Book Review: The Miracle of St. Anthony

I am not a jock.

Although I now exercise more than I used to, and greatly admire the men and women I know who can bang out more than fifteen pullups in one set, the yellow "live strong" bracelets made popular by the Lance Armstrong Foundation hold no appeal for me, mostly because "live right" seems to be a more difficult and more worthy project.

It may not then surprise you to know that I don't often read sports-themed books, and that the last one I enjoyed was W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe.

There have been a few sports books since that "coulda been contendahs," as a young Marlon Brando might put it, but none I'd envision re-reading--until now.

Adrian Wojnarowski's "The Miracle of St. Anthony" is a nonfiction memoir that follows a high school basketball team from Jersey City, New Jersey through an improbable 2003-2004 season under coach Bob Hurley.

You might suppose that dramatic tension would be hard to sustain while chronicling the exploits of a coach whose teams seldom lose, but Wojnarowski manages that feat by paying close attention to what's going on in the hearts and minds of his subjects. He also has an eye for detail. To hear him tell the story, the fact that St. Anthony has no gym of its own has more than a little to do with its practiced response to adversity.

It also helps that Bob Hurley's old-fashioned ethic of "tough love" makes for a series of compelling anecdotes. The probation officer turned basketball coach would seem monomaniacal in lesser hands, and sometimes does in spite of the sympathetic narration here. Hurley looms angry, profane, and stubborn to a fault, but Wojnarowski also shows how the coach's unbending authoritarianism is balanced by his love for the kids, for the game of basketball, and for the other people in his inner circle, most prominently his wife, his assistants, and the two nuns who work with him to keep St. Anthony afloat through tough times. Minor characters like "Doc" and "The Faa" provide welcome comic relief.

Wojnarowski lends background to his story by profiling Bobby Hurley, who as an undersized guard became a walking advertisement for his father's coaching expertise by taking Duke University to a collegiate championship and then himself to an NBA contract. To his credit, Wojnarowski also writes insightfully about Danny Hurley and what it took for him to achieve inner peace out from under the long shadows cast by his father and older brother.

The Hurley family stories are interludes in a book that is otherwise focused mostly on the tribulations of what looks at first like an underachieving senior class. How Wojnarowski came to know Marcus, Ahmad, Derrick, Shelton, Otis, and Barney as well as he did is testimony to them and to him.

Because this is nonfiction, not everything ends happily. Unknown junior colleges await those players whose test scores won't get them into four-year schools without help, and street life in Jersey City remains a temptation that the boys continually wrestle with when Hurley and his whistle are out of earshot.

I found myself moved by the one high-profile junior in the book, a privileged white kid from Connecticut who transfers into St. Anthony to give his game inner-city credibility among impoverished black kids. That's not a bad strategy if you have the fire in the belly to make it work, but Wojnarowksi shapes his narrative to give the impression that the junior, though not without talent, may well be an unwilling slave to his mother's vision of college basketball stardom.

To his credit, however, Coach Hurley tries to translate basketball lessons into life lessons. The biggest flaw in Wojnarowski's book is a reflection of the coach that this first-time author is writing about: a tendency toward heavy-handedness. Even as the St. Anthony Friars beat most of their opponents by double digits, readers like me develop an almost comical certainty that nothing comes easily to this coach, this team, or this writer.

But by the end of the book, Wojnarowski had given me a clear sense of why anyone who has ever played for the man continues to hear Hurley's voice in his head long after coaching advice stops being reinforced by the squeak of sneakers moving swiftly up or sideways on sweat-slicked hardwood floors.

Hurley's players pray the Hail Mary and invoke Our Lady of Victory in the locker room before tipoff. They also join hands to shout "hard work!," and this is ultimately a compelling book that says volumes about the redemptive value of that ethic.