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When he was a kid growing up in Jersey City, Dan Hurley just wanted to watch cartoons. But he always found himself being dragged out of the house by his older brother, Bobby, to go work out on the nearest open basketball court.
“I never imagined I would be coaching beyond the point where I felt I had to be playing,” Dan Hurley said.
Now Dan, 37, is the one who has dragged Bobby back to the basketball court. After Dan was hired as the men’s basketball coach at Wagner College in April, his first hire was to make Bobby an assistant coach.
“I knew there was a point where I’d be able to walk away from basketball, and I didn’t think I would continue coaching at that point,” Dan said. “[And] I certainly didn’t think my older brother would be working on a staff that I was heading up.
“It’s pretty ironic.”
For Bobby, 39, it’s a chance to become a part of the family business. Both brothers helped establish the legend that is the boys basketball program at St. Anthony’s High School in Jersey City, where their father, Bob, is approaching 1,000 career wins. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in August.
But it took Bobby a long time to get back into basketball, in large part because of the disappointing way his NBA career played out. After a storybook four years at Duke, including a unanimous All-America selection in 1993 and back-to-back national championships, the 6-foot, 165-pound point guard was the seventh pick in the 1993 NBA Draft by the Kings. After starting at point guard in the first 19 games his rookie year, averaging 7.1 points and 6.1 assists, he was involved in a brutal car accident on Dec. 12, 1993.
A Sacramento house painter, Daniel Wieland, was driving his station wagon without his headlights on, and Bobby turned in front of him while he was on his way home after scoring no points but dishing out seven assists in that night’s 112-102 loss to the Clippers. Bobby wasn’t wearing a seat belt and was thrown from the car, landing face-down in a ditch.
He suffered multiple serious injuries, including collapsed lungs and several broken ribs. After missing the remainder of his rookie year, he was able to recover enough to return to the NBA for the next five seasons. But the long-term effects of the accident never gave him a chance to live up to his lofty draft status.
“He was robbed of his career by that automobile accident,” Bob Hurley Sr. said. “Physically, he was never the same player he was. . . . He wasn’t allowed to be. He was frustrated he couldn’t do the things he could do when he was a younger kid, 14-15 years old.”
After spending his life working toward the dream of a successful NBA career, having his success taken out of his hands was too much for Bobby to take. So, through a family friend, he found a different outlet to chase athletic glory after he retired following the 1997-98 season — horse racing.
“Not succeeding as much as I wanted to in the pros left kind of a bitter taste in my mouth for basketball,” Bobby said. “I needed to step away from it for a minute and do something different.
“I look back and say maybe that wasn’t the most mature response to it, but I felt burnt out, having pushed so hard to get to that level and not having the success that I wanted to.”
Like basketball, Bobby found early success in horse racing. He established Devil Eleven Stables — a reference to his jersey number at Duke — and the corresponding Devil Eleven Farm in Ocala, Fla.. One of his horses, Songandaprayer, was the winner of the Fountain of Youth Stakes in 2001 and finished 13th in that year’s Kentucky Derby.
“It was exciting to have been a part of that, to experience it,” Bobby said. “I felt like I accomplished something that was separate from basketball. . . . It was exciting to be able to do something at a high level in another area.”
Hurley had other successful horses, including Shooter, which won the Sapling Stakes at Monmouth Park in 2000, and Praying for Cash, which finished second in the Haskell. But, like basketball, his stint in horse racing came to a disappointing end.
Last December, PNC Bank sued Bobby and Devil Eleven Stables after they defaulted on a $1 million loan, and the bank foreclosed on the farm earlier this year and will auction it off to pay off a $3.3 million debt. The two sides came to a settlement earlier this year, and Bobby — who, as a term of the settlement can’t go into details about the farm’s finances — said he has no hard feelings about the way his horse racing career ended.
“I felt like I contributed to the business for a long time,” Bobby said. “I employed a lot of people, and saw a lot of positive things happen. . . . I felt I did a lot [in horse racing].”
Bobby made his initial return to the sport in 2003 when, after interviewing for, but not getting the head coaching job at Columbia, he took a job as a scout for the 76ers under current Nets president and general manager Billy King. But though he was back in the gym, back involved in the game again, it just didn’t feel right.
“I felt like there was something missing by not working with people, and kind of going and watching games and writing reports,” Bobby said. “It didn’t feel the same as getting involved and being on the floor and right in the mix.”
But now he’s back in the mix and helping his brother — who spent the last nine years turning St. Benedict’s Prep into a national high school power after working as an assistant at Rutgers — try to build a program from the ground up after Wagner went 5-26 a year ago.
And nearly 17 years after the accident that forever changed his life, Bobby finally is finding peace with the way things have played out.
“It’s funny, because this is the best therapy I’ve had,” Bobby said. “Since Dan has given me the job and I’ve been involved in this, I have thought about nothing more than trying to help him be successful.
“For years, I thought about my failures and other things, why this didn’t work out and that didn’t work out. But since I’ve been here, it’s been how do I make these players better, how do I recruit and help contribute to recruiting and find players to make the program successful.”
Bobby Hurley is back on the basketball court, and back in the family business. It took awhile, but it had to happen eventually.
“In this family,” Bob Hurley Sr. said, “it’s hard to get out of it.”
tbontemps@nypost.com