Never stop, p.6
Never Stop, page 6
* * *
As Bob started down the road to recovery, as he left the hospital and took those first ginger steps toward rebuilding himself, I began my own journey back from the abyss. I returned to New Jersey, resumed my sessions with Sister Catherine. I told her all about Bob’s accident, the nightmare of seeing him in the hospital, the dark emotions it all stirred. “Should’ve been me.”
She listened with great sympathy and then noted that there was no shame in believing—admitting?—I’d suffered my own crash. And that I too needed to heal. Just as Bob was in pain, so was I. Just as Bob would need time and resilience to return to normal, so would I. “It’s a journey,” Sister Catherine said, “and it’ll require a safe resting place along the way where you can stop, at regular intervals, and refresh yourself, and say whatever it is you need to say.”
Her office was that place. Her heart. That was Sister Catherine’s specialty. Heart.
And honesty.
I heard her, I trusted her. I nodded. OK. I was all in.
And so we started meeting three times a week for one-hour sessions, and in no time it happened. I could feel everything starting to turn. The work was painful, exhausting. I cried—a lot. I went deep, gave voice to things I’d never said aloud before, to anyone, not even myself. Each session felt more emotional than the last. But I learned so much about myself, by trusting her and distrusting my ego—and being vulnerable. I learned how to shed, once and for all, that heavy legacy of Jersey City, that stoic man code. Or at least moderate it.
“Danny,” Sister Catherine said one day, “you’re never going to be happy if you keep looking at life the way you’re looking at it right now. You only think about yourself as a basketball player. Until you care equally about your intellect, your mindset, your performance in school, the quality of your relationships with friends, nothing will change. Are you in relationships with women that will lead to something? Or are they frivolous relationships? What does your spiritual life look like? Do you go to Mass? Are you a believer in Christ?”
She led me, prodded me, questioned me. She never lost patience. It felt at times as if we were puttering in a workshop, building something together, and then I realized: Oh, right, we are. A self. A new self for Dan Hurley to walk around in. And to protect.
But this wasn’t woodworking or car repair. This was like repairing a shattered piece of pottery. Fine, painstaking work. Lots of attention to micro detail.
And it was all interior. She was the first person with whom I’d ever explored my interior, the first who seemed interested in my interior. Who seemed to think whatever was on my inside was valuable.
I reenrolled in school and my grades began to improve. I made progress toward a degree. I slept more deeply, smiled at the person I saw in the mirror each morning. I can even credit Sister Catherine for my impromptu press conference at Dohoney’s, a Jersey City bar, six weeks after my final game. It was she who talked me into taking that very public and very terrifying step.
My twenty-first birthday—January 16, 1994. I told the beat writers who covered Seton Hall that I’d left the team because I had difficulty coping with stress. Full stop. And that I was in counseling to deal with low self-esteem and depression. And that I never again wanted to feel what I had felt over those three or four days holed up in my dorm room. And that P. J. had been totally supportive, that I didn’t realize he was such a caring guy when he was on my ass every day.
They laughed.
I told them that P. J. even called me during halftime of one game while Seton Hall was losing—just to check in. Hearing from him showed me he had a heart for his players.
I told them that I’d recently seen an emotional side of my father that I hadn’t seen before and that, much as he wanted me to return to the game he loved, he’d still love me if I didn’t.
I neglected to mention how much Mom and Dad were struggling. One son suffers a breakdown, the other’s in a near-fatal car crash—naturally they weren’t doing well. Dad especially. He never took medication for anything, he didn’t believe in it, but suddenly he was doing a little self-medicating. Dad was never much of a drinker, but now he was having a couple of drinks at night to numb the pain. It didn’t work.
* * *
No one was surprised when he got sick. Pneumonia. It knocked him out of commission, kept him off the St. Anthony’s sideline. Meekly, coughing, he asked if I might be interested in helping out with the team until he got back on his feet. I was shocked. And beyond hesitant. But there was only one answer. I told him I’d do whatever he needed.
