Culture

Inside the decades-long struggle that made the Caitlin Clark phenomenon possible

Published

2 hours ago

November 7, 2024

Inside the decades-long struggle that made the Caitlin Clark phenomenon possible

In 1990, 34-year-old Carol Stiff, a basketball junkie who spent years coaching small college ball in the Northeast, packed away her clipboard and took an entry-level programmer position at what she considered a “little company” in Bristol, Conn.

Basketball had long been a part of Stiff’s life. Her uncle Don Donoher was one of Bobby Knight’s assistant coaches on the 1984 Olympic gold medal-winning team led by Michael Jordan. By middle school, she was playing youth basketball in Bernardsville, N.J., and one of her fondest memories was going to Madison Square Garden as a teenager with her mom in 1977 to watch Montclair State star Carol “Blaze” Blazejowski as part of a doubleheader called the Hanover Classic. It was the rare opportunity to see the top competitors play the game Stiff loved.

Despite an 11 a.m. tip-off, there was a crowd of over 10,000 people in MSG to see Blaze, whose scoring prowess and all-around game drew comparisons to Pete Maravich. Blaze could shoot. She could pass. She played with flair. Even without a three-point line, she scored 52 points.

“All of a sudden a light bulb went off,” Stiff said of the game. It showed her that the women’s game could thrive under the right circumstances. At her high school, after the boys’ team received Converse Chuck Taylors, the girls did, too, thanks to Title IX. But even that highlighted her beloved sport’s plight: It was rarely viewed as worthy enough on its own. But when the circumstances were right, its greatness could be seen.

Stiff played basketball and field hockey at Southern Connecticut State. Then, following coaching stints at Brown, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Western Connecticut, she joined ESPN.

One of her first tasks at the network was to input four-digit codes for all the programming, recording what was on each hour. She noticed that the format didn’t distinguish if games were played by men or women. In her third year, during a software redesign, she convinced her boss they should add a gender code. It was the first time the network tracked when women’s sports were on — or not — at the network.

Last April, the NCAA women’s national championship game between undefeated South Carolina and Iowa in Cleveland drew nearly 19 million television viewers, the largest audience in women’s college basketball history, and the most-watched basketball game — men’s or women’s — since 2019. Earlier games in the 2024 women’s tournament drew 14.2 million and 12.3 million viewers, respectively, and those followed a 2023 final watched by nearly 10 million, which had been an all-time high.

Why the interest in women’s basketball spiked is no mystery: the immense popularity of Caitlin Clark, the former Iowa and current Indiana Fever star. “There’s (Michael) Jordan, Tiger (Woods) and Caitlin,” said Fox president of insight and analytics Mike Mulvihill.

But before Clark turbocharged the awareness and popularity of women’s basketball, a foundation had to be built, ready and waiting for someone like her. It was constructed by people like Stiff, devotees of the game who long believed the structure and biases of the media business were holding it back. They pushed for more, fought for change, and set the stage on which Clark arrived.

“That stigma that was hanging over women’s sports for so many years — that it’s not athletic, it’s not fun to watch, it’s less than men’s — is being lifted,” said Sue Maryott, the Big Ten Network’s vice president of remote productions. “I think it all started with exposure. People weren’t watching because it wasn’t televised.”

In her third year at ESPN, and just weeks before the 1993-94 college basketball season began, Stiff was tasked with constructing ESPN’s women’s broadcast schedule. She assigned the games for each conference in the time slots she was given, typically Sunday afternoons. A year later, the slots given to her included a 3 p.m. ESPN spot on Martin Luther King Day in January. At the time, it was not considered coveted real estate, but Stiff wanted to make the most of it.

After first failing to get defending national champion North Carolina to agree to a game against UConn, an up-and-coming program in nearby Storrs, Stiff called Pat Summitt, Tennessee’s coach. Summitt had concerns about fitting the game on her schedule and didn’t love the idea of taking her team north in the winter. Stiff made her pitch, sounding like a coach trying to reel in a big recruit, noting that Robin Roberts — a former Division I player and an up-and-coming TV star — would be calling the game. Summitt finally agreed to do it: “For the good of the game.”

