The Miracle of St. Anthony Read online

  “If they went to jail, it was because I had exhausted every other avenue with them,” he says. “It was because that’s where they belonged.”

  Hurley had been too late for most of them. He was picking up the pieces of families and lives that had already been shattered. It deepened his own resolve, a belief that coaching was a calling, a responsibility, the last line of defense between kids and the streets, between getting out and getting left behind.

  “I would sit and listen to these men’s stories for thirty years, and almost always it was the same: Somewhere in the eighth, ninth grade, when they were just starting to make decisions, they got off course,” Hurley says. “At the end of the day, when it was time for me to go practice, I would want to run to those kids on my team. They all had the potential to rise above this, and I would do anything to see that they would. They would be behind academically, or need more discipline, and I would tell myself, ‘I can’t let them fall by the wayside, too.’

  “There were an awful lot of days where I would stagger to practice and tell my kids, ‘I had a brutal day today, boys.’ Friday was sentencing day in the county, where it became the ultimate frustration of watching men go inside for years of their lives. And Monday would be the day where the ones on probation would come in and tell me their stories. Those would just take the life out of me. We would practice from 3:00 to 4:30 on those days, and it would be a catharsis for me, just to get out of there for those one and a half hours. After that, I would go back to the office and meet with more men from 5:00 until 6:30.

  “But I would always bring these stories back to practice—and I still tell them now. I would point to a kid and tell him a story about a man going back to jail out of the housing project where the player was growing up. And once in a while, too, I’d have a story of someone who had turned his life around.”

  THIS WOULD BE the season of survival for Bob Hurley. The showdown of a street fighter’s life awaited in the winter of 2003-2004. Everything was on the line this year, the history, the tradition, the lives of a senior class threatening to sink back into the city’s streets.

  This would be the fight to save St. Anthony High School, the fight against the change in the culture of kids, the fight to prove that this basketball team—the one constructed around seniors he calls the “most dysfunctional class that I’ve had in thirty-two years”—would rise to meet a standard of St. Anthony Friars basketball greatness that they seemed determined to lower every day.

  They would have to do it on the basketball court, because he was going to be on this team like nothing they’d seen at St. Anthony in years. He is known as the greatest high school basketball coach in the country, but maybe there is no stopping there, because no one teaches the game like Bob Hurley. No one inspires kids like him, and no one anywhere in basketball comes closer to perfection under the most imperfect of circumstances. Almost anyone who’s watched his teams play through the years comes away convinced that they play harder than any team, on any level, that they’ve ever seen. And this promised to be a season where those seniors could expect him to keep coming at them every day.

  Yet, going into this season, Hurley had already given this team so many second chances, letting kids back whom he would never have before. He feared that it tore at the fabric of his authority, undermined his ability to lord over this basketball program—this dominance—with an iron fist. Sometimes, he knows, one player needs to be cast aside to spare the rest. Because once anyone sees a crack in the foundation, once the discipline is dulled, once the fear of God that his players feel when Bob Hurley walks into the gymnasium is done, this dynasty is dead. They might as well deflate the balls, barricade the doors to the high school, and understand that St. Anthony basketball will have lost its edge, lost its usefulness, and ultimately, lost its way.

  This worry wasn’t just on his mind now, it was torturing him. But what was his choice anymore? Once more, Hurley was the last line of defense. The tiny school was dying, the money had dried up again, and most of the fund-raising and donations that had come in were because people believed in him, in his values from a different time, a different Jersey City. They knew that if Hurley ever left, if the school ever closed, a whole way of life would go down too.

  Now, the relentlessly troubled seniors on his team were messing with the St. Anthony mystique, messing with Bob Hurley. They were daring him to a street fight that brought him back to the old days. They still didn’t get it, but there was time. He knew that somehow, if he could just get through, they would understand. He just hoped it wouldn’t be too late to save them, and maybe, save this senior class the dubious distinction of being the biggest bunch of screwups in school history.

  Someday, he knew, Marcus Williams and Ahmad Mosby, Lamar Alston Otis Campbell and Shelton Gibbs—all of them—would hear his voice and it would resonate. Because that voice never leaves his players.

  For better or worse, it stays with them forever.

  BOB HURLEY’S BALLPLAYERS will even hear his voice far from the basketball court, long after they have left his watch, the way Mark Harris, a firefighter out of Jersey City Ladder No. 12, had heard it on the roof of those burning row houses on Harmon Street years after he had shared the Friars backcourt with Hurley’s son Bobby, back in the late 1980s.

  His partner, Donald Stembridge, had been cutting a ventilation hole in the roof, and his foot got caught in the hole. Beneath them, they could see the flames exploding into the rafters and through the roof.

  “When we played, we used to get guys in traps and look at their facial expressions—just to see how scared they were,” Harris remembers. “As a kid, you’re not supposed to be thinking like that, but the game used to slow down that much for us. As players for Coach Hurley, we were so prepared that we began to see everything at a different speed. So I was standing in the middle of this, and the flames are everywhere and the roof is giving way and we’re close to falling into the fire. . . .

