Chasing Perfect Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Bob Hurley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-98688-7

  Photograph on this page is courtesy of Peter Mecca. All other photographs are courtesy of St. Anthony High School and the Hurley family.

  Jacket design by Michael Nagin

  Jacket photography by Frank Longhitano

  v3.1

  To

  SISTER MARY ALAN,

  whose selflessness and dedication to the students of St. Anthony High School inspired me in the years we worked together.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hard Work: Monday, November 21, 2011

  Pregame: What Winning Means

  1. A Sense of Where You’re Going

  Hard Work: Wednesday, December 14, 2011

  2. Warming Up

  3. 1973–1974: Mr. Hurley

  Hard Work: Saturday, February 11, 2012

  4. The St. Anthony Way

  5. 1988–1989: Family Ties

  Photo Insert

  Hard Work: Saturday, February 18, 2012

  6. A Dark, Dark Night

  7. 1995–1996: Guarding Kobe

  Hard Work: Thursday, March 1, 2012

  8. 2003–2004: Hardwired to Win

  9. 2007–2008: At Last

  10. 2010–2011: Championship Habits

  11. 2011–2012: The Survivors

  Postgame: What Winning Has Meant

  Acknowledgments

  PERFECTION IS

  NOT ATTAINABLE,

  BUT IF WE CHASE

  PERFECTION

  WE CAN CATCH

  EXCELLENCE.

  —Vince Lombardi

  HARD WORK

  Monday, November 21, 2011

  Unofficial first day of the season. In Jersey, like in most states, there are rules that tell us how often we can practice, and when. Used to be we could practice this week, leading up to Thanksgiving, but now we have to wait until the first Monday after the holiday. NOW we can only work on our fitness, which is okay by me.

  My teams, we’re almost always the best-conditioned team on the floor. That’s been my big thing. I’ve learned it’s the one part of the game you can control as a high school basketball coach. You can have a bunch of big men one year, a bunch of sharp-shooting point guards the next year, or maybe it happens that a stud power forward gets tossed from the team for disciplinary reasons. But fitness is a constant. It doesn’t change, one year to the next.

  You can count on it.

  I want my guys to be able to run the other team into the ground. Always. I want them to out-last, out-hustle, out-think their opponents, up and down the court. But these things only happen if your guys are in shape, if they’re prepared. End of the game, I want to see the players on the other team gassed, hands on their hips, gasping for air. I want my guys to see it too. I want them to look for those moments, late, when they box out their man and he doesn’t fight back. When they see their opponents bending over during a time-out. I want them to learn to spot all those little tells that might give us even the tiniest edge—psychological, physical—so we can turn it to advantage. I want them to learn to sniff out even the slightest whiff of weakness, so we can bury the other team when it counts. Doesn’t mean we’re always the fastest team. Doesn’t mean we’re always the most talented team. But we’ll be in the best shape.

  We don’t get tired. And one of the main reasons we don’t get tired, past couple years, has been Omar Jones, our team trainer. He knocks the tired from our guys before the season even starts. Like right now.

  Omar’s a St. Anthony alum, a former college football player. Now he’s back at his high school alma mater, teaching health and phys ed, and he’s got a lot of creative ideas on how to train these kids on a nothing budget, with bare-bones facilities. He works with them all year, and what I love about Omar is how he puts himself through the same paces. He’s young, built like a football player, still in tremendous shape, and my guys respect that he’s in there lifting right alongside them. Running. Doing crunches, squats, push-ups. Whatever Omar asks them to do, he’s doing it himself, and the players really respond to that. They respect it. Same way I used to run the floor with my players when I was first starting out, when I could still keep up with them. It puts it out there that what we’re asking them to do is no more than we’d do ourselves. That it’s what the game deserves.

  In the off-season, we encourage our players to work out on their own—running, mostly. Lifting, occasionally. Summers, it’s hard to keep them to a real schedule, because everyone’s off in a hundred directions. A lot of my guys will play on our summer team, but a few of them won’t, so we try to give them a routine they can all follow. This way, they’re all starting from the same place. Last week of August, Omar will get them back into the gym, lifting on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then, before the season, we’ll switch to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Between workouts, they’re supposed to run. And rest. That’s a big part of what we expect from these kids. Some coaches, they only know how to push their players. They want them to be hard chargers at all times, in every way, but we expect them to listen to their bodies. To know that if we’re running hard in practice once the season begins, they need to go home and put their feet up. They need to know what their bodies can take.

  Today, though, we’ve hit a snag. A pipe burst over the weekend in our weight room, so we have to improvise. Already, we’re improvising, because our weight room is just a converted storage area, off the school cafeteria. We cleaned it out a couple years ago, painted it, turned it into a makeshift auxiliary gym, with benches and free weights and pull-up bars. Nothing fancy. What the kids call “old school,” which pretty much describes St. Anthony itself. Really, there’s a lot you won’t find in our weight room. No elliptical machines. No treadmills. No Nautilus equipment. No frills. Just a bunch of resistance bands and boxes for step-up drills, some floor mats, and whatever else Omar has been able to cobble together to allow him to do his thing, only now he has to get our guys to drag the equipment from the storage/weight room to the school cafeteria, which also doubles as the school’s central meeting space, auditorium, main hallway, and locker area.