The teams entered undefeated, with UConn ranked No. 1 and Tennessee No. 2. A sold-out crowd of 8,241 saw the Huskies beat the Volunteers, 77-66, and the contest recorded a strong 1.0 rating (635,000 households). It was the first game in what would become the greatest rivalry in women’s college basketball history.

However, there were no postgame interviews. A repeat of “The Sports Reporters” had to be rushed onto ESPN.

On Nov. 30, 1996, 30-year-old Brent Clark and 27-year-old Anne Nizzi were married at Saint Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in West Des Moines, Iowa. The next day, the Iowa and Iowa State women’s basketball teams resumed their rivalry after a five-year break at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City. The Hawkeyes won, 64-53, before an announced crowd of 5,061. The game was not televised.

During the 1994-95 women’s college basketball season, Connecticut went 35-0 en route to a national championship, becoming only the second women’s team to complete a season undefeated. The team’s star, Rebecca Lobo, was the most visible women’s basketball player since USC’s Cheryl Miller in the 1980s. Lobo appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman,” and she and her teammates were featured on the “Live with Regis & Kathy Lee” morning show.

As a kid, Lobo watched women’s basketball every chance she got. “Which means I didn’t watch it at all,” she said. She cut out pictures of Miller from Sports Illustrated and placed them in her locker. As the 1996 Olympics approached, Lobo had become something never seen before in the women’s game: a bonafide media sensation, even if she was a bit player on the star-studded Team USA.

The U.S. women won gold, boosting the launch of the WNBA the next year. The first WNBA season consisted of 28 regular-season games for each team with the national broadcasts split between NBC, ESPN and Lifetime. There were three playoff games, with the one-game semifinals simulcast on ESPN and Lifetime, while the Finals were on NBC.

That same year, ESPN won the broadcast rights to the NCAA women’s championship, taking it from CBS. Over the years, CBS turned out some big numbers, most notably with 11.84 million viewers for the 1983 final featuring Miller. However, the network failed to grow the game. ESPN won the rights by offering to air more games and by being willing to have a day of rest for the teams between the national semifinals and the final, which Stiff and others urged the network to put into its offer.

“We got the NCAA deal done. Then the Olympics and then the WNBA, it was like a trifecta,” Stiff said.

In late June 1997, in front of an announced crowd of 17,780, the New York Liberty, led by Lobo and Teresa Weatherspoon, beat Phoenix, 65-57 in Lobo’s first WNBA game.

“The crowd was not just women. It was dads who wanted their child, boy or girl, to see it and have aspirations,” said Blazejowski.

By then, Blaze had retired as a player and was the Liberty’s GM.

In January 2002, The Des Moines Register listed 25 birth notices from three Des Moines-area hospitals on page 5B. The child born to Brent Clark and Anne Nizzi-Clark was simply listed as “daughter.”

Caitlin Clark, like Carol Stiff, was born into a sports family. Her father, Brent, was inducted into the Simpson (Iowa) College Athletics Hall of Fame as a basketball and baseball player. Her maternal grandfather, Bob Nizzi, coached high school football at West Des Moines Dowling Catholic, one of Iowa’s dynastic large-school programs.

She had a large extended family on her mother’s side, but as one of the few girls, Clark was teased relentlessly and developed an obsessive desire to prove herself to her older cousins. Clark was 5 when she expressed an interest in playing basketball, but there were no teams in central Iowa for girls that young, so her father signed her up for boys teams that he coached. By the second grade, she was so dominant that parents complained that a girl shouldn’t be allowed to play with the boys.

In 2000, another star emerged at UConn.

“It was the Diana Taurasi era, when all the guys on SportsCenter could say her name,” Stiff said. “It was almost like, ‘She plays like Larry Bird.’”

Still, Stiff was frustrated. Sports TV can be a chicken-and-egg game. Events don’t receive prime-time slots unless they deliver big ratings. But it is difficult to earn the highest numbers without the best slots.

“So I’d hear, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate,’” Stiff remembered. “I’d say, ‘It doesn’t rate, because no one can see it.’ They say, ‘Carol, it doesn’t rate so advertisers don’t want to buy it.’ It was that vicious cycle.”