Crazy, but filling in for Dad, coaching at good old St. Anthony’s, returning to my roots, helped reignite my love of the game. It was the first time I’d touched a ball in weeks, months, and it just felt so damn good. All of it felt so good. Like seeing an old friend with whom you’ve had beef, and you can’t seem to remember what the beef was about.
I loved teaching the players about the game. I was coaching, although I didn’t think of it as coaching. I thought of it as helping Dad. Being Dad. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to examine it too carefully. I just wanted to enjoy the hell out of it.
The only negative: We weren’t at White Eagle Hall. We were practicing in the Ice Box, the Jersey City Armory, which was massive and freezing cold. No more bingo tables, no more cigarette butts on the free-throw line. Oh well, I thought. Can’t have everything.
The kids on the team knew me, of course. I was a Hurley after all. Still. But they also remembered my career. Vividly. They remembered everything about this game and that. They came of age when I was the best player in the state. Many of them attended games in which I’d been great. Their admiration did a lot to ease the pain of those Seton Hall memories, which were still fresh.
“Hurley SUCKS. Bobby’s BETTER.”
* * *
After I coached the team to a win over an excellent Christian Brothers Academy team, I was fucking giddy. I had that old feeling again, being a part of a team… that connection… that camaraderie. I talked to Sister Catherine about this feeling. What is it? Pride? Contentment? Happiness? Whatever it is, more please.
She began upping the stakes, giving me stuff to read. One of them was Knicks coach Pat Riley’s book The Winner Within, which completely changed the way I looked at everything. I don’t know that I’d ever voluntarily read a book before in my life. And now I was devouring this slim volume. Highlighting, underlining, memorizing. “Until you change the way that you look at things, those things will never change.” Hell yes, Coach Riley.
Among the many sacred gifts given to me by Sister Catherine, this was one of the most precious. The gift of reading. Of learning.
When I set down Riley’s book, I went and read everything I could find about him. His upbringing, his relationships, his family—his demanding father. Oh, demanding father? You don’t say? Plus, Riley Sr. was a coach. He’d spent years trying to make it in pro baseball. He’d caught on with eighteen different minor league teams before finally getting his big chance in the show. He recorded a grand total of twelve at bats, with only one hit. I don’t know if that brief flirtation with his dream made him bitter, and extra demanding of his son, but I also don’t know how it couldn’t. The pressure he must have put on his son Pat…
After reading Riley’s book and thinking about the winner within me, I started to entertain thoughts of returning to the team at Seton Hall. I made up the first-semester exams I’d missed after Bob’s accident and started to practice with the team. Baby steps.
I was having fun, shooting well, feeling great on the court. So P. J. naturally suggested that I return as a full-time player.
A very generous offer. Which I declined.
I was feeling better, feeling alive, but not fully healed. It wasn’t an anti-P. J. thing so much as me feeling I just wasn’t ready for that kind of challenge. March Madness? Are you kidding?
I wouldn’t play another game for the rest of the season, and that was fine. The important thing was this: My first love, my true love, basketball, was back in my life.
* * *
After finishing my third year at Seton Hall as a redshirt practice player, I returned full-time in the fall of 1994.
But everything was different. P. J. was gone. He’d left school for the NBA, to coach the Portland Trail Blazers. His replacement was George Blaney, who straight up saved me. Saved my soul and saved my basketball career, as surely as Sister Catherine.
Did it hurt that Blaney was from Jersey City? No, it did not. Did it hurt that he’d been one helluva baller at Holy Cross? Or that his brother Jimmy played in the same high school backcourt as my father, who coached Blaney’s youngest brother, Mike, in grammar school at St. Paul’s? Again, no, it did not.
And then in 1961 Blaney was a draft choice of the New York Knicks. He was a big name on the Jersey basketball scene with a lot of street cred long before we even met.
