The Miracle of St. Anthony Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for The Miracle of St. Anthony:

  “Part Bad News Bears, part Hoosiers, and absolute entertainment for anyone who cares about kids, basketball, education and any combination thereof.”—Gregg Doyel, CBS Sportsline.com

  “After more than eight hundred wins and in excess of one hundred players placed in four-year colleges, Bob Hurley may have thought he’d seen it all. But then St. Anthony’s tough-love coaching legend encounters a group of players he regards as the most clueless and unmotivated bunch he’s dealt with in thirty years of winning state and national titles. Bob Hurley deserves a great basketball writer to tell this story and he has one in Adrian Wojnarowski.”

  —Bob Ryan, Boston Globe columnist and panelist for ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters”

  “Hurley’s calling was always to do for St. Anthony what Coach Carter, Ken Carter, did for his Richmond, California, team, a truth laid out poetically in Adrian Wojnarowski’s book, The Miracle of St. Anthony.”—Ian O’Connor, USA Today

  “Wojnarowski . . . has matched Feinstein’s effort with The Miracle of St. Anthony. . . . It reads like a novel, with the players’ characters so fully developed that you felt personally connected.”

  —Joe Sullivan, The Boston Globe

  “Through the eyes and words of players, coaches, and nuns, Wojnarowski tells their story in a kind and compelling manner. But Miracle is more than a hoops history lesson; Wojnarowski also chronicles the devotion and motivation of Hurley and the sometimes harrowing life experiences of the young men he is trying to reach and teach.”

  —Steven Goode, The Hartford Courant

  “Wojnarowski provides a powerful, poetic look at an old-school disciplinarian. He makes it clear Hurley’s mission isn’t so much to win games as it is to change lives, to take boys from difficult urban backgrounds and turn them into men.”

  —Jerry Sullivan, The Buffalo News

  “An honest, sometimes startling peek into the workings of the most storied high school hoops program in the country. . . . Basketball junkies will love the book.”

  —Jerry Carino, Courier News (Bridgewater, NJ)

  “In [Wojnarowski’s] words, the entire tale becomes a melding of Hoosiers and Hoop Dreams. . . . St. Anthony’s is a story of passion and dedication and drama told well and true here.”

  —Mike Sielski, Calkins Newspapers

  “[An] enormously readable take on one of the game’s great teachers. . . . Wojnarowski has captured the Hurley life, one that along with producing winning basketball teams and successful kids also saves St. Anthony from closure and, some would say, saves a way of life in Jersey City.”

  —Cormac Gordon, Staten Island Advance

  “Like a good point guard who sees the entire floor—like a Bobby Hurley, for instance—[Wojnarowski] sees the totality of an incredible story, and he makes us care.”

  —Gordie Jones, Morning Call (Allentown, PA)

  “Remarkable . . . A tale that will inspire anyone who is responsible for the lives of young people.”

  —Simon Crowe, Greenville News

  “A story of determination, perseverance, and dignity . . . Wojnarowski brings readers a story of a basketball coach that is a hero, a school that means so much to many, and a basketball team that is on the brink of destruction.”

  —Felix Chavez, Las Cruces Sun-News

  Copyright © 2005 by Adrian Wojnarowski

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  For my parents, Edward and Lillian Wojnarowski, whose sacrifices for Bryan, Brenda, and me taught us the value of family.

  For Amy, the love of my life.

  For Annie and Ben, who make it all worthwhile.

  “We were in Vegas at the AAU event last summer, recruiting some kids on a South Dakota team. They come in, all white kids, beautiful uniforms, four coaches, parents in tow, running all kinds of offenses and defenses. So, I told my assistants, ‘Now, watch this. See this team here? Eight black kids from Jersey City. Shitty uniforms, no parents, not even a coach. Just a chaperone somewhere there.’

  “So, I tell my assistants, ‘Watch these Jersey City kids kick the shit out of that team.’

  “They’re like, ‘Why? What’s special about them?’

  “I told them, ‘They will not say a word to the refs. They will not say a word to the other kids. They’ll get on each other’s backs for not taking the charge, not closing out, not stopping penetration.’

  “So the game starts, and they were huddling at the free-throw line, one or two kids were yelling about not closing on penetration. They’re coaching themselves.

  “My assistants finally said to me, ‘Holy shit, these kids play like they’re possessed, like they’re freaking animals. Who are they?’