  “And right away, all that flashed into my mind was: Think before you react. Awareness. Alertness. And it was just like Coach had trained us. Everything turned to slow motion. It was like I was playing ball again.”

  After freeing his partner, Harris and Stembridge navigated across the crumbling footing, leaping to a safe area on top of a row house next door. A moment later, the blaze exploded through the rafters, engulfing the roof they had just abandoned.

  As Mark Harris stood against the Jersey City sky, as flames spit into the air, the chills ran up and down his spine. It had hit him, like it would for so many old St. Anthony basketball players.

  He looked into the inferno and thought: “Coach Hurley just saved my life.”

  CHAPTER 1

  ED SZALKIEWICZ KEPT coming down the third-floor corridor of St. Anthony High School, insisting that Ahmad Mosby—the senior everyone called “Beanie”—turn around and talk to him. Beanie wouldn’t take his do-rag off. That’s all the teacher wanted. Just take the damn thing off your head.

  “I’m going to call Coach Hurley,” Szalkiewicz warned.

  “Go ahead,” Beanie said, still walking away from him. “I don’t care.”

  This was one of those moments when working at the high school felt like working in a mental ward, because Beanie was losing his mind again. Actually, Beanie was being Beanie. It was a damned do-rag. Beanie wouldn’t dare to wear it into Hurley’s gymnasium, and he knew he shouldn’t be wearing it in the corridors of the school.

  This was Beanie at his worst: acting out, convinced that the world was out to get him, that he was just the last in a line of Mosby men doomed to self-destruction. Bob Hurley never called him Beanie, the nickname his family gave him when, as a baby, he looked as tiny as a bean. Hurley called him Ahmad. “Beanie was always the guy getting in trouble,” Hurley explains. “I want him to grow up and become ‘Ahmad.’ ”

  It was a Friday morning, November 21, just a week until practice started, and it looked like Beanie was trying hard to throw away the last chance he had to redeem
himself. He was an elastic five-foot-eleven, all gangly arms and legs. At times, he could be one of the most charming kids in the school, but too often, Beanie just brooded. He had a long, thin face, often wearing a tired, troubled look—like a forgotten old man sitting alone on a park bench.

  Beanie kept moving to his next class—psychology class, of all places—and dropped his books on the desk inside and sunk into the seat. Beanie remained defiant, telling the trailing teacher that he didn’t want to be yelled at, that he just wanted to be left alone.

  Between periods of teaching his environmental science class, a young assistant basketball coach named Darren Erman had heard it all unfolding from down the hall and rushed into the classroom to defuse the kind of mindless confrontation that had cost Beanie a week’s suspension at the start of the month.

  “Beanie, you’re so close,” Erman said, standing over him. “You’re too damn close to screw this up.”

  Beanie’s eyes stared defiantly straight ahead. Erman stayed on him.

  “You’re almost there. You’re getting the grades, the test scores. You’re playing great. You can taste it.

  “Don’t blow it, Beanie.”

  How many times had he heard that?

  Don’t blow it.

  His whole life, his mother and older sisters had shielded him like an endangered species, because, well, he was just that. The last Mosby man standing.

  The first-marking-period grades had just come out and all the hard work and concentration that Beanie invested had been rewarded: all B’s, and an A. He had been a good student in elementary school, pulling mostly B’s, and even winning science and math awards. He had done the absolute minimum—and often even less—for his first three years in high school. It was too late in his high school career to raise his marks high enough for a Division I scholarship, but this marking period had shown promise. There was so much unfulfilled promise within him, and Hurley prayed staying with Ahmad Mosby was worth the trouble.

  If only he could glide past his life’s strains like he could a defender—with one of his stop-on-a-dime, stutter-step moves to freedom. Every star high school guard in the state of New Jersey had a story about Beanie embarrassing him somewhere—against St. Anthony, in summer ball, at a camp—somewhere. He was the guard that just kept coming for you, again and again. He was a pain to play against, and when his head was on straight, a quintessential Hurley player.

  He was the youngest child of Cornelius and Beverly Mosby’s three daughters and two sons. Growing up, they had never told Beanie the reasons his father was constantly in and out of the hospital near the end of his life, why he was finally gone when Beanie was just in the second grade. Cornelius had been a drug dealer, and it had cost him his life.

  “Those years were so confusing for him,” his older sister, Crystal, says. “He was the baby, and we tried to protect him from my father dying.” She had gone away to college on a basketball scholarship, to the University of South Alabama, where after the constant telephone conversations with her little brother, and her mother’s reports on the way it seemed Beanie was slowly, surely getting sucked into Jersey City’s streets, Crystal had transferred back to Kean College in New Jersey for her final two years.

  “It didn’t hit him until he was thirteen and really realized his father was gone,” she says. “He needed him, and he realized that he wasn’t there. It hit him all at once: the acting out, the behavior, the mood changes.”

  Beanie escaped with basketball. Traveling constantly with the Jersey City Boys Club team, winning tournaments and trophies throughout the Northeast and the nation, basketball kept him on course. Basketball kept him going when an uncle had gone in and out of prison due to drugs, and basketball kept him going when his older brother ended up behind bars for pushing, too.