Immediately after Blaney replaced P. J., he started reaching out to me. Asking questions. And those questions had nothing to do with basketball. He asked questions like “How are you doing in school?” And “Do you have a girlfriend?” And “Who are you hanging out with off the court?” And “Did you go to Mass yesterday?”
And “Are you drinking?”
To see a coach care about me so much, to see him unafraid to show personal interest, changed everything.
Not that Coach Blaney was averse to talking basketball! And when he did, he said some really shocking shit. He told people, and word got back to me, that I had the talent to play in the NBA. He told people that he really liked me. He showed me that he liked me. He saw that I was damaged, wounded, and it didn’t make him like me any less. Fuck, it made him like me more.
My teammates and I were quickly won over by Blaney’s quiet, gentle manner. P. J. screamed a lot, Blaney screamed never. Well, rarely. He was steadfastly and resolutely calm. It was like playing for the neighborhood priest.
Through Blaney’s calm, I became calmer on the court. I grew in confidence, started believing in my game again. Five games into the season, two days after undergoing a double root canal, I scored a career-high twenty-five points in a victory over Wagner. “We’ve been trying hard to get Danny back to where he loves the game,” Coach Blaney told reporters afterward. “He seems to be having a good time.”
By now Bob was back with Sacramento, miraculously healed up after a long and difficult rehab. But my own comeback, in my own mind, was no less miraculous. And it was accompanied by equally cosmic changes in the Seton Hall program. Coach Blaney let me play my game out there. He seemed to enjoy watching me play. And that inspired a fierce loyalty in my heart. Together, we won ten of our first fourteen games.
Then we ran into St. John’s at Madison Square Garden.
My first game at the Garden since the Hurley Day Debacle. Scene of the crime, I kept thinking.
Down three points in the final seconds, there was a strip, the ball squirted loose, and somehow it rolled over to me. I grabbed it and saw that I was beyond the three-point line. The play wasn’t drawn up for me, the ball wasn’t supposed to be in my hands, but suddenly it was. I’d always dreamed of hitting a big shot in the Garden, and here was my chance. With James Scott of St. John’s hanging all over me, I leaned forward, left my feet, double pumped to avoid Scott’s block attempt, and let it rip. I actually blacked out as the ball arced through the air. But I came to just as it went through the hoop with 1.6 seconds left, sending the game into overtime.
St. John’s coach Brian Mahoney looked as if he’d been hit with a brick. The air went out of him and his whole team. Then in OT I hit another big three-pointer and we won going away—by ten points. When Coach Blaney took me out of the game in the closing seconds, I thought of all those fans who’d booed and hurled obscenities at me. I looked across the court at them and took a bow. A deep, theatrical bow. “They’ve been doing it to me for a long time,” I told reporters after the game. “I should be entitled to a couple of seconds of it myself.”
My line was sweet. Nineteen points, six assists, two steals. The whole experience felt like a blast of sunshine and pure oxygen, after being buried alive. I felt a pulsing pride that I hadn’t felt in years—maybe ever. And people around me, people who loved me, they saw it. Felt it. Dad couldn’t be there that day because he was back coaching St. Anthony’s, and they had a game against All Hallows, but Mom was there, despite battling the flu. She missed my game-saving shot because, just as I let it go, someone spilled a soda on her pocketbook.
But she saw my postgame glow and that was all she cared about. Later she told a reporter that I seemed like a totally different person. “Watching Danny smile,” she said, “is the greatest feeling in the world.”
That was the whole point.
I wasn’t a different person. I was myself.
For once. The last time I’d taken a last-second shot, I was in high school, and I’d missed. A three-pointer that would’ve helped St. Anthony’s win the state championship. This felt better, I’m not going to lie. But I recognized that either way I was going to be OK. I had no fear, and that was what counted.