  “I said, ‘Well, they’re Bob Hurley’s kids.’ ”

  —Pat Kennedy, former Florida State and DePaul coach,

  currently at Towson University

  “To some extent, we’re all 24/7 with basketball, but Bob takes it to a level I’ve never really seen anywhere in the game. I mean, this guy takes his vacations to go coach basketball. Good luck finding any of us doing that in college. I’ve never seen anyone, on any level, more dedicated than him.”—Jim Boeheim, Syracuse University,

  2003 national championship coach

  “Everybody knows that Bob Hurley is the total package. The presence, the organization, the style of play, he’s one of the great teachers in the game. He captivates people when he’s talking. What he’s done at St. Anthony—with no gymnasium, no funding—the success speaks for itself. It’s staggering.”—Hubie Brown,

  2003-2004 NBA Coach of the Year

  “I think that Bob Hurley teaches the game of basketball better than anybody in the country. In the purest sense, a coach is a teacher. And he’s the best I’ve ever been around.”

  —Phil Martelli, St. Joseph’s University,

  2003-2004 NCAA Coach of the Year

/>   PROLOGUE

  IN THE OLD neighborhood, on the street corners in the Greenville section of Jersey City, in the playgrounds and the gymnasiums, Bob Hurley can still see him. Thirty-eight years have passed but Tommy Esposito will be forever eighteen years old, the kid the girls adored, the kid the boys wanted to be. He was Hurley’s best friend, big and strong and smart, representing promise—the promise of every kid who Hurley someday would struggle to save, and the tragedy of those he would lose.

  It happened late in the summer of 1965, in the fading innocence of his childhood, and it wouldn’t be until years passed that Hurley understood that both of them had been desperately trying to hold onto something that was slipping away too fast.

  Everything was changing, the way it had in the world beyond the borders of this jagged city in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan: the racial tensions, the growing anxiety about the Vietnam War, the drugs. Bob and Tommy had missed all of it while bouncing a basketball. Together, they had held courts from St. Paul’s Parish to the No. 30 School to Audubon Park. Afterward, they would drop a quarter on the counter of Irv’s Deli on the walk home to Greenville, on the southern tip of the city, buying pressed ham sandwiches on half a pizza loaf. On Friday nights, they would cross Kennedy Boulevard for the Friday night dances at Sacred Heart Academy, where fluid footwork on the gym floor remained secondary to flailing fists outside in the parking lot.

  It was one of those gorgeous summer nights when young men feel untouchable, like nothing could ever stop them. Bob, Tommy, and a few of the fellas had gone down to Roosevelt Stadium to watch Bucky Rineer, a buddy from the neighborhood, play quarterback for a minor-league football team.

  In just a few weeks, Hurley would begin his sophomore year at St. Peter’s College, over on Kennedy, where he had played freshman basketball. Tommy was a bright student and had a chance to play football in college, but no one had ever steered him that way at home. He had been a year behind Bob in school because he had run away as a kid and had been kept back at Snyder High. After enlisting in the army that summer, he would soon be leaving for basic training, and after that, Vietnam. Everyone was sure he would come home a war hero. Tommy Esposito could be a little crazy, but he always landed on his feet.

  As they walked to the corner of Danforth and Fowler, Hurley told his buddies that his family was away for the night and invited them over to watch the Mets game.

  “Nah,” Esposito told them, “we’re gonna go swimming in the channel.”

  NOW, ON A bright October afternoon in the fall of 2003, Bob Hurley, the coach of the nationally renowned St. Anthony High School boys basketball team, was pulling up in his Toyota Camry to that same corner. His thoughts went back again to that night in 1965.

  “So we get to the corner, and a couple of us made the right and walked over to my house,” Hurley said. “Tommy and two others guys decided to turn down toward the water. They walked up and bought some beer, and now they were going to go swimming in the pitch black down by the channel. They decided to hop a train. Two kids hopped up. Tommy was carrying the beer. He tried to hop on while the train was going.

  “He lost his balance. The one kid couldn’t grab him.”

  While Bob had been sitting in his living room, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner flickering on the television set, Tommy Esposito ended up under that train, pieces of his body scattered down the tracks by the Morris Canal.

  Hurley tapped the pedal in his old neighborhood, looked into his rearview mirror, and turned right, down Fowler. Window down, elbow dangling, he could feel the chilled autumn air through his blue nylon New Jersey Nets windbreaker. It meant that the start of basketball season wasn’t far off. And it guaranteed to tighten the knot in his stomach, that edge to his disposition that always came with the beginning of practice, with the uncertainty of it all.

  He made his way down Fowler, toward the gym, toward the basketball season and those St. Anthony kids looking as strong and young and alive as Tommy once had. He tugged on his baseball cap, snug to the edge of his forehead. His eyes were on the road, but his mind was back where Danforth met Fowler, where one boy had turned toward manhood, another toward a cautionary tale.

  “You get older and you realize that something was going to happen to the poor guy,” Hurley continued. “He didn’t have much at home. He just didn’t have the benefit of people helping him through things. Tommy Esposito had managed to fight everything. He was invincible.”