  At some schools, space is so tight, administrators have to find multiple uses for all their facilities. At a tiny school like St. Anthony High School, with only 230 or so students, no gym, no grounds, no budget, we use every available inch of space, over and over. Even our bathrooms are pressed into multipurpose duty, doubling as locker rooms for our gym classes and athletic teams.

  The shortage of space hits you full in the face at the end of the school day, on the changeover. Most of the kids are headed home or to some after-school activity, but our guys grab their gear, which they’ve stuffed into their lockers along with their books, and wait for the cafeteria/hub/hallway area to clear out. They chat with their friends, flirt with the girls on the cheerleading squad, maybe duck into the boys’ bathroom to switch out of their school clothes. It takes awhile. The kids with no good place to go are in no particular hurry; the kids who play ball are happy to be distracted, because they know what’s waiting for them once practice starts. Eventually, the square basement room thins, and it’s just the guys on the team, waiting on me to tell them what to do.

  Yeah, it’s a little
strange, the way we manage to compete at the highest levels of high school basketball despite such spartan, basic conditions. We’re at a disadvantage, clearly, but somehow we’ve turned our have-not circumstances into a kind of edge. The contrast can be startling to our juniors and seniors. Every year we’ve got guys being recruited by some of the biggest, most storied programs in the country, with awesome facilities. These kids go off on their official visits, and they’re wowed by gyms the size of football fields, by the fiberglass backboards, by the first-class locker and training rooms, the state-of-the-art equipment. Basically, by the way top college players are pampered and coddled.

  But, really, it’s not that strange at all. Our guys have gotten used to the St. Anthony deal. Even our upperclassmen, they consider our bare-bones facilities a point of pride, a badge of honor. Gives our team a kind of us-against-the-world mentality. We’ve taken a negative and turned it into a positive. How? Well, just about every team we play has its own gym, a real locker room, a real training room, so it’s become a great motivator for us. My guys, they never trash-talk our own place. It’s always clean, painted, and it’s the best we have. We do the best with it. But they’ll absolutely go to another team’s gym and poke holes in it, find something to diss. Like, they can step into a weight room and see that the equipment is still brand-new, like it’s never been used. Like, you can step to the rim and see there’s dust on the backboards, because they’ve hardly been touched. They see stuff like that, and they’re all over it.

  Where we play, at the METS Charter School on Ninth Street in Jersey City, a couple blocks from St. Anthony, you’ll see fingerprints all over the backboards from the way my guys attack the boards. The prints run all the way to the top of the box above the rim. The guy who runs the facility for the city, Bob Fosetta, Windexes the backboards every year just before the state tournament, so it’s like we’re starting with a clean slate, but you’d be amazed how many gyms we’ve been in where there’s a thick coating of dust over the hoop. Tells us right away that team isn’t ready.

  Like I said, it’s our juniors and seniors who notice the contrast most of all. On this year’s team, we’ve got senior Kyle Anderson, one of the top high school players in the country, a six-eight swing-type player who can handle the ball like Magic Johnson and dominate down low. He just decided to go to UCLA. We’ve got our center, Jimmy Hall, another senior, headed off to Hofstra, and our other big man, Jerome Frink, just back from a trip to Florida International, where he’s being recruited by former Knicks head coach Isiah Thomas, where alumni and boosters have been pouring a ton of money into the program. Josh Brown, a junior, has signed a letter of intent to play at Temple University, another first-rate basketball program. So these kids have seen how the other half lives. They know what we’re missing.

  And it’s not just the recruiting visits that mark the contrast. It’s the games on our own schedule. A lot of these kids played for us on last year’s team, as sophomores and juniors, when we won the state championship at the RAC—the Rutgers University Athletic Center—in front of five thousand people. Or, when we went on to win the Tournament of Champions at the Izod Center, in the Meadowlands, former home of the New Jersey Nets. So they’ve played in some big-time facilities.

  Up and down our bench, it’s much the same: we’ve got Rashad Andrews, coming back from that team; a six-five wingman from Queens, he’s penciled in as one of my starters. And Chris Regus, a talented guard who played with us as a sophomore, along with the promising Hallice Cooke, a terrific outside shooter who figures to fill a lot of big minutes for us as a junior. So most of our guys have seen and tasted what it’s like to play ball on a grand stage.

  When we’re in season, the way it works is we’ll walk over to the charter school, where we rent gym time. It’s where we play our home games too, but it’s not our gym to do with as we please. We’ve got to watch the clock. We’ve got to make sure our freshman and junior varsity teams get their practices in, get their games in. We’ve got to make sure our girls’ team gets the floor. When one session ends, there’s another group waiting, so there’s no time to goof off or procrastinate or even to get in any extra shooting work or run some new plays. Every minute matters.

