Chasing Perfect Read online

  When it comes down to it, every time, I’ll take the hardworking, dedicated, motivated kid who’s managed through sweat and effort to string together some good grades, even though he might struggle or freeze up on his SATs, over the kid with the perfect SAT scores and the spotty transcript. I’m a big fan of the person who grinds it out every day over the person with all kinds of God-given talent who can’t keep it together or harness his natural ability because he doesn’t have the drive or the discipline. Without drive or discipline, where the hell are you? You’re nowhere.

  Basketball’s like anything else. You get back what you put into it. Only, with basketball, with five guys working toward the same goal, what you get back can be everything.

  You have to realize, up until that first season playing for Charlie Shaughnessy when I was thirteen years old, I had no real hopes or goals or dreams. I was just a kid playing ball. If I’d thought about it at all, I would have probably said I wanted to be a baseball player, but only because baseball came a bit easier back then. Only because it didn’t much matter if I was on the short side, like it did on the court. But I wasn’t really thinking along these lines just yet. Wasn’t in any kind of hurry. The world I grew up in was very simple. My father was a cop. My mother was a nurse. I didn’t know what my life would look like in five years, ten years, twenty years … whenever. I liked school, but I liked sports even more, and now, with this one push from Charlie, I was turning from baseball to basketball. I was starting to see that with a little bit of focus and direction I could change the direction of my life—at least a little bit. At least for now.

  Four years later, I was still in Jersey City, still at St. Peter’s, only now I was at St. Peter’s College. St. Peter’s Prep was downtown, but St. Peter’s College was up in Journal Square. They’re both Jesuit schools, but they’re only loosely affiliated, so it’s not like you graduate from one and everyone assumes you’ll go to the other. They’re two distinct institutions, and at the time St. Peter’s College had one of the best basketball programs in the area, so it felt to me like a good next move.

  I was the oldest of four siblings, so I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of moving away from home. Folks who know me will tell you I’m a family-oriented guy, so I guess you could say I didn’t want to miss out. Jersey City was just fine with me, and when the St. Peter’s coach let me know I’d have a shot to make his team, I set my sights there. It was a long shot, mind you, but it was a shot, and I figured I’d take it, and in my head it was like I was thirteen all over again, working my left hand to match my right.

  Freshman year, I went into the season in the best shape of my life. I was “dialed in.” That’s a phrase you hear now all the time, but back then we were just “good and ready.” I ended up averaging almost twenty points a game for the freshman team, which was a big number, but then the realities of college basketball began to set in. This was key, because I didn’t have a basketball scholarship. I went to St. Peter’s on what was known as a New Jersey State Scholarship, which meant that after that one season I’d be competing for a spot on the varsity with a bunch of other guards with full athletic scholarships. The coach would have to cut one of those guys to make room for me, so that was the long-shot part of the deal. I didn’t know it just yet, but that wasn’t about to happen, even with my twenty points a game. I was banging my head against the wall, with no hope of busting through to the other side.

  Plus, that St. Peter’s team was the best team the school ever had. That team would go on to beat Duke in the National Invitation Tournament, back when the NIT was a big-time tournament. A lot of folks don’t remember this, but in those days it seemed like the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament changed its format every couple years. It went from eight teams to sixteen teams to anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-five teams. That’s where the NCAA tournament was when I started paying attention. Prior to 1975, only one team per conference was invited to the tournament, which meant that if you were the second-place team in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) one year, like Duke was that year, you weren’t going to any Big Dance. (And by the way, if you’d called it a Big Dance in those days, people would have looked at you funny.) All those years, when UCLA was the team to beat in the Pac-10, USC had some great teams that were shut out of the tournament, so a lot of those strong teams ended up playing in the NIT.

  So that’s the kind of team I was trying to make—a guard-heavy team that would go on to knock off a Top Ten–type program like Duke in a big-time postseason tournament.

  Man, I couldn’t crack that team for trying.

  All that summer of 1966, heading into my sophomore year, I worked my tail off. It was around that time that I read that great John McPhee book about Bill Bradley, A Sense of Where You Are. It felt to me like everyone I knew was reading that book—to this day, it’s still one of the best, most thoughtful books ever written about the game, but at the time it was a great big deal because Bill Bradley was a great big deal. If you were a kid from Jersey, playing ball, you looked up to Bill Bradley. He’d just graduated from Princeton, where he’d been one of the top players in the country, and it was such a thrill to watch him play. His game was all about hard work and dedication and out-thinking your opponent. He wasn’t especially tall or fast or quick, but he was a lights-out shooter with an uncanny ability to put himself in the right place at the right time. Whatever was going on out there on the court, the game seemed to come to him—and to a short white kid struggling to latch on to a good college team, he was just about the perfect role model.