Stiff mostly had to work with time slots on Sundays, competing with the NFL or the final round of some PGA event — often with Tiger Woods charging to a win.

“I kept fighting over the years for better windows,” Stiff said. “‘I need better windows, guys. All I get is Sunday afternoons? Are you kidding me?”

Finally, in 2005, ESPN gave the women’s game Big Mondays on ESPN2. Yet it was a bittersweet development. Those games were up against the men’s version of Big Monday that featured behemoths like Duke and North Carolina.

Three years later, Maya Moore arrived at UConn and led the Huskies to two undefeated seasons, four Final Fours and two national championships. She was a bigger guard who could dribble, shoot and pass — an earlier version of Caitlin Clark — and she was twice named national player of the year. Sports Illustrated labeled her “the greatest winner in the history of women’s basketball.”

Yet for most of Moore’s time in Storrs, many of her games were shown only on Connecticut Public Television.

In 2012, 10-year-old Clark traveled with her family three hours north from Des Moines to Minneapolis to attend a Minnesota Lynx WNBA game and see her favorite player: Moore, who was in her second season with the Lynx.

The Clark family watched the Lynx play the Seattle Storm, then lingered afterward. Moore and a few other Lynx players remained on the court, and Clark couldn’t contain herself. She sprinted toward Moore.

“I didn’t have a phone, I didn’t have a Sharpie, I just gave her a hug and I ran away,” Clark said. “And she just gave me a hug back. It’s just something that’s stuck with me, that one interaction can change somebody’s life.”

Around that time, Clark was known by youth sports coaches in central Iowa as an excellent basketball player and also an elite soccer talent. On April 26, 2013, a photo of Clark appeared for the first time in The Des Moines Register. She was pictured with her U11 team from the West Des Moines Soccer Club. The name of her team:

Blaze.

After the final of the 2015 women’s World Cup in Canada produced the largest soccer audience in United States history, executives at Fox had a brainstorm.

Fox received the Women’s World Cup rights as something of a throw-in with the men’s World Cup contract. There was no extra fee. It won big merely by amplifying a property it already owned. Executives knew that the rights to Big Ten women’s basketball were similarly baked into the men’s rights that Fox controlled.

At the same time, with entertainment moving off ad-supported broadcast networks to streaming services like Netflix, fewer women were watching TV. “We’ve felt for a while that we’ve got a clear incentive to try to build out that female audience,” said Mulvihill, the Fox president of insight and analytics.

Fox’s large ownership stake in the Big Ten Network allowed it to use that channel as an incubator. Fox executives programmed a large slate of women’s games on the Big Ten Network and sat back and watched.

Clark’s cousin Audrey Faber was a four-star hooper at Dowling Catholic who would go on to become a three-time All-Big East selection at Creighton. One February afternoon, when Faber needed to appear at The Des Moines Register office as part of the paper’s all-area team, 13-year-old Clark tagged along.

John Naughton covered high school sports for The Register for 31 years until his retirement in 2019. Naughton said hello to Faber and then motioned to Clark.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“I’m Caitlin Clark, Audrey’s my cousin,” she answered.

“Maybe I’ll write about you someday,’” Naughton responded.

On Nov. 22, 2016, Clark played her first game as a freshman at Dowling Catholic High. She scored a team-high 14 points, grabbed six rebounds, dished five assists, pulled three steals and had one turnover in a 75-26 win. Two months later, on Jan. 25, 2017, The Des Moines Register introduced Clark to its readership with a photo and quote from Clark following her 21-point game in a win against Des Moines Roosevelt.

A day later, Naughton included a section on Clark in his girls basketball notebook. He wrote, “Got my first chance to watch West Des Moines Dowling Catholic freshman Caitlin Clark play Tuesday. She’s the real deal.”

Clark scored 368 points that season and led her team to the state tournament, where she scored 11 points in an 87-64 loss to crosstown rival West Des Moines Valley. The game was streamed by the Central Iowa Sports Network. It was the first of Clark’s games aired live to a wide audience.