My brother had a game against the Celtics the following night. When I met with the media I said, “I’m going to tell Bobby that anything he does will pale in comparison to my shot. That’s the first time I’ll ever be able to say that to him.” But I said it with love, without envy. Without any sense of comparison. I was just damned happy he was out there, healthy, doing what he loved to do.
* * *
I averaged fourteen points per game over my two full seasons under Coach Blaney. I finished my Seton Hall career with more than a thousand points scored. While I’ve talked a lot over the years about being haunted by my failures as a player, I have to say: It’s not easy to score a thousand points in a big-time Division I program. Or to average fourteen points in the Big East. I’m proud of those numbers, because they’re more than numbers. They have a context, a backstory, that makes them symbols of personal endurance.
When I looked around for people to thank, it was Mom and Dad, Sister Catherine, and of course Coach Blaney. That man made it happen. That man’s support, and belief, taught me so much about manhood. He modeled what it meant to be a good man, a quiet leader. When it was all over I had the clearest thought: How awesome would it be to change someone’s life the way Coach Blaney changed mine?
SIX
Andrea Sirakides first watched me play basketball when she was in elementary school. Her parents were from Jersey City, and her dad was a sports fan who loved my father’s program. So of course, once a year he’d take the whole Sirakides clan to see St. Anthony’s play Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, NJ.
Having no interest in the outcome, Andrea would pass the time during games by making string bracelets.
Then Andrea became a Seton Hall freshman. She paid a little more attention to the games but only attended my final home game, against UConn, before a sellout crowd of twenty thousand in Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, NJ. Ray Allen and the Huskies ran us out of the building, and the fans got ugly. Andrea was with her family, and at one point she turned to her mother in sadness. “This is why I hate sports,” she said. “That kid is doing the best he can, and they are being so mean to him.”
She chirped back at the fans. “Why do you even bother coming to the game if you’re just going to yell things at this kid?” she told them. “You think he wants to do bad? He’s not a professional.” About four weeks after that game, a Thursday night, I was at a bar near campus. The Hall. With me was my teammate John Yablonski and his girlfriend, Emily. Suddenly Emily said she wanted me to meet someone. Her best friend—Andrea.
I was enamored right away. And not the least bit discouraged that she was a freshman, whereas I was a fifth-year senior. She was super mature, I was permanently immature. We’re basically equals, I thought.
I found it charming that she was clueless about sports. But she was interested in many other things, and we found plenty to talk about. She was assertive, funny—fun.
She mentioned that she loved the way I was dressed. Flannel shirt, jeans, Timberland boots, gold chain. She thought my city vibe was a sharp contrast with her Jersey Shore vibe. I took it as a compliment.
At the end of the night I drove her and her friends home, making sure I dropped her last. We sat in the car and talked awhile.
We made plans to get together that Saturday night.
But when I rolled up for our date, a different woman opened my car door. The woman I met had straight hair and blue eyes; this woman had curly hair and green eyes. “I’m not in the mood for jokes,” I said to this stranger. “Where’s Andrea? I’m not doing this today.”
She threw up her hands. She stared in horror. She explained that she was Andrea, the same woman I met in the bar. She just had naturally curly hair and wore colored contacts.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I just put the car in drive and hit the gas.
The mood in the car was tense. She thought I’d always looked arrogant on the court, like I had a chip on my shoulder, that I didn’t seem like the nicest guy on campus, and now I was confirming all those impressions. She didn’t say: “This is one and done.” But her face said it.
We were supposed to go to the movies, but for some reason we didn’t. We just went back to my apartment.
We ordered a pizza with no cheese on it because I was on a health kick. We watched a movie on TV.
It was the most boring date Andrea had ever been on in her entire life. How do I know this?
She told me so later on. In those words.
She asked me to take her home.
I agreed—readily. Eagerly.
We walked outside and I said quietly: “My car’s not here. My car got stolen.”
I had a blue Jeep Cherokee, and it was missing, and there was only one explanation.
