St. Anthony coach Hurley to be inducted into Hall of Fame

INDIANAPOLIS - When you are selected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in a class with such NBA greats as Karl Malone and Scottie Pippen, you might get overlooked - until you consider the impact Bob Hurley Sr. has had on the sport.

What Hurley has done at St. Anthony's High in Jersey City, N.J., really should be impossible. He has made the little school with no facilities into a hoops powerhouse. More important, he has impacted the lives of hundreds of young men who might otherwise have disappeared into the netherworld of the streets.

"Nobody coaches for this," Hurley said. "You coach for other reasons. But there is a compartment in everybody's head for something like this to happen."

When he is inducted on Aug. 13 in Springfield, Mass., Hurley will be joined by Malone, Pippen, WNBA star Cynthia Cooper, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, late NBA stars Dennis Johnson and Gus Johnson, as well as the late international player Maciel "Ubiratan" Pereira. Also, two teams, the 1960 Olympic team, featuring Oscar Robertson, Jerry West and Jerry Lucas, and the 1992 Dream Team, the greatest collection of talent in team sports history, will be inducted.

The modern-day players will get most of the attention, but Gus "Honeycomb" Johnson was a true revolutionary. The Baltimore Bullets star might have the most powerful dunker in history. One of his legacies was more broken backboards than any player in history. No glass was safe if Gus was in the gym.

Hurley is only the third high school coach selected. When he got started at St. Anthony's nearly 40 years ago, he modeled his career after DeMatha High's Morgan Wootten, one of the other high school coaches in the Hall.

"My background starts with a CYO team in my parish, St. Paul's, in Jersey City, in 1966," Hurley said. "Starting to coach at the high school level in '68 and I said Morgan Wootten is what I would like St. Anthony's to be when I become the high school coach in '73. I picked the right guy out to try to be like."

Hurley's career record (957-106) looks like a misprint. It is not. His best player was his son, Bobby Hurley, the point guard for Duke's 1991 and 1992 national champions.

It was 1991 in Indianapolis when Bobby was the Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four as Duke upset unbeaten UNLV in the semifinals and beat Kansas for the title. Now, his dad is here as a Hall member, while Duke is playing for another championship.

Pippen and Malone were members of that 1992 Olympic team. Every player on that team, except Chris Mullin and Christian Laettner, has been selected to the Hall.

Laettner retired from the NBA in 2005. He will be eligible for the first time next year. Great college players, who were not NBA stars, have been almost eliminated from Hall consideration in recent years.

Laettner will be a fascinating test case. Has any shot in history been replayed more than Laettner's game-winner against Kentucky in 1992? If Laettner, the most influential and successful college player of the last quarter-century, can't get inducted, then no great college player, without a dazzling NBA resume, can.

And what about Philadelphia University's Herb Magee? How many more games does he need to win? He has already won more NCAA games than any coach in history. Perhaps, his Hall of Fame day will come soon. *