A COVID-era gift from his wife, the room is wedged in the corner of the basement. It’s a cross between a man cave, a bat cave, a shrine and the well-appointed bedroom of a boy with an active imagination, this enclave is embroidered with sports souvenirs, Marvel memorabilia, Cincinnati Bengals swag, a dragon head, a St. Michael figurine, a tiger print carpet, an easel, candles, essential oils—“gotta have essential oils”—and a meditation mat. Low-ceilinged and deprived of windows, it’s hardly the highlight of a stately home-on-the-hill in the suburbs of Hartford. But Dan Hurley starts most days by spending time here.
Sometimes, Hurley says, he comes to paint. Sometimes he’ll start to work on a puzzle. Other times he’ll simply sit alone and convince himself that he is no failure and no bluff, and that, in fact, the considerable success that has come his way is both hard-earned and well-deserved.
If there’s an inverse of fake-it-till-ya-make-it, well, Hurley embodies that. He is not simply a generationally successful college basketball coach. When the men’s NCAA tournament starts next week, Hurley will try to coach the UConn Huskies to a third consecutive NCAA title, a feat no one has pulled off since John Wooden in the early 1970s. He convinces player after player to pass up schools situated in flashy cities, alongside beaches and in warm climates, and instead, relocate to the cold innards of Connecticut. Once the players arrive, most improve individually. Collectively, they blend into winning units. He gets bleary-eyed watching games from Turkey and Israel and the EuroLeague so he can incorporate their sets and actions into offenses and defenses more complex than anything you’ll find in an NFL playbook. And Hurley does it without the slightest whiff of scandal.
Yet he remains convinced that he is still bouncing on the rim of failure.
The Dan Hurley Story … let’s stop here. It’s Dan, and pointedly no longer Danny, a nod to a rebirth … The Dan Hurley story is well-known in the canon of basketball. It also comes with the ring of classical mythology. His father, Bob Sr., was a towering high school coach in New Jersey, an inductee in the Basketball Hall of Fame, the subject of a best-selling book. (Trivia: written by Adrian Wojnarowski of “Woj Bomb” fame). Hurley’s big brother Bobby was, for a time, the face of college basketball, a flinty point guard who helped the Duke Blue Devils win back-to-back championships in the 1990s and was a ’93 NBA lottery pick.
Dan was, inevitably, “the third Hurley.” Failing to meet the standards set both by the family pedigree and himself, Dan spent years feeling unworthy. In December 1993, during his sophomore year at Seton Hall, it got so bad that some combination of the missed shots, the boos and the “Bobby’s Better” chants prompted him to step away from the team. (“Am I a punk?” he asked his brother.) Barely a week later, Bobby, then an NBA rookie, was injured in a serious car accident, driving home from a Sacramento Kings game. Dan heard the news and reflexively asked, Why couldn’t it have been me?
Hurley the Younger “got my head straight,” as he put it. He rejoined Seton Hall. He even scored more than 1,000 points in a college career that most in Division I would happily take. But to this day, he winces when the subject of his college career comes up. But if he lost his taste for playing basketball, the sport never left him. His redemption arc came in the form of coaching. He would take all his basketball knowledge, his intensity, his attention to detail and funnel it into building teams. Slowly but steadily, he would climb the coaching ladder. (More trivia: Who knew Dan Hurley was J.R. Smith’s high school coach in New Jersey?)
By his mid-forties, Hurley left Rhode Island and took over a moribund UConn program. Now, in his seventh season, he’s added two more banners to UConn’s haul. (We’re now up to six Huskies men’s titles since 1999.) More validation he’s reached the pinnacle of his profession: Last summer Hurley turned down a chance to coach the Los Angeles Lakers. He and his wife, Andrea, have raised two sons into fine adults. He’s at least made inroads convincing himself he is worthy. Sometimes. Sort of.
By his own admission, he is a smear of complexity and contradiction. He is strenuously modest, deflecting praise as a reflex; he is also the man who confronted a ref by saying, “Don’t turn your back on me. I’m the best coach in the f---ing sport.” He is data-driven and committed to advanced stats; he also is sufficiently spiritual that he places garlic bulbs under the Gampel Pavilion bleachers on the eve of a season, an offering to the basketball gods. He runs a brutal practice; the walls outside his office are decorated with the signed jerseys of NBA players he has minted, most declaring him the most positive force in their careers.
Before this year’s NCAA tournament, Hurley sat down with 60 Minutes for extended interviews. At one point, he was joined by Andrea, the ideal counterbalance to his intensity and basketball obsession. You can watch the whole piece here.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Dan Hurley Is a Smear of Complexity and Contradiction.