  “It put a lot of pressure on me,” Beanie says. “My father was in the drug game, and my uncle, and now my brother is locked up for it. It was like all the males in my family. Everyone is relying on me . . . ‘I want him to go to college . . . I want him to do this,’ and it’s pressure. It’s pressure I can handle, because I want to go to college. It’s like I shouldn’t mess up, because everyone is relying on me.

  “But it falls on my head. It’s like, ‘How am I going to keep myself on track, and not fall into the drug game like them?’ I think about it at times, and then I just tell myself, ‘No, you can’t even let yourself think of that, because you’re going to fall, too.’ ”

  Crystal says, “When you’re growing up and that’s what you’ve seen out of your role models, there’s that identity crisis that a young man will go through, trying to find out who he is, and where he fits. With what my brother has seen and been through, it’s remarkable that he’s never dabbled in that life. Never did.”

  And maybe it had been too much last year, when Hurley and the basketball team counted on him as a junior. Twenty games into the season, with the stretch run for the state tournament looming, Hurley had started to turn up the heat on his kids. He was on Beanie, the way he was on everyone. He kept telling him that he was only on the floor until Sean McCurdy came back from his injury, just keeping his spot warm.

  At home, in the Hudson Gardens projects, the pressure continued. His mother was watching a young grandson for a few hours a day, but the boy’s mother was constantly coming back late to take over the responsibilities. When Beanie would arrive home, he felt like his mother was taking her frustrations out on him. “She would start to yell at me, just after I came home from practice,” he says. “Coach Hurley was yelling at me there. I just couldn’t take it.”

  So he missed a practice in February and didn’t call anyone. And then another. In his mind, he was just going to walk away. Yet, as he sat home that second day, the confusion slowly gave way to clearer thinking and he reached out to Hurley’s assistant coaches with some tale about an injury, and then the snow. Nobody bought it. For thirty years, Hurley had listened to professional con men sell him stories every day in the probation office. The kids on his basketball teams could never get over on him. Never. Had he just told the truth, Beanie would’ve suffered a suspension and made it back to the season. He didn’t, so he was tossed.

  “In other schools, what he did would not have warranted what happened to him, but he’s in a different place,” Hurley says. “Instead of just admitting that he made a mistake, he tried to build some more stories to cover himself. The thing was, he was caving. We were coming to the pressure time of the year and there was some real performance anxiety there.”

  And then, Beanie made the mistake of trying to talk to Hurley after the next game, a sluggish victory over St. Peter’s of Staten Island in Jersey City. After witnessing Hurley’s fury in the postgame locker room, his top assistant coach, Ben Gamble, was mortified to see Beanie walking toward him outside. “I wish I could’ve stopped him,” Gamble says.

  Beanie tried to explain himself, only to have Hurley unload on him. “Get out of my face,” Hurley screamed. He was done, Hurley told him. He was suspended for the rest of the season. After flunking off the team as a sophomore, Beanie would fail to complete his second straight season. There was no guarantee that he’d ever play basketball at St. Anthony again.

  Looking back, Hurley had wished the assistants had stopped Beanie, told him to come to practice the next day and talk to Hurley after he had cooled down. He would’ve reinstated him for the state tournament, but it was too late, in the coach’s mind. The deed was done. Beanie was gone for the season.

  “At that point, he went from double secret probation to off the charts,” Hurley says. “There is a little bit of social worker in me. I had counseled him. It’s not like out of the clear blue that I’m going to chop someone’s head off. This is a sentencing. And the sentencing up in Superior Court is going to be based on the charge and the previous record. Judge Olivieri and Judge Callahan, good friends of mine, are very fair judges. And I think I’m a very fair judge.”

  In the end, St. Anthony had lost to number-one-ranked St.
Patrick’s, its archrival, when sophomore point guard Derrick Mercer was overcome by St. Pat’s ball pressure. He kept turning the ball over, and everyone couldn’t help but think that Beanie would’ve made the difference in that game. They still lost by just four points.

  “The whole team brought that up to me,” Beanie says. “All of them were saying, ‘If you had played in that game, we would’ve won.’ ”

  When Beanie kept showing up at games at the end of last season, Gamble was afraid of what he saw in the stands. More and more, Beanie looked like he was slipping into the thug life. Because without basketball, the kid would to try to fit in somewhere, with someone else. “He was walking around with that hard image, thinking he needed that to be accepted,” Gamble says.

  Ten years ago, Hurley never would’ve considered bringing Beanie back to the team. The relentless—twelve months a year—commitment was what separated St. Anthony—the conditioning, the camps, the summer leagues. Once he let one kid slide on it, the others would think that they could come and go as the mood struck them, and the championship foundation promised to crumble. But when the season was over, the coaches talked a lot about Ahmad Mosby and kept coming back to the same thing: He had nowhere else to go.

  They told Beanie that his grades had to come up, and as long as those did, he could start coming to open gym in the springtime. He had to start over with Hurley, but for better or worse, he was back together with his graduating class for a final run at redemption at St. Anthony, a final chance to chase what Hurley had always promised was waiting for them beyond the rainbow, a state championship and a scholarship. His family wanted to get him out of the Hudson Gardens, out of Jersey City, and away.