  There was a paragraph in that Bradley book that really registered. I still think about it whenever a game goes a certain way. The author, who’d also gone to Princeton, was talking about a no-look, over-the-shoulder shot that had become one of Bradley’s trademarks. He’d copied it from Oscar Robertson and Jerry West, the book said. Bradley explained that after you’d played the game as long as he had, after you’d logged enough time on the court, you didn’t need to look at the basket. He said, “You develop a sense of where you are.” That’s where the author got the title.

  I thought about Bradley’s approach a whole lot that summer, trying to work myself onto that St. Peter’s team. I thought about all the hours I’d put in, on all those courts, all around Jersey City, developing my own sense of where I was on a basketball court. And the thing of it was, no matter how many times I might have flipped the ball over my shoulder with my back to the basket, it would have only gone in every once in a while, only because of sheer dumb luck. I wasn’t Bill Bradley. I wasn’t that kind of player. The game didn’t always come to me, much as I might have wanted it to. I was more of an eyes-open, looking-ahead kind of player, which was fine. You’ve got to play to your strengths, right? And one of my strengths was being able to see the floor, and watch the game develop, and find a way to fit myself into it that would help my team.

  A sense of where I was? I guess, but with me it was more about playing with a sense of where I was headed—and the phrase applied to my time on the court and my life outside the gym as well. I was starting to think about what I might do for a career, just as I was beginning to realize that if a spot on the St. Peter’s varsity wasn’t even certain, a spot on an NBA roster was probably out of reach. So I had to think of something else. Didn’t necessarily mean I had the first idea what that something else might be, only that I had to start thinking about it.

  Meanwhile, there was my sophomore season to worry about, and there was a real turning-point moment for me in preseason, during a scrimmage against a team from the Eastern League, which in those days was just a notch below the NBA. At that time, the NBA only had ten teams, and the ABA was still a year away, so the caliber of these Eastern League players was good enough to make it to the pros today, and somehow we managed to play these guys tough. Somehow I was able to hang in there for a quarter and make an impression.

  This was just before the St. Peter’s coaches were making their final cuts, and going into the gam
e I talked to our assistant coach, Mark Binstein, who’d always been very supportive. He didn’t exactly have the ear of the head coach, Don Kennedy, but he knew what Coach Kennedy was looking for. Mark took me aside and said, “The way to impress the coach is to go out there and be aggressive. He sees you playing hard, he sees that you can do certain things out there, he’s gonna keep that in mind.”

  Here again, I took a coach’s advice and ran with it. I ended up scoring ten points in just one quarter—but that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t dominant, or anything, even though I’d certainly managed to put my stamp on the game against first-rate players who just a year or two later would have been playing some kind of pro ball. Truth was, I don’t know that there was anything I could have done out there on the floor that day that would have earned me a spot on that St. Peter’s team because there was just no room for me. I should have seen it coming, and now that it was here, I should have done something about it, but all I could do was set my disappointment aside and move on.

  What I should have done was transfer. You see a kind of logjam blocking your path, and if you can’t get past it, you look for another opportunity. Happens all the time these days. A player reaches a certain point, in a certain program, and he sees there are a bunch of guards ahead of him on a coach’s depth chart, so he finds a situation where a coach might be looking for someone to play point. It’s not about going to a better school and a bigger program, or a lesser school and a smaller program. It’s about fitting yourself in, finding a place to play. But nobody thought that way back then. Nobody was advising me the way I try to do now for my players. You want to see young players in a positive place where they can make a contribution and find an opportunity to improve, but players didn’t have coaches and mentors looking out for them the way they do today.

  So what did I do? Well, I kept playing, wherever I could. I found leagues, games … anything to keep me in shape. It was frustrating not being a part of a competitive program, but I never lost my love of the game or my desire to play it at the highest levels available to me. I was drawn to the basketball court, for whatever reason. I felt at home there, most like myself, and at some point in the middle of all these games and scrimmages and rec league schedules I started to think about coaching. In some ways I’d always thought about it, in a back-of-my-mind sort of way, but now I put it front and center. The year before, during my freshman season, my brother Brian had asked me to help coach his youth team. The head coach, Mr. Newcomb, was a fireman, and he couldn’t get to practice one day, so Brian asked if I’d run the session so they wouldn’t have to cancel. I was happy to do it, and the kids knew me from the neighborhood and seemed to like having me around, so whenever Mr. Newcomb couldn’t make it, I’d fill in for him. That’s all it was at first. I wasn’t there in any kind of official capacity; I was just helping out. After a while, I started showing up at games. I knew a lot of the kids already because they were my brother’s friends, but they were thirteen years old, and they knew I was a college player, so they thought I had something to teach them.

  Now that I’d been cut from St. Peter’s, I started thinking more and more about coaching, and somewhere in the middle of all this thinking and figuring I got an opportunity to coach the freshman team at St. Anthony High School. It was just a part-time gig—heck, I was still in college!—and I hadn’t exactly gone looking for it, but I grabbed it before the folks at St. Anthony had a chance to change their minds.

