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LAS VEGAS — They met at Dohoney’s, a local bar owned by one of Bob Hurley Sr.’s oldest friends in Jersey City, N.J. Danny Hurley, the younger of Bob’s two sons, asked Seton Hall basketball’s three primary beat writers to meet him there. Danny sat in the back, waited for them to arrive. One by one, they filled the table — John Rowe from The Bergen Record, Mike Amsel from the Asbury Park Press, and Tom Luicci from The Newark Star-Ledger.
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Immediately, Danny leveled with them.
He hated basketball.
And he was done with it.
The three writers sat stunned, staring back at the 20-year-old. Then they scribbled this all down. Danny was under too much pressure. Couldn’t do it anymore. Being Bob Hurley Sr.’s son was too hard. Being Bobby Hurley’s brother was even harder. The Seton Hall fans were too much. The ones who booed during supposed home games at the Meadowlands. The ones who wanted their own version of Bobby — the Duke star — but instead got Danny, the other Hurley. He wasn’t good enough for them, and they let him know it. Bob Sr., the patriarch of both the family and New Jersey basketball, attending every game alongside wife Chris, seethed, needing to be talked out of confronting fans and popping ’em. But it wasn’t as if road games were that much better. Opposing fans could be even worse. Chants of, “You’re not Bob-by!”
Danny laid it all on the table, telling the writers he was broken. He said he was drinking too much, partying too much, chasing coping mechanisms. He explained why he was taking a personal leave of absence from Seton Hall basketball. A seismic decision, unheard of in 1993. Luicci, the last remaining of the three Seton Hall writers there that day, remembers: “He said he needed time to think. He was brutally honest with us.”
So that was it. The end, potentially, of Dan Hurley’s basketball life.
“I wanted nothing to do with it,” he says, sitting here today. “When I took the leave, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever play again. I locked myself in my dorm room for like two days. No one could get at me, no one could find me. F—, man, I didn’t want to play. I didn’t even want to watch it.”
It’s a little after 10 p.m. local time in Las Vegas, 30 years later, and Dan is in a side room attached to a locker room in T-Mobile Arena. He’s wearing suit pants, a UConn basketball T-shirt and an NCAA Tournament West Regional champions hat. From this seat, he can see it all. He sees where he was, he sees where he is. He sees who he is.
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He thinks about when he told the world he hated basketball, and says: “When you’re from Jersey City, and your dad is tough as nails, and your brother is tough as nails, and everyone in your neighborhood is tough as nails — for me, I needed to show some vulnerability. I didn’t have a lot of people I could open up to. I felt like I needed to tell people I was hurting, that I was in a bad way.”
On the other side of the wall, the 2022-23 Connecticut men’s basketball team is packing its bags for a flight back to Storrs. It will be a brief visit home. This group, a ruthless combination of offense and defense, just pulverized Gonzaga, what was thought to be a challenger. Now, it’s off to Houston, off to the Huskies’ sixth Final Four since 1999, but first since 2014. Hurley was hired in March 2018 to fix the place and has done it. For a man wired by a preoccupation with self-deprecation, the moment marks a long-sought validation. He might not come out and say that this is a fulfillment of his lineage, but his wife will.
“Surreal,” Andrea Hurley says at midcourt, confetti stuck to her shoes. “He’s just fought and fought and fought. He’s wanted to prove that he’s legit.”
He just had to do it in his own way.
UCLA assistant Darren Savino paced around a bathroom late Thursday night, fighting mixed emotions. His Bruins fell to Gonzaga in the West Regional semifinal, ending a promising season in the Sweet 16. The top button of Savino’s dress shirt was undone, the knot on his necktie pulled down. He felt terrible for his guys, but also …
“I’m just so happy for Danny,” Savino said, remembering UConn rolled over Arkansas in the night’s opening game.
Savino grew up on the same block as the Hurleys in Jersey City. He’s as close to being the third Hurley brother as is possible — same age as Bobby, two years older than Danny. The three did everything together, running the streets, playing stickball, punchball, kickball, basketball. Bobby and Danny could usually be found on the front steps of White Eagle Hall, the former bingo parlor that served as St. Anthony High School’s gym, either waiting to go in or because Bob Sr. just threw them out.
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St. Anthony, a life raft for those who needed it in Jersey City, operated with an enrollment under 500, sometimes with fewer than 200 boys. A Catholic school with 10 classrooms, no gym, and tutoring in an outside trailer. Gym classes were held at the Jersey City Boys and Girls Club, eight blocks from the school.
From here, you likely know, Bob Sr. coached the Friars to a 1,185-125 record, 28 state titles, four national championships and a place in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He is perhaps the greatest high school coach in basketball history.
And from here, you also likely know, Bobby Hurley went from being a 5-foot-1, 90-pound eighth grader into a national icon. He is one of the greatest college basketball players of all time.
And then there’s Danny.
