COLLEGE BASKETBALL / NCAA MEN’S TOURNAMENT : HE’S ON A Short List : Hurley Might Not Be Best Ever at College Point Guard, but There’s No Doubt He’s Up There

Small enough to be crammed into a Duke ball bag--true story, it happened--but big enough to carry the Blue Devils this season, point guard Bobby Hurley is a gym rat with a twist.

The TV Hurley you know about: Jersey City kid. Duke jersey retired. Terrorized by the ultra-demanding Christian Laettner. Bad haircut. Bad socks. All-time NCAA assists leader. Has two national championship rings. Has played in every title game since ninth grade. High school coach was his dad, Bob Sr. High school teammate was his brother, Danny, who now plays at Seton Hall. Member of USA Basketball Development squad, a.k.a. Dream Team Jr. Emotional. Short.

But thumbnail sketches only go so far.

Dick Vitale, who never met a microphone or hyperbole he didn’t like, recently called Hurley, all 6 feet of him, the best college point guard in the history of the game. Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski doesn’t go that far--who else does?--but instead asks that Hurley doubters simply look at the facts.

Fair enough. Hurley’s four-year record at St. Anthony in Jersey City, N.J.: 115-5, four championship game appearances. His four-year record at Duke: 119-25 and, including Thursday night’s victory over Southern Illinois, an amazing 18-1 record in NCAA tournament play.

And should the Blue Devils somehow advance to the final bracket, Hurley and fellow senior Thomas Hill would become the first players in NCAA tournament history to reach four Final Four championship games.

But those are numbers. To base Hurley’s career on mere statistics is to cheapen it. Better to remember how far Hurley has come during those four years.

“When you’re in high school and you’re playing in the AAU leagues, you hear things,” said reserve point guard Kenny Blakeney, Hurley’s roommate and best friend. “The first thing I heard about Bobby is that he had two kids and he could dunk. I just heard he wasn’t that good. And when I first saw him, he was 180, 185 pounds. He looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy or the Michelin Man. You looked at this kid and said, ‘This is Bobby Hurley?’ ”

For the record, Hurley is no parent. Nor can he dunk a basketball (volleyball, yes; basketball, no). But he was a bit on the chubby side--until Coach Mike Krzyzewski got to him.

As a freshman, Hurley started all but one game and led the team in assists and whiny, anguished looks. That was the season Nevada Las Vegas beat Duke by 30 points in the championship game, causing Hurley, who played ill, to have nightmares featuring sharks chasing him in a pool.

As a sophomore, he directed a Duke attack that first avenged the UNLV loss and then beat Kansas for the NCAA title. Hurley played all 80 minutes of those games and finished with 16 assists and only six turnovers.

As a junior, he made six of nine three-pointers against Indiana in the semifinal and led the Blue Devils to a 20-point victory over Michigan in the final.

As a senior, Hurley broke the NCAA career assists record of North Carolina State guard Chris Corchiani. And with Laettner gone to the NBA and star swingman Grant Hill recently back from a toe injury, the fortunes of Duke have often rested on Hurley’s slight shoulders.

“This year the pressure’s on Bobby,” Blakeney said. “In a sense, he tries to do too much.”

Hurley, though, is accustomed to the attention. Anyone with cable and an ESPN feed has watched him grow up. From pouty boy to possible three-peat, such is the possible legacy of a player who defies easy explanation.

Now he finds himself five victories away from another championship or one defeat away from depression. Hurley doesn’t deal well with defeat. Then again, there have been so few.

You want emotion? Then you should have been in the Duke huddle Jan. 13, the night the Blue Devils defeated Wake Forest, 86-59, on the road.

Eight months earlier, while returning from a local bar, Hurley had been arrested for drunk driving, a charge that was later reduced to careless and reckless driving. Hurley paid a $500 fine, did without his driver’s license for three months and volunteered for community service work. That done, he tried to put the entire frightening, embarrassing incident behind him.

Not so fast, said the Wake Forest crowd. Each time Hurley prepared to shoot a free throw, he was greeted with a chilling chant: “D-U-I! D-U-I!”

Unnerved at first, Hurley returned to the floor for the second half and played as if he had a point to prove to each of the 14,526 Wake Forest fans. He scored on a drive down the lane. He came back with a jump shot. And then a three-pointer. He made two steals and scored on one of them.