I told her I’d have to call the police the next day.
As Bob started down the road to recovery, as he left the hospital and took those first ginger steps toward rebuilding himself, I began my own journey back from the abyss. I returned to New Jersey, resumed my sessions with Sister Catherine. I told her all about Bob’s accident, the nightmare of seeing him in the hospital, the dark emotions it all stirred. “Should’ve been me.”
She listened with great sympathy and then noted that there was no shame in believing—admitting?—I’d suffered my own crash. And that I too needed to heal. Just as Bob was in pain, so was I. Just as Bob would need time and resilience to return to normal, so would I. “It’s a journey,” Sister Catherine said, “and it’ll require a safe resting place along the way where you can stop, at regular intervals, and refresh yourself, and say whatever it is you need to say.”
Her office was that place. Her heart. That was Sister Catherine’s specialty. Heart.
And honesty.
I heard her, I trusted her. I nodded. OK. I was all in.
And so we started meeting three times a week for one-hour sessions, and in no time it happened. I could feel everything starting to turn. The work was painful, exhausting. I cried—a lot. I went deep, gave voice to things I’d never said aloud before, to anyone, not even myself. Each session felt more emotional than the last. But I learned so much about myself, by trusting her and distrusting my ego—and being vulnerable. I learned how to shed, once and for all, that heavy legacy of Jersey City, that stoic man code. Or at least moderate it.
“Danny,” Sister Catherine said one day, “you’re never going to be happy if you keep looking at life the way you’re looking at it right now. You only think about yourself as a basketball player. Until you care equally about your intellect, your mindset, your performance in school, the quality of your relationships with friends, nothing will change. Are you in relationships with women that will lead to something? Or are they frivolous relationships? What does your spiritual life look like? Do you go to Mass? Are you a believer in Christ?”
She led me, prodded me, questioned me. She never lost patience. It felt at times as if we were puttering in a workshop, building something together, and then I realized: Oh, right, we are. A self. A new self for Dan Hurley to walk around in. And to protect.
But this wasn’t woodworking or car repair. This was like repairing a shattered piece of pottery. Fine, painstaking work. Lots of attention to micro detail.
And it was all interior. She was the first person with whom I’d ever explored my interior, the first who seemed interested in my interior. Who seemed to think whatever was on my inside was valuable.
I reenrolled in school and my grades began to improve. I made progress toward a degree. I slept more deeply, smiled at the person I saw in the mirror each morning. I can even credit Sister Catherine for my impromptu press conference at Dohoney’s, a Jersey City bar, six weeks after my final game. It was she who talked me into taking that very public and very terrifying step.
My twenty-first birthday—January 16, 1994. I told the beat writers who covered Seton Hall that I’d left the team because I had difficulty coping with stress. Full stop. And that I was in counseling to deal with low self-esteem and depression. And that I never again wanted to feel what I had felt over those three or four days holed up in my dorm room. And that P. J. had been totally supportive, that I didn’t realize he was such a caring guy when he was on my ass every day.
They laughed.
I told them that P. J. even called me during halftime of one game while Seton Hall was losing—just to check in. Hearing from him showed me he had a heart for his players.
I told them that I’d recently seen an emotional side of my father that I hadn’t seen before and that, much as he wanted me to return to the game he loved, he’d still love me if I didn’t.
I neglected to mention how much Mom and Dad were struggling. One son suffers a breakdown, the other’s in a near-fatal car crash—naturally they weren’t doing well. Dad especially. He never took medication for anything, he didn’t believe in it, but suddenly he was doing a little self-medicating. Dad was never much of a drinker, but now he was having a couple of drinks at night to numb the pain. It didn’t work.
* * *
No one was surprised when he got sick. Pneumonia. It knocked him out of commission, kept him off the St. Anthony’s sideline. Meekly, coughing, he asked if I might be interested in helping out with the team until he got back on his feet. I was shocked. And beyond hesitant. But there was only one answer. I told him I’d do whatever he needed.
