By ADAM ZAGORIA
What if Bobby Hurley had gone to Seton Hall instead of Duke?
How many NCAA championships might the Pirates have won with Hurley running the point?
“At least one,” former Seton Hall star Terry Dehere said.
In the E:60 film “Hurley: Jersey. Family. Basketball.,” which airs Tuesday night (10 p.m. EST, ESPN), Hurley said the initial plan was for him to attend Seton Hall along with his close friends and teammates from the St. Anthony’s team which went 32-0 and finished No. 1 in the nation in 1989: Dehere and Jerry Walker.
“We wanted to stay together, myself, Bobby and Jerry,” Dehere says in the film, reported by Jeremy Schaap and produced by John Minton and Vin Cannamela. “We came up together. We all said, ‘Hey, we think we’re gonna go to Seton Hall.'”
Said Hurley: “We had played ball together so long, Seton Hall had been to a national championship game and there was no reason that we shouldn’t go there and do it.”
“We wanted all three of them, so you want to encourage that” said then-Seton Hall coach P.J. Carlesimo, who had guided the Pirates to the 1989 title game against Michigan. “I really thought we had a tremendous advantage.”
Said Bob Hurley Sr.: “He may have gone with Jerry and Terry, he might’ve gone to Seton Hall but he was going to use all his visits.”
The thing was that Chris Hurley, Bobby’s mother, wanted him to take his official visit to Duke.
“I never really watched college basketball, but I knew that Duke is a great school,” Chris says in the film. “And I said, ‘You know what, I’d really like you to look at Duke.'”
Said Bobby: “There was a part of me that didn’t want to go on the Duke visit because I’m not going to go away that far. And it was a conversation I had with my mom, and my mom says, ‘No, you’re going.'”
“He was taking the visit to Duke and we thought the following week we were all going to visit Seton Hall and we were all going to do this big announcement,” Dehere said. “Bobby comes back to the classroom and he’s not giving us any eye contact. We’re not getting a lot of eye contact from the young fella. And before class was over I think there was an announcement that he had committed to Duke.”
Said Hurley: “The visit blew me away. If you go on a visit to Duke, it’s hard to pass it up and that was the decision and I knew it was right.”
“I wanted Bobby Hurley,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “At the end of the day, he knew we were going to have something pretty special.”
Hurley went on to lead Duke to back-to-back NCAA championships in 1991 and ’92, but Dehere and Walker will always wonder if Seton Hall might have won at least one of those titles instead had Hurley opted to remain in New Jersey for college.
And who knows, maybe the Christian Laettner shot against Kentucky never happens, either.
