Editor's note: This is the first in a series of profiles about members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2010.
St. Anthony's High School basketball coach Bobby Hurley Sr. has been thinking about how to avoid an awkward moment when he brings his team to Springfield for the Spalding Hoophall Classic in January.
His trips north from Jersey City, N.J., always include a tour of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame to see plaques commemorating the greats of the game.
On Aug. 13, Hurley will be one of those greats.
"A word I haven't used too many times in my life is 'surreal,'" Hurley said. "I've been taking my team up to play in the tournament for five or six years and we do the tour on either the morning of the day we're going to play or the day before and we spend about an hour and half going around and we talk to the kids about the history of the sport and we go upstairs and around the whole arc and cover everybody right up to the most recent class.
"And I don't know what the heck I'm suppose to do now when we get up to my thing. Am I suppose to read the thing about me or am I suppose to awkwardly step back and let the kids see it themselves?" he said. "But I think it will be very interesting when it all hits us that I'm actually in this thing that we've been coming to for a long time,"
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Hurley joins Karl Malone, Jerry Buss, Dennis Johnson, Gus Johnson, Cynthia Cooper, Scottie Pippen, Maciel Pereira and the 1960 and 1992 USA Olympic basketball teams in the Class of 2010.
Hurley will be just the second person enshrined in the Hall who did all his coaching at the high school level, joining DeMatha Catholic legend Morgan Wootten.
"When Morgan Wootten was in the Hall of Fame (Class of 2000) it gave all of us high school coaches hope, but I don't think that any of us, including myself, thought that they would open the door too many times to high school coaches," Hurley said.
He has been at St. Anthony's, one of the smallest schools in the state with 240 students and no gymnasium, for 38 years, and in that time the Friars have won 25 state titles, three national championships and he has twice been named the national coach of the year.
More than 100 students have earned Division I basketball scholarships playing for Hurley, and five have been first-round picks in the NBA Draft.
A retired probation officer, Hurley said only once in his career did he consider leaving the high school sideline for college basketball.
"It's probably now close to 25 years ago the only time I seriously considered it," he said. "I almost went to Xavier University with Pete Gillen. Both my sons were just about approaching high school age at the time and we were going to move to Cincinnati, my wife (Chris) and I had looked at homes, looked at schools, we had been out there for a weekend and we left Pete saying we were going to do it.
"We got home and my sons blistered us with questions that I had a hard time answering," Hurley said. "'You're going to be an absentee father because you're going to be recruiting all the time, we wanted to go to St. Anthony's, we're at an impressionable age and why would we be relocating at this age of our lives.' Between my wife and I, if it was a quiz we would have got like a 20 out of 100 on the quiz.
"I called Pete on Monday morning and said the kids really didn't want to do it and really I have never looked back," Hurley said.
A year later son Bobby Jr. would be his point guard on the Friars, the first of six straight years when a Hurley was in the backcourt and six straight years when St. Anthony's would raise the state championship trophy.
Those were proud days for Hurley and his wife, as were the next several years when Bobby Jr. would go on to lead Duke University to a pair of NCAA national titles and Danny would star at Seton Hall.
At 62, Hurley said he has no plans on hanging up the whistle. With he and his wife retired from their day jobs, the days are spent with their grandson, the nights with basketball.
Hurley has 984 career wins and sees no reason why the Friars cannot win 16 of 26 games next season to reach the 1,000-win plateau.
It's unlikely that win will come when St. Anthony's returns to Springfield January 15 to face DeMatha Catholic in the Spalding Hoophall Classic, a game that likely will be shown live on ESPN. If it did, Hurley would have another awkward moment to consider.