Clark led the state in scoring as a senior (775 points) and junior (781), but she never won a state title. Her senior year ended with a four-point loss in a regional final. Clark scored 40 points and grabbed 10 rebounds. It wasn’t a state tournament game, so it wasn’t televised.

The COVID-19 pandemic eliminated crowds during the 2020-21 college basketball season, which made it seem like Clark played her freshman season at Iowa in obscurity.

Her first college game came on Nov. 25, 2020, against Northern Iowa, and aired on BTN-Plus, a pay-per-view stream. She scored 27 points in 26 minutes in front of an announced attendance of 365.

Clark’s first nine games were streamed on BTN-Plus. Her first televised contest took place Jan. 9, 2021, at Northwestern. BTN’s Lisa Byington and Meghan McKeown called the action. It was the first of nine of Clark’s games to air on BTN that season.

Fox executives started to notice that Clark’s games drew about 30 percent more viewers than the other games it aired on BTN.

The 2021 NCAA Tournament took place in the San Antonio bubble. In the Sweet 16, Iowa faced UConn, which featured fellow freshman Paige Bueckers. ABC aired the clash, the first time in 16 years an over-the-air network televised an NCAA women’s tournament game. UConn won 92-72 in a game that drew 1.5 million viewers, the most of the six games ABC aired that tournament.

In her sophomore season, Clark’s Iowa telecasts on BTN were 98 percent higher than other women’s games. By her junior year, Clark had fully smashed the chicken or egg dilemma that Stiff ran up against when trying to get good slots for women’s basketball games at ESPN. Clark was must-see TV, with 12 games airing on either ABC, Fox or ESPN, up from five combined in her first two seasons. The Hawkeyes broke BTN’s ratings record four different times, and the Iowa-LSU championship game on ABC generated 9.9 million viewers.

For Clark’s final season, nine Iowa games aired on either ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox, and every Big Ten game was available on network television or Peacock streaming. Clark’s games set women’s basketball viewership records on eight different television or streaming platforms.

The BTN’s Maryott, who oversees nearly all of the network’s live sports except football and men’s basketball, saw the impact Clark had in the viewership numbers, but she also experienced it anecdotally. Her 84-year-old mother, Jean, briefly was in a nursing home last winter for cardiac rehab.

“I’m calling to check on her, and she’s like, ‘Oh, honey, I’ve got to go. We’ve got pizza being delivered to the nursing home and we’re watching Caitlin tonight,’” Maryott said.

Her mother had never paid attention to sports until Clark came to Iowa.

Fox began to look for successes outside of Iowa and Clark. Last Thanksgiving, following its Lions-Packers’ 12:30 p.m. game, Fox aired a men’s college game that drew 5 million viewers and then a women’s game — Indiana and Tennessee — that drew 1.18 million. It was a new record for a women’s basketball game on that network.

Clark played on BTN 43 times during her four years at Iowa, counting the Crossover at Kinnick exhibition in which the school set the women’s basketball single-game attendance record (55,646). Her final appearance was a win over Michigan in a 2024 Big Ten tournament semifinal. Clark came out of a postgame interview session and saw Maryott in the hallway.

“I’ll see you guys tomorrow,’” she said.

Maryott corrected Clark. Her game the next day would air on CBS.

“Then her face kind of fell,” Maryott recalled. “I said, ‘Caitlin, it’s been a thrill. Thank you.’ And she grabs me and hugs me and hugs Meghan, and she says, ‘Thank you guys for everything you did.’ That hit me so hard, because I’m thinking, ‘Thank you for what you did.’”

Caitlin Clark after being selected No. 1 overall by the Indiana Fever in the 2024 WNBA Draft. ((Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

Viewers followed Clark into the WNBA this season. Her regular-season games were watched by 1.178 million viewers compared to 401,000 for all other non-Clark WNBA games, a 199 percent difference. While she is definitely the main attraction, the league over the last five years under commissioner Cathy Englebert has increased the number of nationally televised games from 80 to 200.

“It was the confluence of all this coming together at the same time,” Englebert said.

