He Almost Lost It All : Duke Guard Hurley Has Rebounded From Drunk Driving Arrest in May

The very last place on Earth Bobby Hurley wanted to be in the early evening of May 5 was plunked in front of the television set in his apartment near the Duke campus. Just as much, it was also the only place he could be, the better to flog himself with a wireless remote and the 6 o’clock news on all three local affiliates.

Seeing his face on the tube was a given: He had been arrested early that morning on a charge of driving while impaired after leaving a Durham tavern with friends and being stopped at a license checkpoint. Embarrassed and crestfallen, a pessimist by nature -- “a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom,” Hurley’s father, Bob Sr., calls him -- Hurley was certain he had ruined his life.

All the drilling with his father the coach, the trips to playgrounds where white faces are as rare as green grass, the two national championships as Duke’s point guard, and just maybe a future in the NBA . . . down the drain before the start of his senior year.

It had been 4 a.m. when he finally got home and called his girlfriend, Ana Quinones, a medical student in Boston.

“He thought he had lost everything,” Quinones said. “You would have thought that his world had collapsed. He had been so positive and now he thought he’d destroyed it. There was nothing I could say to him.”

She had told him to call his parents in Jersey City. He couldn’t.

“I don’t want to tell them, I don’t want to tell them,” he pleaded to her. And she had pushed him. Wouldn’t you know, Bob Sr. and Chris Hurley had gotten some crank calls that night and taken their phone off the hook. So the son couldn’t get through to the parents until later that morning.

“Even then he couldn’t talk,” Chris Hurley said.

And here he sat, waiting for Eyewitness News or NewsCenter or whatever. “Flipping through all the channels,” said Quinones, who had left Boston that morning and flown to Durham. There was an important primary election in North Carolina that day. Not important enough. Hurley’s arrest was the lead story.

Given that Bobby Hurley has been playing basketball at Duke for, oh, like 20 years -- Hurley? You are excused for blurring his highlights. And further, for missing the most defining moment of all, the one that made him grow up. Just like that.

Not in the spring of his freshman year, when in all his bristly precocity he made a nationally televised run to the bathroom in the middle of a Final Four victory over Arkansas and then was undressed by UNLV two nights later. Or when he spent the offseason dreaming about sharks and watching a videotape of his immature whining and pouting compiled by his coaches.

Not in March of his sophomore year, when he stopped dead on the floor of the Hoosier Dome and bottomed out maybe the brassiest three-point jumper ever, and then 90 seconds later took hold of the very last rebound in a 79-77 win over UNLV and shot his left fist into the air, redeemed at the age of 19. Or at the close of last season, when he confronted a new age of Michigan players and left with a second consecutive national title and a Final Four MVP.

“The kid’s been a part of 95 wins,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “He’s taken us to three national championship games. I mean, we’re a good team, but a lot of it has to do with who Bobby Hurley is.”

None of which had the effect of May 5. Sixteen days later, Hurley pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of careless and reckless driving, for which he received a six-month suspended sentence and a $500 fine. He volunteered to visit at least 10 schools in the Raleigh-Durham area and speak to assemblies, on the wrongfulness of drinking and driving.

“I did something that was wrong,” Hurley said. “In the past I’ve done a lot of great things that have been well-documented. Now I realize that if I make a mistake it’s going to be hot, too. I’m an adult now. Nobody’s going to say, ‘It’s OK, he’s just a kid growing up.’ ”

Funny how good things follow bad ones. Here was Hurley, winning a second national title in early April, getting arrested in early May, and then, in early June, getting invited by USA Basketball to play on an eight-man college all-star team against the Dream Team in San Diego.

And if there was a star in that week at the beach, it was Hurley. Who can be surprised that Chris Webber (Michigan) and Rodney Rodgers (Wake Forest) held their own physically? Or that Jamal Mashburn (Kentucky) could score? But Hurley?

“We just couldn’t handle him,” Dream Team coach Chuck Daly said just last week. “You know, he’s deceiving because of his size. He looks like a little boy, about 12 or 14 years old. But he was very difficult to handle because of his quickness in the lane. And he’s got a very solid outside shot.”

So he’ll play in the NBA?

“Absolutely,” said Daly, now coach of the Nets.

Hurley, who at all times trains as if preparing to climb high mountains, worked himself savagely in prepavation for the Dream Team camp. Of course, there would be no accounting for fear and awe, and when he first took the court, he damn near fainted dead away from the adrenaline rush. The first few trips down the floor he was all nervous energy and wide eyes. And then ...

“I’ll never forget it,” Hurley said. “I was on a fast break, Stockton went for a steal, I put it behind my back at the top of the key and went to the basket with my left hand. I went up for the shot, Bird went up to block it and I threw a little wraparound pass to Chris Webber and he laid it in.”

Beat John Stockton and Larry Bird on the same play and got an assist.

“Exactly.” (He laughs, like the description amazes him still.)

It’s a Hurley myth that he’s innately confident. In fact, his insecurity serves him well, never letting him take his skills for granted. He will start this winter for a Duke team that could play in its fourth consecutive national championship game. No player in NCAA history has played in four national championship games (Hurley’s teammate, Thomas Hill, has also played in three). Christian Laettner leaves a huge hole, but Duke is good enough to contend for a third consecutive national title, which has been done only by UCLA (seven straight from 1967-’73).

“First of all,” Krzyzewski said, “people think he’s smaller than he is because he’s out there with such big guys. Some of his appeal has to do with a black-white thing, but it’s not just Irishmen that like Bobby. He transcends racial lines, ethnic lines.

“Like, if you’re a guy,” Krzyzewski said, “you probably didn’t like Christian because he’s big (6-11) and he’s good and he’s good-looking. Not just Christian, but Chris Webber (6-10) or Grant Hill (6-8), because of their physical stature. Bobby’s like a representative of the common man. But he’s not common at all. A large part of Bobby wants to be normal, but normal people don’t win two national championships.”