d started to do here. I looked back to our regular-season game in Plainfield, when we held them to thirty-one points, on a shorter floor. You’d think, in the Tournament of Champions final, on a much bigger stage, on a much bigger floor, that number might even go down a little bit, but Plainfield went out and doubled their point total.
Yeah, we won, but we gave up sixty-two points—the most we’d allowed an opponent during our two-year undefeated string.
It’s why you play the games. You can talk about them, and prepare for them, and train for them … but until the opening tap, you never know.
You just never know.
POSTGAME
What Winning Has Meant
BE STRONG IN BODY, CLEAN IN MIND, LOFTY IN IDEALS.
—James Naismith
MY FATHER GAVE ME THE GREATEST GIFT ANYONE COULD GIVE ANOTHER PERSON. HE BELIEVED IN ME.
—Jim Valvano
In forty years as head coach at St. Anthony, I’ve had the great good fortune to coach seven different teams that have managed to go undefeated over the course of an entire season, on their way to state titles. I’ve spent the past couple hundred pages sharing the stories of those seasons, together with the story of my life in and around basketball. I could have just as easily focused on seven different teams from seasons when we fell just short, or seasons when our players were still learning how to win, and there would have been a whole other batch of player profiles and game strategies to consider. After all, there are as many lessons to be taken from loss and struggle as there are from winning. But I’ve chosen to shine a light on these seven teams because in many ways they represent the best of our winning tradition at the school.
For the record, I want to point out that four of these seven teams were named national champions—five, if you count last year’s team, the 2011–2012 squad, which finished 32-0 and extended our unbeaten streak to 65-0, earning us the top spot in a couple national polls.
Each of these seven teams has added to the lore of our program and made the kind of mark on our community that has only raised the expectations for our team in succeeding seasons.
Each of these seven teams will be remembered in the halls of our school, in the streets of Jersey City, and among our extended St. Anthony community for a great many years to come.
But also for the record, let me be clear: these undefeated teams didn’t work any harder or deserve anything more or better than any of the other teams I’ve been blessed to coach. All they did, really, was put themselves in position to win—practice after practice, possession after possession, game after game—which is what all my players have tried to do. It’s just that with these seven special groups, it worked out. (Even with that frustratingly special group of 2004 seniors, it worked out.) Over and over, again and again, it worked out. In a whole lot of ways, big and small, it’s because of these seven undefeated teams that each and every player who’s played for me at St. Anthony has had a model of excellence to inspire him to put in his very best effo
rt.
Think about this for a second: all of our four-year players have won a ring. Each and every one. I don’t set this out to brag or to blow smoke my own way, but it’s one of my proudest, most enduring accomplishments as a coach, and so I share it here: every single player who started in our program as a freshman (either on the freshman team, the junior varsity, or the varsity) and continued playing with us all through high school has graduated with at least one state title. Heck, most of my guys have two rings. Some—not too many, but some—have three. And a couple even have four. Four championship rings! That’s saying something—not about me, but about the culture of winning that has attached itself to our school. Only I didn’t put it there. No individual player put it there.
But there it is.
People ask me all the time how much longer I’ll continue to coach, and I don’t have an answer. I have some ideas, but I can’t know for sure because it comes down to health and a whole mess of other factors beyond my control. Right now, I’m feeling great and things are lined up in my life in such a way that I don’t even think about hanging it up. Really, it’s the furthest thing from my mind, and that’s because I get more out of coaching now than ever before—probably because I can put more into it.
Here’s what I mean by that: I retired from my career in probation in 2001, and from my job with the Jersey City Parks Department in 2008, so now my time is my own. Now I’ve found the sweet spot. Now I can coach without distraction. It used to be I’d get to the gym and my head wasn’t always right for practice. Something at work had maybe set me off, or I was agitated by some detail or other, and I wasn’t able to focus. Days like that, practice could sometimes be a chore, but that doesn’t happen anymore. Now I get to fill my days doing what I love, without having to run all over the place chasing a paycheck, and that’s been a real game-changer for me because, let’s face it, there’s a clear difference between work and play, and coaching for me is clearly play. It’s like that old line about a bad day on the golf course … well, a bad day coaching is better than a good day of working, I’ll say that.