The WNBA receives $200 million per season in the NBA’s new television contract with ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. The WNBA was previously taking in around $65 million per season. There are budding stars and rivalries, with Englebert citing Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink and the next generation emerging in college, including UConn’s Bueckers and USC’s JuJu Watkins.

“You are looking at the solid next decade of real stars in this league,” Engelbert said. She added: “Whenever anyone asks me, ‘What is next? Expansion? Check. Media? Check. Globalization of this game.”

In 2021, Stiff retired from ESPN during a round of layoffs. She was honored by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and won the John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award. Her reach extended beyond basketball; she was instrumental in the expansion of softball coverage at ESPN.

She was among the millions who watched Clark and Iowa versus LSU in the title game on ABC, and she was pleased with the attention it received, but she also wondered what the number would have been if it had aired in prime time rather than on a Sunday afternoon.

In an email to his staff after the game, ESPN president of content Burke Magnus mentioned Stiff and former top ESPN producer Pat Lowry, another women’s hoops advocate.

“While the future is bright, I thought a lot about the many contributors like Pat Lowry and Carol Stiff, who worked tirelessly for decades to build up women’s basketball slowly but surely,” Magnus wrote. “Everything we witnessed in Cleveland would not have been possible without their efforts.”

ESPN’s chairman Jimmy Pitaro and Disney CEO Bob Iger followed that up with text messages to Stiff, thanking her for her advocacy through the years.

Stiff, now the president of the Women’s Sports Network, played a role in helping broker a game between UConn and the University of Southern California for Dec. 21, with Bueckers and Watkins stepping in as the must-see stars.

That game, played in the 16,000-capacity XL Center in Hartford, will be shown on Fox right after a special Saturday NFL matchup between the rival Steelers and Ravens.

“Clearly, we want to capitalize on the momentum behind women’s basketball and help establish new stars post-Caitlin,” Mulvihill said.

That had long been Stiff’s dream, to see what would happen if a women’s game got a prime slot and lead-in like that.

Said Stiff: “It’s going to be a fabulous game.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Elsa, Mike Powell, Damian Strohmeyer, Nathaniel S. Butler, Daniel, Andy Lyons / Getty Images)

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Culture

Michael Jordan’s 23XI, NASCAR have first preliminary hearing regarding antitrust lawsuit

Published

10 hours ago

November 6, 2024

Press Room

Michael Jordan’s 23XI, NASCAR have first preliminary hearing regarding antitrust lawsuit

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — 23XI Racing co-owners Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin started off NASCAR championship week by facing the sanctioning body in federal court.

23XI, which along with Front Row Motorsports is suing NASCAR and its CEO Jim France for antitrust violations, had its first in-person courtroom showdown with NASCAR during a Monday hearing over a preliminary injunction request.

On the fifth floor of the federal courthouse in Charlotte, the teams’ attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, sparred with NASCAR attorney Chris Yates in a spirited, sometimes contentious hearing. At stake is a clause in NASCAR’s 2025 charter agreement with teams that does not permit them to bring legal action; 23XI and FRM asked Judge Frank Whitney to waive that clause and allow them to sign the agreements so they can continue racing, either as charter teams or non-charter “open” teams.

“We literally cannot practice our profession at all without signing this release,” Kessler said.

23XI Racing co-owners Michael Jordan, Denny Hamlin and Curtis Polk, and Front Row Motorsports’ Bob Jenkins and Jerry Freeze walk into a federal courthouse for today’s injunction hearing. pic.twitter.com/hXNJaecFFW
— Jordan Bianchi (@Jordan_Bianchi) November 4, 2024
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The teams hope Whitney will both waive the clause and reinstate the original charter offer NASCAR had on the table Sept. 6, when 13 owners signed it. The DocuSign originally had a deadline of Nov. 5, Kessler said, but NASCAR has now withdrawn it.

Yates said NASCAR no longer wants to enter into a charter agreement with the teams after they have disparaged NASCAR publicly.

“They have been calling NASCAR a series of names that undermine NASCAR’s brand and goodwill,” Yates said. “NASCAR only wants to enter into charter agreements with teams who want to work collectively to grow the sport.”

Yates added the teams have made a “frontal assault on the charter system” and argued NASCAR is not a monopoly for several reasons, including the availability of 128 other tracks on which stock cars could race in the United States aside from the 26 Cup Series venues.