  That night, Hurley had learned the lesson about invincibility and these Jersey City streets, about what a kid needed growing up to give him a shot at getting on his way to a good life.

  “I guess you just know sometimes that a guy’s in danger, that someone has got to save him.”

  Thirty-eight years had passed, but on the streets outside his window, there were kids who now believed themselves to be just as invincible, who had no idea how vulnerable they were.

  That was something that never changed in Jersey City. There was always a corner, and there was always a choice.

  SEEN FROM THE steel arches suspending the Casciano Bridge over Newark Bay, Jersey City stands with a skyline of steeples and smokestacks, leaving the ill-informed the impression that it has stayed largely untouched and unchanged over the years. Still, everything had moved such a long way from those days when Bob Hurley’s old man had walked the streets as a beat cop.

  As crime and poverty remained on the rise in Jersey City, as the public school system grew into such disarray that the state of New Jersey had to strip control from the local board of education, Hurley and the two Felician nuns, Sister Felicia and Sister Alan, wouldn’t let the doors of the tiny brick school on Eighth Street in downtown close for good, even when the parish church had pulled its funding, even when the archdiocese would do little but wish them the best and privately predict its demise. For a quarter of a century now, the three of them had been trying to keep St. Anthony High School open for the poorest of the poor in Jersey City. Each year, with limited resources—without even his own gymnasium—Hurley constructed a national powerhouse program out of an enrollment that struggled to stay at 200 students for four grades. And every year, as St. Anthony balanced on the brink of financial ruin, that basketball team and coach would find a way to rally everyone and raise the money so another class could graduate and keep the school’s decade-long streak of 100 percent college acceptance. Most of all, Hurley just wouldn’t let that school die in a Jersey City where so much else he had held sacred was gone.

  Today, the varsity letter sweaters have turned to gold chains, the fists to firearms, and it breaks Hurley’s heart to see that the Jersey City that raised him has grown so complicated and treacherous for the kids under his watch now. High school basketball has changed, too, growing corrupt and commercialized, but its greatest dynasty never budges because Bob Hurley is determined to stay the most stubborn S.O.B. ever to walk into the gym with a whistle. In thirty-one seasons as St. Anthony coach, his teams had 796 victories and 91 losses, twenty-one Parochial state titles, eight of the fifteen New Jersey Tournament of Champions titles ever held, two USA Today national championships and five runner-up finishes. And most of all, all of it had been done the St. Anthony way. His way.

  “What I have here is a formula to get kids out of Jersey City,” Hurley says, and it begins with his foot on their throats, commanding them completely until they get out of high school, until they’ve gone to college like each of his players but one has since he started coaching at St. Anthony in 1972.

  Hurley has sent more than a hundred players to full basketball scholarships, and five to the NBA as first-round picks, including his son, Bobby. It stands as an odd juxtaposition: Hurley has stayed so that they can get out. Somehow, Hurley is still the biggest bargain in sports—$6,800 a season to win championships year after year, to mold men and raise the revenue to save the school and its student body, to save a way of Catholic school education that is fading fast in urban America.

  To him there is something so p
ure about high school basketball. In Hurley’s practice gym, it is always 1965. There are no tattoos on his players, no cornrows, no facial hair. The most improbable dynasty in basketball has survived against the longest odds because Hurley has kept watch on these streets when he could’ve left to be a famous college coaching star, with a million-dollar-a-year package, a shoe deal, and racks of Armani suits. Yet on game nights, he wore that same maroon sweater-vest, those gray slacks, and his dulled brown loafers. And his kids still play the fiercest man-to-man in basketball, treating opponents like they’ve broken into their homes and threatened their families.

  He drives his team with a tenacity taken from thirty years on the job as a Hudson County probation officer. Thirty years of walking into housing projects and gutted-out apartments where cops didn’t dare go without a partner and a piece. Trusting his instincts to think on his feet, Hurley had hardened himself to deal with whatever lurked in the stairwell shadows.

  The fear, the sheer uneasiness that his figure strikes into his players—what he uses to push his teams—is borne out of his own fear of the influence of the streets, out of the understanding that as soon as compromise and concession reach his gymnasium, he’s lost everything. “I grew up in a neighborhood where you crossed the street to avoid somebody, or you just kept walking toward him, saying to yourself, ‘Screw it, I’ve got to deal with it today,’ ” Hurley says.

  Yet something still drove him that people couldn’t see, couldn’t possibly understand unless they had seen the innocence of Tommy Esposito’s face, unless they had sat at Hurley’s probation desk to witness the wasted lives and broken promise of two generations. Until his retirement from probation two years ago, he had done the best he could sifting through the carnage of Jersey City’s lost souls.