“Tough little sucker,” Savino says. “Danny was the jokester, Bobby was a little more serious. Bobby, off the court, was laid-back. Danny was a ball-buster. I called him the Hudson County Ball-Buster. That’s what he is.”
Danny was, in fact, a hell of a basketball player. He led St. Anthony to a 31-1 record and a No. 2 national ranking as a senior. Seton Hall and Rutgers were all over him. He opted to play for P.J. Carlesimo and a Seton Hall team led by former St. Anthony stars Terry Dehere and Jerry Walker. Hurley joined the program in 1991-92, playing a reserve role for a team that won the Big East and reached the Sweet 16. There were, however, early signs that Hurley was slipping down the well. He remembers a matchup with Ohio State at noon on a Saturday in late January 1992. Big-time game. Jim Nantz and Billy Packer on the call.
Danny? He was at a bar till 2 a.m. the night before. He arrived at the Meadowlands with tousled hair and heavy eyes.
That season ended with a worst-case scenario. Duke-Seton Hall in the 1992 regional semifinal. Duke trying to repeat as national champion. Seton Hall chasing a return to the Final Four for the first time since that heartbreaking ’89 title game. Bob Hurley Sr. told reporters the game was “an emotional nightmare” for the family, and it would play out in front of a sold-out crowd and a national television audience. Bobby, an All-America junior point guard, said afterward playing his brother was “the hardest thing I had to do this year.” He struggled, going 2-of-7 with four points and six turnovers. Danny guarded him multiple times, and vice versa. There was some chirping, mainly from Bobby.
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In the end, Seton Hall’s season ended with a loss to the No. 1-ranked team in the country for the second straight year (it was UNLV in ’91). Bobby and the Blue Devils, meanwhile, advanced to the regional final for the fifth consecutive year.
Duke advanced to play Kentucky on a Saturday night at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.
Maybe the single greatest game in this sport’s history.
Where was Danny that night? As much as he loved his brother, he couldn’t do it, couldn’t sit there, couldn’t openly cheer for the team that beat him two days earlier. Danny watched Duke-Kentucky in the freshman dorm at Seton Hall.
“Hammering beers, nervous as hell,” he says. “When that shot went in, it was f—ing on. It was a late night after that.”
Duke went on to win a second straight national championship. Bobby was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four, because of course he was.
The next season, expected to take on a larger role as a sophomore, Danny instead started 16 of 34 games, averaging 6 points in 23 minutes per game. The weight upon him grew. “He was doing his best to do his best, but everything would inevitably go wrong,” says Robin Cunningham, the Pirates’ academic adviser at the time. “He was always walking around with his head down, and he’d eventually bump into something.” That January, Hurley was booed every time he entered or exited a game against North Carolina at Meadowlands Arena. He said afterward: “I can’t make a mistake. I think I play hard and I don’t deserve this abuse. I’m a college kid.”
Bobby, on the other hand, was a senior at Duke, on his way to becoming the NCAA’s all-time assist leader and again an All-American. Both Hurleys’ teams flamed out early in the NCAA Tournament.
In 1993-94, with Bobby in the NBA with the Sacramento Kings after being the No. 7 pick in the draft, Danny embarked on his junior year. He was, he says now, “a mess.” The Seton Hall staff met with him day after day, trying to understand what they were dealing with. Today, the au courant term is mental health. But this was 1993.
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“It was very difficult for us to understand what he was going through,” says Bruce Hamburger, a Seton Hall assistant. “That high bar was so built-in. The Hurley name in New Jersey? It is literally like royalty. Problem was, he was never treated that way. He was really a high-level player but was just in a fish bowl, constantly.”
The second game of the season was against St. John’s at Madison Square Garden. The Knicks also played the Kings that day, making for a Hurley doubleheader in Manhattan. The last thing Danny needed. All the shallow comparisons he swam in for so long all resurfacing at once. Danny wanted no part of it.
He didn’t show up for practice the next day. Then he missed the Pirates’ next game — against UConn. The program conveniently said it was a case of the flu. Eventually, Carlesimo revealed Danny was taking a personal leave. “He has to get away from us and basketball for a while,” Carlesimo told writers.
That was on a Saturday.
The next day, late on a Sunday night, Dec. 12, 1993, as Bobby drove home from Sacramento’s Arco Arena after a game against the Clippers, his Toyota 4Runner was broadsided by a 1970 Buick station wagon without its headlights on. Bobby was thrown 100 feet out of his vehicle, crumpled in a drainage ditch.
Two collapsed lungs, five broken ribs, a torn ACL, a broken shoulder, among other injuries. Life-threatening stuff. So much so that the Kings needed to issue a release saying Hurley was expected to live. He spent two weeks in the hospital, finally released on Christmas Day 1993.
The Hurley family was off its moorings, no longer understanding the world. The stress pulled Bob Sr. apart, and he developed a nasty bout of pneumonia. He was forced to hand the team at St. Anthony over to his assistant, George Canda, but Canda needed help.