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He also said the owners could choose to do something else with their business aside from running a NASCAR team, such as “buying another NBA team,” a nod to Jordan’s former ownership of the Charlotte Hornets. But Kessler said the suggestion 23XI and FRM could suddenly change their business model, even to another racing series, would be like asking a football player to become a baseball player.

Jordan spent much of Yates’ arguments leaning forward intently from his seat in the front row of the courtroom, sometimes with a smirk and other times holding his chin.

Michael Jordan after the hearing: pic.twitter.com/2L4MQFmsxj
— Jeff Gluck (@jeff_gluck) November 4, 2024

Yates said under the 2025 charter agreement, race teams will receive approximately half of all TV revenues and said the worst-performing charter team would get a 50 percent increase in payouts from the current agreement.

He said NASCAR was contractually obligated to inform teams of the purse money for next season by Nov. 1, which is why NASCAR has reduced the number to 32 charters with no plans to re-offer 23XI and FRM their existing four combined charters. Charters offer guaranteed entry into each Cup Series race, along with a higher share of the race winnings. Yates claimed the teams were asking the judge to force NASCAR into a seven-to-14-year agreement by rewriting the contract “on their preferred terms.”

“They’re trying to force NASCAR into an unwanted charter relationship,” he said.

Kessler denied that and said the teams only wanted the judge to waive the clause for the length of this case, adding: “Hopefully it doesn’t take 14 years.”

Yates also said the teams’ contention that many owners were coerced into signing the new agreement on Sept. 6 was false, because team owners like Roger Penske, Rick Hendrick and Pro Football Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs are not the type of people who get pushed around. He also quoted Hendrick and owner Justin Marks as saying they were pleased with the terms of the new charter agreement.

At one point, Kessler loudly said Yates was “manufacturing facts” and “misrepresenting” the teams’ case to mislead the judge. Kessler rephrased the terms of what the teams were asking for “so even (Yates) can understand it.”

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Responded Yates: “We disagree on pretty much everything he’s argued.”

Kessler also revealed 23XI’s driver contract with Tyler Reddick would allow the driver to leave as a free agent if 23XI did not have a charter for him, along with the team’s sponsors.

Reddick is one of four drivers competing for the NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway. Prior to the hearing, Whitney told those in the room he hadn’t seen his courtroom so full “in several years” and added, “I feel like I have two full law firms in front of me, too.”

Whitney initially appeared skeptical of Kessler’s claims while being more open to Yates’ arguments, but the rebuttals from Kessler left the two sides on even ground.

The judge praised both attorneys for their “extraordinary” and “very excellent arguments” and said he would give a written decision by Friday.

Both sides appeared pleased afterward. Though NASCAR did not comment, France turned around and winked at senior advisor Mike Helton in the row behind him.

And Jordan, addressing reporters outside the courtroom, said Kessler “did an unbelievable job today.”

“I put all my cards on the table,” Jordan said. “I think we did a good job of that. But I’m looking forward to winning the championship this weekend.”

Required reading

(Photo: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)

Culture

Before Dan Hurley’s UConn master class, he was a high school history teacher

Published

18 hours ago

November 6, 2024

Press Room

Before Dan Hurley’s UConn master class, he was a high school history teacher

Juan Santamaria’s World History II teacher comes up often, more than any 38-year-old’s high school teacher should. Santamaria recently attended a soccer event in Kansas City and found himself in a crowd of basketball fans. He noticed a man reading “The Miracle of St. Anthony,” a book about legendary high school basketball coach Bob Hurley Sr.

“You know, I know his son, Dan Hurley,” Santamaria said.

“No way,” the man replied. “I love Dan.”

“I’m serious,” Santamaria said. “He was my history teacher.”

His audience wasn’t buying it.

“Yes,” Santamaria said. “That’s how he started.”

UConn coach Dan Hurley has spoken often about his days at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, N.J., and how they shaped the man he is now: an elite college basketball coach, winner of the last two men’s national titles, who this summer turned down a chance to coach the Los Angeles Lakers.