  But today we’re in our own building—in the cafeteria, yeah, but at least we’re on our own clock. The burst pipe means Omar has to get our guys to push all the cafeteria tables to the side and then haul in the weights and bands and heavy balls from the storage room. It’s a workout in itself, but our guys don’t seem to mind. They go at it hard. They pair off to toss the heavy ball back and forth, to spot each other while they press, to stretch. They get their heart rates going by running tiny laps around the small cafeteria. It’s almost funny to watch, these big, lanky kids, some of them stretching to six feet, seven inches tall, six-eight, six-nine, going all out in such a cramped, tight space.

  After twenty, thirty minutes, they’re drenched in sweat, bone-tired, spent, but Omar’s not done with them.

  He’s just getting started.

  Just so happens that on this day we’re being visited by two youth coaches from the Philippines. This alone isn’t so unusual. Happens all the time that coaches stop by to check out what we’re doing—foreign coaches, especially. They take a tour of the States, they try to see a professional game, a college game, a top-level high school game. What they really want to do is check out the practices, only it’s not so easy on the professional and collegiate levels. Those practices are usually closed. But we’re always getting calls from coaches who want to watch us practice, and we open our doors pretty wide.

  First ten, fifteen years I coached, I had no idea this was even possible. Never even occurred to me to drop in on another team’s practice session, although I wish it had. You can pick up a lot of drills, a lot of different approaches. It can be enormously helpful for a young coach, and so I’m usually happy to help out—only here, now, I must admit I’m a little embarrassed I don’t have more to show these guys. They’ve come all this way, and all they get to see is a bunch of kids high-stepping around a multipurpose high school basement, using each other for resistance, motivation, support. Doing step-up drills on rickety cafeteria chairs. Bunching up for a team huddle, hands in, while Omar gets them to shout out “Hard work!” on the count of three—our rallying cry from last season.

  It must seem absurd, from the perspective of these coaches from the Philippines, but to us it’s the most natural thing in the world. It keeps us grounded. Plus, it’s closer to what we’re used to than the cathedrals of basketball you’ll find at UCLA or Temple, or even at some of the richer parochial schools in our state. It’s closer to who we are, I guess you could say. We’re like the amateur boxers who train at some of the older gyms in Jersey City—places like Bufano’s, where the sweat hangs in the air like it’s been there forever and the seams in the mat in the ring are held together by tape.

  So you’d think our players might be a little put out by the nothing-special surroundings, but that’s not the case at all. In fact, I think it’s just the opposite. I think they’ve come to embrace the history of St. Anthony basketball. The whole aura. The ways we have to practice, it’s more in keeping with how they grew up. A lot of them come from one-parent households; they’re scrambling, scraping to get by. They’ve been playing in tiny recreational gyms since they were kids. Outside, in the parks, with rusted-over backboards and chain-link nets … or no nets at all.

  They’re at home with how we play, because it’s how they’ve always played. It’s who they are.

  PREGAME

  What Winning Means

  GOOD IS NOT ENOUGH IF BETTER IS POSSIBLE.

  —Unknown

  ONE LOSS IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL. TOO MANY LOSSES IS NOT GOOD FOR THE COACH.

  —Knute Rockne

  This is a book about winning.

  Mostly, it’s a book about finding ways to win consistently, over time, but it’s also about the constant search for winning moments in every part of our lives. It’s a
bout finding the right mix of purpose and preparation in all of our pursuits, so that we can call on just enough of each to help us accomplish our goals. And underneath all these things, it’s also about how I came to build a life and a career coaching high school basketball in a tiny, rundown, underfunded parochial school in the toughest part of a tough city, with no gymnasium, no training facilities, and no real shot at any kind of long-haul success.

  In sports, winning is usually measured at the end of a series, a tournament, a season. The idea is to push yourself as far as you can, to reach as high as you can, to play as fast and hard and smart as you can, to come away with whatever’s on the line. A loss or a hiccup of some kind on the way to a championship is to be expected; in some cases, coaches even go looking for struggle along the way, so they can use it to motivate their players or redouble their focus.

  In basketball, seasons are won or lost in practice. If you’re fit, focused, and prepared, good things will happen. Games are won or lost with each possession. If you take care of the ball, find the open man, attack the boards, you’ll put yourself in position to win, as long as you find a way to keep your opponent from doing the same things. In a high school game, there are hundreds of tiny battles that decide the outcome. Each battle is important. Each matchup, each switch on defense, each blocked shot … they all add up. Every move matters. Even the moves your players make off the court factor in. Each and every player, up and down the bench. The moves he makes in the classroom, the moves he makes at home, the ways he interacts with his friends.

  A lot of high school coaches, they leave their players alone away from the gym, but I try to get in their heads. I try to instill a work ethic, a sense of pride, and hope it spills onto the floor during games. It’s mostly about basketball, but it all ties in. I get on them about school, about family, about work if they happen to have a part-time job. Basically, I look to make the most of every opportunity. To practice hard, so we can play even harder. To remind my guys that the way they play on both sides of the ball is key, every possession. Stop the other team from scoring, and you’ll win that one battle. Create good shots on your end of the floor, and you’ll win that battle too. It’s basic math: find a way to win more possessions than the other guy, and you’ll win the game. Make positive choices away from the court and you’re more likely to make positive choices in the run of play. Take care of your relationships—with your teammates, your coaches, your teachers, your parents—and your relationships will take care of you.