UConn, Dan Hurley are in the Final Four, 30 years after he almost quit basketball

BRENDAN QUINN • MARCH 27, 2023

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.

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.”

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.

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.

DAVID BECKER / ASSOCIATED PRESS

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.

“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

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,