Crazy, but filling in for Dad, coaching at good old St. Anthony’s, returning to my roots, helped reignite my love of the game. It was the first time I’d touched a ball in weeks, months, and it just felt so damn good. All of it felt so good. Like seeing an old friend with whom you’ve had beef, and you can’t seem to remember what the beef was about.
I loved teaching the players about the game. I was coaching, although I didn’t think of it as coaching. I thought of it as helping Dad. Being Dad. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to examine it too carefully. I just wanted to enjoy the hell out of it.
The only negative: We weren’t at White Eagle Hall. We were practicing in the Ice Box, the Jersey City Armory, which was massive and freezing cold. No more bingo tables, no more cigarette butts on the free-throw line. Oh well, I thought. Can’t have everything.
The kids on the team knew me, of course. I was a Hurley after all. Still. But they also remembered my career. Vividly. They remembered everything about this game and that. They came of age when I was the best player in the state. Many of them attended games in which I’d been great. Their admiration did a lot to ease the pain of those Seton Hall memories, which were still fresh.
“Hurley SUCKS. Bobby’s BETTER.”
* * *
After I coached the team to a win over an excellent Christian Brothers Academy team, I was fucking giddy. I had that old feeling again, being a part of a team… that connection… that camaraderie. I talked to Sister Catherine about this feeling. What is it? Pride? Contentment? Happiness? Whatever it is, more please.
She began upping the stakes, giving me stuff to read. One of them was Knicks coach Pat Riley’s book The Winner Within, which completely changed the way I looked at everything. I don’t know that I’d ever voluntarily read a book before in my life. And now I was devouring this slim volume. Highlighting, underlining, memorizing. “Until you change the way that you look at things, those things will never change.” Hell yes, Coach Riley.
Among the many sacred gifts given to me by Sister Catherine, this was one of the most precious. The gift of reading. Of learning.
When I set down Riley’s book, I went and read everything I could find about him. His upbringing, his relationships, his family—his demanding father. Oh, demanding father? You don’t say? Plus, Riley Sr. was a coach. He’d spent years trying to make it in pro baseball. He’d caught on with eighteen different minor league teams before finally getting his big chance in the show. He recorded a grand total of twelve at bats, with only one hit. I don’t know if that brief flirtation with his dream made him bitter, and extra demanding of his son, but I also don’t know how it couldn’t. The pressure he must have put on his son Pat…
After reading Riley’s book and thinking about the winner within me, I started to entertain thoughts of returning to the team at Seton Hall. I made up the first-semester exams I’d missed after Bob’s accident and started to practice with the team. Baby steps.
I was having fun, shooting well, feeling great on the court. So P. J. naturally suggested that I return as a full-time player.
A very generous offer. Which I declined.
I was feeling better, feeling alive, but not fully healed. It wasn’t an anti-P. J. thing so much as me feeling I just wasn’t ready for that kind of challenge. March Madness? Are you kidding?
I wouldn’t play another game for the rest of the season, and that was fine. The important thing was this: My first love, my true love, basketball, was back in my life.
* * *
After finishing my third year at Seton Hall as a redshirt practice player, I returned full-time in the fall of 1994.
But everything was different. P. J. was gone. He’d left school for the NBA, to coach the Portland Trail Blazers. His replacement was George Blaney, who straight up saved me. Saved my soul and saved my basketball career, as surely as Sister Catherine.
Did it hurt that Blaney was from Jersey City? No, it did not. Did it hurt that he’d been one helluva baller at Holy Cross? Or that his brother Jimmy played in the same high school backcourt as my father, who coached Blaney’s youngest brother, Mike, in grammar school at St. Paul’s? Again, no, it did not.
And then in 1961 Blaney was a draft choice of the New York Knicks. He was a big name on the Jersey basketball scene with a lot of street cred long before we even met.
