TEMPE, Ariz. -- Twelve-year-old Bobby Hurley III walked into his dad's office at The Weatherup Center, perfectly at ease in his surroundings. As he planted his sneakers firmly on the floor to greet an unfamiliar reporter, it was easy to see the footprints of family all over his dad's new job.
Sun Devils men's basketball coach Bobby Hurley has talked candidly and exhaustively about his battle to find purpose again after a car accident and massive injuries robbed him of the NBA career he had dreamed about since boyhood. Like the reverse trajectory of a jump shot, basketball has healed a man it once nurtured and then spit out, but it was family that provided the guidance and support to steer Hurley back to the game he loves.
"He has a purpose now and it's not just about him," Bobby's wife, Leslie said. "It's about the players -- about them as athletes and about them as people.
"He cares about them. He wants them to succeed by showing them everything he can, but he also wants them to experience those amazing moments he had as a player."
When you talk to Hurley's father, Bob Hurley Sr., you hear a remarkably similar goal when discussing his four-plus decades of coaching at St. Anthony's High School in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Hurley and his father are different people. Bob Sr. is old school; a hard-driving coach who was tough on his sons, Bobby and Dan, because he never wanted the outside perception of favoritism.
"I don't think anybody I ever coached felt they had a day in the park or that Bobby was only the one being pushed," Bob Hurley Sr. said. "One of my goals as a coach is I never want someone to come back to me years later and say, 'coach, I wish you had pushed me more." I'm still waiting for the first guy to say that and it's Year 44."
Bobby may not be fully aware of his father's ingrained teachings, but they are there every time he steps on the court to coach, or steps into a living room to recruit.
"Just following his competitive drive," Hurley said, when asked about his father's influence. "He's won 1,100 games and his winning percentage is ridiculous. It's impossible to emulate that at the college level but he expected to win every day.
"He had expectations for my brother and me to handle our responsibilities at home, in school and when we played. It was across the board -- it's how we lived our lives: To excel, to achieve and to strive to achieve.
"A part of me has those qualities. He always wanted to help the kids excel and he always wanted learn about the game and was open to how others did things. I've tried to assemble a diverse coaching staff from different programs and that helps me become a better coach by thinking from different perspectives."
When Hurley's basketball life came crashing down on Dec. 12, 1993, Bob Sr.'s disciplined approach was critical in helping Bobby fight through the trauma and slowly rebuild. Hurley was involved in a high-speed collision with a station wagon that was driving without its headlights. Hurley was thrown 100 feet from his Toyota 4-Runner into a ditch. He suffered broken ribs, two collapsed lungs, a severed trachea tube, a fractured shoulder blade, a compression fracture in his lower back, a torn ACL in his right knee and several minor injuries.
Leslie Hurley met him a few months after the accident and played an active role in his rehab to get back on the court for the Sacramento Kings.
"It was sort of a weird thing when you start dating someone and they ask you to start rebounding for them," Leslie said, laughing. "I remember he would say, 'bad pass, bad shot' if he missed because I guess my pass wasn't good enough. I wanted to throw the ball harder at him."
Hurley did get back on the court, where he played four more NBA seasons. But the body that had previously been in perfect sync with the mind and spirit was no longer capable of keeping up. His retirement led to a nomadic period where Hurley tried private business and even dabbled in horse racing and ownership.
"He was almost wandering with no real goal in sight," Leslie said. "It got to the point where he wasn't sure what to do next. It was like a part of him had died. He would sometimes go into this darker place where you could tell something was missing."
Leslie Hurley never pushed Bobby bask to basketball. She just supported, listened and waited patiently for a moment she always knew would come. When that moment came, again, it was at the hands of family.
Dan Hurley offered his brother a job as an assistant at Wagner and the two spent three years coaching together -- there and at Rhode Island.
"It's a very unlikely story to begin with, that I ended up at Wagner and we ended up doing it together," said Dan Hurley, one of two Division I basketball coaches in the last 30 years to be given a job straight out of high school coaching. "We dove right into the work with staff meetings, recruiting meetings, practices and game meetings. It was like old times again and it was great, being there with my brother."
It was also the spark that reignited Bobby's basketball flame.
"We were really closely aligned in what we believed in terms of philosophy of the game," Bobby said. "Dan gave me a lot of the responsibility of running a program that I think helped develop me as a coach. It was great to work for someone I believed in. I learned so much about how to bring a team through a season; the type of drilling you need to do to improve and the relationship we had sitting in the office, talking about the team, laughing and being brothers was pretty cool.
"We did it at a level that was uncharted territory for us. My brother played in Big East (at Seton Hall) and I played in the ACC and yet, at the lowest level of college basketball, we figured out a way to build a great program. To have a 25-6 season at a place like Wagner is not easy but were able to take them down that road, along with a lot of long bus rides."
When Hurley accepted the job as Sun Devils coach in April, the resume wasn't filled with coaching bullet points, but as Bob Sr. noted, "he's got as many man-hours invested in the sport as anybody who walks the planet."
"We didn't necessarily need someone who had a resume with lots of wins," Sun Devils athletics director Ray Anderson said. "We needed a program builder with energy, who was fiery and could make his own mark.
"Some of the same qualities I detected in (football coach) Todd Graham and in (women's coach) Charli Turner Thorne, I see in Bobby. It was clear to me that he has the drive to really want to build something special and put his own mark on it."
To truly understand what drives Hurley you have to understand the influence family has had on his life, every step of the way.
"No question they are a part of everything I do and everything I will continue to do here with Arizona State basketball," Hurley said.
With the men's basketball team starting practice on Oct. 2, Hurley can't wait get the next ball rolling.
"I've got really good support from the administration, we have the facilities and with our student population, we can tap into 70,000-plus students with a great alumni base. I think we can generate the type of excitement we're trying to bring here," Hurley said. "We're going to actively pursue the best possible talent, but we'll focus hard on recruiting the right kids.
"I don't back down from anyone or anything. I'm not afraid of the challenge."