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There was only one guy everyone would trust.
Young Danny.
Having withdrawn from school to move home, turning away from his future to instead return to a time-starved place, Danny wasn’t able to spend more than a day figuring things out. “Here this guy had finally decided to take care of himself, and, immediately, all attention was back on Bobby, as it had always been,” Cunningham says. “Of course, everyone felt so bad for Bobby, but we felt bad for Danny, too. He really needed help.”
With both his dad and his brother recovering at home, Danny returned to the gym. He stepped in front of the St. Anthony team, a whistle in his hand, as an assistant coach. If there are moments in life when everything that’s come before feels like a prelude, this was one for Danny. He had no choice but to be himself.
“I refound just how much I love basketball,” Dan says today. “Just being around the kids, going to practice, games. I always felt like I knew the game better than I played it. Coaching felt natural, know what I mean?”
Danny didn’t magically figure everything out in one practice. But this was a step. A necessary one. He was never going to remove basketball from his life. We don’t choose our DNA. But he was on his way to figuring out his place in the game.
“That’s when we got to the point where we talked about it — that the pressure he was putting on himself to be successful wasn’t allowing him to enjoy his journey,” Bob Sr. says.
Danny Hurley sat out the remainder of the 1993-94 season. Seton Hall went 17-13, finished under .500 in the Big East, and lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Carlesimo moved on to the NBA, replaced by Holy Cross coach George Blaney, an old family friend from the Hurley’s parish in Jersey City. When Danny re-enrolled in ’94-95 with two years of eligibility remaining, he’d take on the role of Seton Hall’s No. 2 scorer behind Adrian Griffin. The Pirates wouldn’t win much those next two seasons, but Danny played — as himself.
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From his seat courtside in Las Vegas on Saturday night, Carlesimo, now a radio broadcaster, reached over the table along press row and embraced Hurley in a bear hug. Reminded of when his former player nearly walked away from the game, Carlesimo paused, thought, and said, “Danny did what was best for him, not in a selfish way, but because he needed to. He needed to decide what he wanted.
“Basically hasn’t looked back since.”
Bobby Hurley, fresh off signing a contract extension as Arizona State head coach, flew into Vegas on Wednesday night. He went over to UConn’s team hotel to track down his brother. Dan said to Bobby that he wondered how the weekend was going to go. The Sweet 16. The Elite Eight. A chance at a Final Four. It’s all so big. “So many times in basketball life,” Dan told his brother, “I’ve been the dude from Charlie Brown, and the girl always pulls the football away when I go to kick it.”
Bobby mimicked the teacher. “Wha-wha-wha.”
This is how Dan Hurley exists. He will play the part of the younger brother, the one they still call Danny, who can’t catch a break, maybe doesn’t measure up. He has it down pat. Call it what you will — inferiority complex, impostor syndrome, whatever — this is how he sees the world. He doesn’t know another way. It’s part of the reason, about 20 years ago, while working at Rutgers, he began going by Dan. Perpetually the youngest, he wanted to seem older.
The byproduct of Dan’s disposition is work. Whatever he feels about himself, that is, in turn, the voltage in his wiring. He’s climbed from an assistant coaching role at Rutgers (1997-2001) to a high school head coaching gig at St. Benedict’s Prep (2001-10), to Wagner (2010-12), where Bobby spent two years on his staff, to Rhode Island (2012-18) and now to UConn. Other than one blip at Rhode Island in 2016, every team he’s coached has won more games than it did the prior season.
Now he has this version of UConn, a team that’s built in the Hurley image and has come to take on Dan’s personality. They feel doubted. They feel aggrieved. They’re going to operate with an edge, kick everyone’s ass, and prove their worth.
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“Yeah, but we suck,” Dan says, winking.
As of this week, the highlight of Dan Hurley’s basketball life, according to Dan Hurley, is winning the NJSIAA Tournament of Champions as a high school senior and winning the Atlantic 10 tournament at Rhode Island. For having a hall of fame name and spending a lifetime in the game, he’s still looking for his crowning moment.
He very well might be one week away from it. UConn is in the Final Four, and it will be Bob Sr. and Bobby sitting in the front row in Houston, along with mom Chris, and sister Melissa. It will be Andrea, and the couple’s sons — young Danny Hurley, also a Seton Hall grad, and Andrew, a junior UConn walk-on — and everyone else. All watching Dan. Maybe wanting it for him more than he even wants it for himself.
But Dan?
He says he doesn’t need validation. Not anymore at least. Saturday night in Las Vegas began with him fighting back tears 45 minutes before tipoff against Gonzaga, realizing this could be the last time he coaches this specific UConn team. This group means the world to him. As does his wife, and family. He doesn’t need anything else, or to be anyone to anybody.
It might’ve taken awhile, but Dan Hurley found what he was looking for.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)