Immediately after Blaney replaced P. J., he started reaching out to me. Asking questions. And those questions had nothing to do with basketball. He asked questions like “How are you doing in school?” And “Do you have a girlfriend?” And “Who are you hanging out with off the court?” And “Did you go to Mass yesterday?”
And “Are you drinking?”
To see a coach care about me so much, to see him unafraid to show personal interest, changed everything.
Not that Coach Blaney was averse to talking basketball! And when he did, he said some really shocking shit. He told people, and word got back to me, that I had the talent to play in the NBA. He told people that he really liked me. He showed me that he liked me. He saw that I was damaged, wounded, and it didn’t make him like me any less. Fuck, it made him like me more.
My teammates and I were quickly won over by Blaney’s quiet, gentle manner. P. J. screamed a lot, Blaney screamed never. Well, rarely. He was steadfastly and resolutely calm. It was like playing for the neighborhood priest.
Through Blaney’s calm, I became calmer on the court. I grew in confidence, started believing in my game again. Five games into the season, two days after undergoing a double root canal, I scored a career-high twenty-five points in a victory over Wagner. “We’ve been trying hard to get Danny back to where he loves the game,” Coach Blaney told reporters afterward. “He seems to be having a good time.”
By now Bob was back with Sacramento, miraculously healed up after a long and difficult rehab. But my own comeback, in my own mind, was no less miraculous. And it was accompanied by equally cosmic changes in the Seton Hall program. Coach Blaney let me play my game out there. He seemed to enjoy watching me play. And that inspired a fierce loyalty in my heart. Together, we won ten of our first fourteen games.
Then we ran into St. John’s at Madison Square Garden.
My first game at the Garden since the Hurley Day Debacle. Scene of the crime, I kept thinking.
Down three points in the final seconds, there was a strip, the ball squirted loose, and somehow it rolled over to me. I grabbed it and saw that I was beyond the three-point line. The play wasn’t drawn up for me, the ball wasn’t supposed to be in my hands, but suddenly it was. I’d always dreamed of hitting a big shot in the Garden, and here was my chance. With James Scott of St. John’s hanging all over me, I leaned forward, left my feet, double pumped to avoid Scott’s block attempt, and let it rip. I actually blacked out as the ball arced through the air. But I came to just as it went through the hoop with 1.6 seconds left, sending the game into overtime.
St. John’s coach Brian Mahoney looked as if he’d been hit with a brick. The air went out of him and his whole team. Then in OT I hit another big three-pointer and we won going away—by ten points. When Coach Blaney took me out of the game in the closing seconds, I thought of all those fans who’d booed and hurled obscenities at me. I looked across the court at them and took a bow. A deep, theatrical bow. “They’ve been doing it to me for a long time,” I told reporters after the game. “I should be entitled to a couple of seconds of it myself.”
My line was sweet. Nineteen points, six assists, two steals. The whole experience felt like a blast of sunshine and pure oxygen, after being buried alive. I felt a pulsing pride that I hadn’t felt in years—maybe ever. And people around me, people who loved me, they saw it. Felt it. Dad couldn’t be there that day because he was back coaching St. Anthony’s, and they had a game against All Hallows, but Mom was there, despite battling the flu. She missed my game-saving shot because, just as I let it go, someone spilled a soda on her pocketbook.
But she saw my postgame glow and that was all she cared about. Later she told a reporter that I seemed like a totally different person. “Watching Danny smile,” she said, “is the greatest feeling in the world.”
That was the whole point.
I wasn’t a different person. I was myself.
For once. The last time I’d taken a last-second shot, I was in high school, and I’d missed. A three-pointer that would’ve helped St. Anthony’s win the state championship. This felt better, I’m not going to lie. But I recognized that either way I was going to be OK. I had no fear, and that was what counted.