Wake Forest couldn’t call time out quick enough.

“He went crazy,” Blakeney said. “He came back to the huddle and he was so upset, so mad. But he was also pumped up. He came back to the bench and he was shaking, literally shaking. I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”

So concerned was Krzyzewski, that he spent the entire timeout trying to calm his hyper point guard. Hurley looked at him and said, “Coach, I’m all right, I’m all right.”

By the time the rout was complete, Hurley had scored 25 points--20 in the second half--and collected six assists, four rebounds and four steals. After one score, Hurley turned to the hostile audience and, using his hands as imaginary guns, fired away.

A stunned Blakeney watched from the sidelines. “I didn’t even know who it was,” he said.

Hurley gets like that sometimes. It happened against Wake Forest. It happened against Indiana in last year’s NCAA semifinal game, when Hurley scored 26 points, 18 of them from beyond the three-point line. It happened against Maryland during his sophomore season.

Nothing else matters during those moments. It is as if he were Billy Hoyle, the goofy basketball hustler in the movie, “White Men Can’t Jump.” Hoyle was at his best when he reached some sort of mystical playing level. The zone, he called it.

Hurley is no different. Problem is, Hurley rarely admits to reaching the level. In his own mind it has only happened those three times.

“He’s still seeking approval--mine and his, mostly his, probably,” Krzyzewski said. “He’s a kid who, instead of playing up to your standards, is trying to play up to his standards. In other words, he’s internalized hard work, high standards and then he goes after it every day.”

Said Blakeney: “I’ll say he’s a perfectionist on the court. He’s very (analytical) about basketball.”

That would explain why Hurley and Laettner, now with the Minnesota Timberwolves, didn’t get along. It was a battle of the perfectionists. Two methods, one ball. Theirs was a coexistence based on the mutual need for success. Friendship wasn’t part of the equation.

Laettner and Hurley last played against each other during those summer scrimmages against the Dream Team. It was there that word crept out: The Duke guard was better than anyone ever imagined.

Of course, the reports didn’t come from Hurley. Hurley didn’t say a peep. About the most you could get out of Hurley was that he had held his own, nothing more.

The news came courtesy of Grant Hill, who played on that same development squad. According to Hill, Hurley was the surprise of the camp. Olympian John Stockton couldn’t stop him. Magic Johnson had his share of occasional troubles against him. Charles Barkley marveled.

Only Michael Jordan, merely the game’s best defender, completely shut Hurley down. Thus, the Jordan nickname, “the Glove.”

Hurley denies everything, except the glove part. He said it was an honor to simply share the same court as boyhood favorites Johnson and Larry Bird. In fact, Johnson gave Hurley his home phone number, just in case he ever needed to talk.

“I was playing one time, on the wing and dribbling toward the top like I was going to set the offense up, and at the last second I threw a look-away lob pass to (Eric) Montross and right over David Robinson,” remembered Hurley of a Dream Team scrimmage. “I thought it was a pretty good pass, but we didn’t connect on it. So I put my head down and said something to myself. Magic was on the sidelines and he said, ‘Hey, that was a good pass. Keep your head up.’ I thought that was pretty cool. The greatest point guard ever said that to me.”

This is vintage Hurley. Cocky, half-arrogant on the court. Reserved, polite off it.

The perfect day for Mr. Excitement? Run errands, go to class, work out, play video games, watch a movie, go to sleep.

“I’m kind of laid back,” he said. “I like simple things. I pretty much stay in my apartment because people recognize me wherever I go. But when I do have a chance to be myself, I really enjoy it.”

Good luck. Two years ago at Notre Dame, a large postgame crowd gathered just outside the visiting Duke locker room. In an effort to sneak past the fans, Hurley agreed to crawl inside an oversized ball bag. He almost made it, too.

“Some little kid saw my hand or my leg moving and said, ‘There he is in there!’ ” Hurley said. “Everyone kind of rushed the bag and I got out of there. But it was kind of fun.”

Hurley leaves Duke reluctantly. He has come to regard Krzyzewski as much more than a coach.

“I love him almost like he’s my second dad,” he said.

And he has come to regard this small, private and somewhat preppy school as a second home of sorts--an odd fit if there has ever been one. He will miss the Cameron Crazies and they will miss him back. Has it been four years?

“I wish it could go on, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I wish I could stay a couple of more years.”