  First game I ever coached was in December 1967, against Don Bosco. Now, a lot of people around the country have heard the name Don Bosco because of the powerful Don Bosco Prep football program in Ramsey, New Jersey. This was a different school—Don Bosco Tech in Paterson, New Jersey. The basketball program at Don Bosco Tech wasn’t quite at the powerhouse level of the Don Bosco Prep football program, but they always had good, competitive teams. Going up against them, it felt like the start of something. I remember stepping to our bench just before tip-off and looking at my kids. A part of me couldn’t believe that they were now looking to me to jump-start their school basketball careers. I was just a kid myself, still fresh from my disappointment at not making the St. Peter’s team, but as I looked up and down the bench at my players I felt a kind of calling. A sense of where I was headed, to bend Bill Bradley’s phrase. The other thing I remember is that there were a ton of kids—twenty-two, to be exact. The rule at the school was that I couldn’t cut anybody from the parish. We barely had enough uniforms to go around, but I ended up keeping to that philosophy over the years. Even when it wasn’t the school’s rule, I made it my rule. I never wanted to cut a kid, because I remembered what it was to be cut. I didn’t ever want to be the guy who kept a kid from his dreams, from his development. And this wasn’t just because I was a soft touch. It’s because you can never really know how a kid will turn out when he’s fourteen years old. Or when he’s sixteen, eighteen … even into his early twenties. You don’t know how their bodies will fill out, what kind of work ethic they’ll develop, what kind of young men they’re about to become.

  And so you keep them around. Doesn’t mean they’ll all get minutes, but everyone will get the same shot in practice. They’ll work the same drills, get the same looks.

  So there I was, all of twenty years old, looking up and down the bench at these twenty-two kids—who of course were checking me out as well. And as my five starters went out to center court for the tip, I sat down and thought, Okay, Hurley. This ain’t half-bad.

  HARD WORK

  Wednesday, December 14, 2011

  I’m itching to get going on the season.

  This nutty new schedule, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. For a long time we were in a nice routine, opening up practice the day after Thanksgiving—a double session that Friday, a double session that Saturday, and then on Sunday we’d break for a coaches’ clinic we always run, “Coaches Versus Cancer.” I’d get my guys to help out, to run drills, but it was basically just a light workout. Then we’d practice the whole next week and play our first scrimmage the following Friday.

  That was our routine for a bunch of years, but now the state has taken that Thanksgiving weekend from us. Now we can’t really run the floor with our guys until the Monday after Thanksgiving, which puts us about a week behind. It’s only a couple days, but we miss out on those double sessions, on the clinic, so it’s a big deal. A lot of teams, they’re in the same spot, but the prep schools follow a different schedule, so it’s tough for us to hit the ground running once the season’s under way. Those are the teams we tend to play early on. Plus, when we travel to our big holiday tournament—in Boston this year, at the Shooting Touch Shootout—the teams we’re facing will have been playing under a whole other set of rules. They could have as many as ten or twelve games under their belts, while we might have just two or three.

  It’s like you’re playing at half-strength for a while, like you’re playing catch-up.

  One of the ways I’ve tried to compensate is to set up our preseason scrimmages against tougher teams. Used to be, we’d feel our way into the regular season against some halfway decent local competition, but all of a sudden we’re facing teams who’ve had an extra week or two of practice, who’ve got their game legs, so I want my guys to be ready. I want to layer in scrimmages that’ll be tougher and tougher—on paper anyway.

  This year I happened to run into Mergin Sina, who coaches the varsity at Gill St. Bernard’s, a private day school in Somerset County. We were out at Paterson Kennedy, competing in the fall league, and Mergin and I got to talking. I was bitching and moaning about our shortened preseason practice schedule, and a week or so after Thanksgiving, when we happened to run into each other again, we continued the conversation. Mergin was having some of the same concerns, so he offered to give us a game in his gym. He’s opening up his season at a big national tournament in Florida, and he wants to be ready. We’re opening up on Friday, December 16, against a small charter school in Trenton, Emily Fisher, and of course we want to be
ready too, so we looked at our calendars and hit on this date.

  We’ve already played a couple scrimmages, and we looked mostly okay. This stage of the season, you don’t even look at your opponents; you keep your focus on your guys, on what you’re trying to do. Still, Gill St. Bernard’s is one of the top teams in the state. This will be a step up, a chance for us to push our guys a little bit. I know Mergin’s squad will give us a good game, which is just what we need to kick-off our season. The idea is to ease into your schedule. You work your way up the ladder, one rung at a time, and I think Gill St. Bernard’s will be a good reach for us, a good way for us to see where we are. They’ve always had a strong program, and it’s looking like they’ll be one of the teams to beat in the south—along with St. Patrick, Trenton Catholic, Roselle Catholic, Cardinal McCarrick … the usual powers in the region.