My brother had a game against the Celtics the following night. When I met with the media I said, “I’m going to tell Bobby that anything he does will pale in comparison to my shot. That’s the first time I’ll ever be able to say that to him.” But I said it with love, without envy. Without any sense of comparison. I was just damned happy he was out there, healthy, doing what he loved to do.
* * *
I averaged fourteen points per game over my two full seasons under Coach Blaney. I finished my Seton Hall career with more than a thousand points scored. While I’ve talked a lot over the years about being haunted by my failures as a player, I have to say: It’s not easy to score a thousand points in a big-time Division I program. Or to average fourteen points in the Big East. I’m proud of those numbers, because they’re more than numbers. They have a context, a backstory, that makes them symbols of personal endurance.
When I looked around for people to thank, it was Mom and Dad, Sister Catherine, and of course Coach Blaney. That man made it happen. That man’s support, and belief, taught me so much about manhood. He modeled what it meant to be a good man, a quiet leader. When it was all over I had the clearest thought: How awesome would it be to change someone’s life the way Coach Blaney changed mine?
SIX
Andrea Sirakides first watched me play basketball when she was in elementary school. Her parents were from Jersey City, and her dad was a sports fan who loved my father’s program. So of course, once a year he’d take the whole Sirakides clan to see St. Anthony’s play Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, NJ.
Having no interest in the outcome, Andrea would pass the time during games by making string bracelets.
Then Andrea became a Seton Hall freshman. She paid a little more attention to the games but only attended my final home game, against UConn, before a sellout crowd of twenty thousand in Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, NJ. Ray Allen and the Huskies ran us out of the building, and the fans got ugly. Andrea was with her family, and at one point she turned to her mother in sadness. “This is why I hate sports,” she said. “That kid is doing the best he can, and they are being so mean to him.”
She chirped back at the fans. “Why do you even bother coming to the game if you’re just going to yell things at this kid?” she told them. “You think he wants to do bad? He’s not a professional.” About four weeks after that game, a Thursday night, I was at a bar near campus. The Hall. With me was my teammate John Yablonski and his girlfriend, Emily. Suddenly Emily said she wanted me to meet someone. Her best friend—Andrea.
I was enamored right away. And not the least bit discouraged that she was a freshman, whereas I was a fifth-year senior. She was super mature, I was permanently immature. We’re basically equals, I thought.
I found it charming that she was clueless about sports. But she was interested in many other things, and we found plenty to talk about. She was assertive, funny—fun.
She mentioned that she loved the way I was dressed. Flannel shirt, jeans, Timberland boots, gold chain. She thought my city vibe was a sharp contrast with her Jersey Shore vibe. I took it as a compliment.
At the end of the night I drove her and her friends home, making sure I dropped her last. We sat in the car and talked awhile.
We made plans to get together that Saturday night.
But when I rolled up for our date, a different woman opened my car door. The woman I met had straight hair and blue eyes; this woman had curly hair and green eyes. “I’m not in the mood for jokes,” I said to this stranger. “Where’s Andrea? I’m not doing this today.”
She threw up her hands. She stared in horror. She explained that she was Andrea, the same woman I met in the bar. She just had naturally curly hair and wore colored contacts.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I just put the car in drive and hit the gas.
The mood in the car was tense. She thought I’d always looked arrogant on the court, like I had a chip on my shoulder, that I didn’t seem like the nicest guy on campus, and now I was confirming all those impressions. She didn’t say: “This is one and done.” But her face said it.
We were supposed to go to the movies, but for some reason we didn’t. We just went back to my apartment.
We ordered a pizza with no cheese on it because I was on a health kick. We watched a movie on TV.
It was the most boring date Andrea had ever been on in her entire life. How do I know this?
She told me so later on. In those words.
She asked me to take her home.
I agreed—readily. Eagerly.
We walked outside and I said quietly: “My car’s not here. My car got stolen.”
I had a blue Jeep Cherokee, and it was missing, and there was only one explanation.
I told her I’d have to call the police the next day.