Not as much is known about Hurley’s days as a teacher, a role often required of high school coaches. He referenced them during a news conference in April at the Final Four in Arizona, discussing how he learned to control a classroom, first at St. Anthony, where he taught health, physical education, sex education and driver’s education, then at St. Benedict’s, where he worked from 2001 to 2010.

How did this ultra-intense coach, one with a red-faced reputation for challenging players and officials, adapt to the classroom, teaching the French Revolution and the collapse of the Roman Empire?

Informed recently that The Athletic had spoken with about a dozen former St. Benedict’s students, as well as leadership and faculty, about his teaching days, Hurley laughed. “Oh, God,” he said, as if unsure of what was to come. A liberal studies major at Seton Hall with a minor in criminal justice, Hurley said teaching World History II was probably the most nervous he’s been in his life. He also doesn’t think he’s ever worked harder.

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St. Benedict’s in the early 2000s had a diverse enrollment of about 500. It was an all-boys school, grades seven through 12. The school calendar included out-of-classroom sessions designed to get students involved in community service or other activities such as hiking or martial arts. The dress code was button-down shirts with ties, although in later years this changed to hoodies.

Hurley, who had just lost his job as an assistant coach at Rutgers, worked in admissions in addition to coaching and teaching. He was 28 and married with a 2-year-old son. On most days, his work schedule unfolded like this:

8:30-11 a.m.: Teaching history. World History II, which most students took as sophomores, covered European history, starting with the Middle Ages. Leading up to his first week, Hurley studied beyond the textbook because he was convinced “some wise-ass kids were going to test me.” Those close to him, however, thought it was a good fit.

“I thought history was probably up his alley because it’s a lot of memorization,’’ said Hurley’s older brother, Arizona State coach Bobby Hurley. “You don’t have to do labs or anything. If he was doing that, I’d be scared he might blow the school up or something.”

11 a.m.-2 p.m.: Visiting schools. Driving a school-issued vehicle, Hurley would visit grade schools in Newark, Irvington and East Orange and talk to students about the benefits of St. Benedict’s. This showcased Hurley’s people skills, overlooked throughout his career in basketball.

“He’s one of those guys, if people catch him getting on a player or getting on an official, it’s, ‘Oh, that’s what he’s like,’” said P.J. Carlesimo, who coached Hurley at Seton Hall. “But if you talk to the players in particular, or guys he taught, they’d say, ‘No, no, no.’ They’d do anything for him.”

3-6 p.m.: Coaching basketball. Hurley would finish his practice plan and run practice. Some nights the Gray Bees might have a game. Others, he’d stay late and greet visitors at a school fair. If nothing else, Hurley would return home and grade papers.

Father Edwin Leahy, the headmaster at St. Benedict’s, never doubted Hurley would put in the work, mostly because Hurley had watched his dad do it for years at St. Anthony, where he had won 26 state championships.

“St. Anthony was just a tiny little box in the middle of Jersey City right before the Holland Tunnel and everybody did whatever they had to do to make the thing work,’’ Leahy said. “Danny grew up in that kind of an environment of watching these adults, whether they were the religious sisters or the lay people who would do whatever they had to do. So teaching history, I don’t think it was something that he was excited about at first, but he knew you did whatever you had to do.”

Former students describe Hurley mostly in three ways: He had a presence. He had a sense of humor. And he had swag.

“Growing up as a kid in the inner city, in Newark or anywhere around there, you knew all the neighbors,” said Joe Carratura, Class of 2004. “You could play outside all day long. Everybody sat on their stoop. Miss Susie down the street was your babysitter. It was just a community, and he felt like he belonged there.”

Marc Onion taught English. Shortly after Hurley’s hire, Onion went and watched a summer basketball workout. He noticed the AC was shut off and Hurley had his guys playing not full court but full gym, with the bleachers pulled back. No out of bounds. No fouls. Just grab the ball and go. A test of wills.

In the classroom, Onion noticed a different environment but similar control. Hurley walked around the room. He posted up in the corner. He never sat behind his desk. “He’d sit along the front edge and sort of be the big commander over the kids in the room,” Onion said. “He had the wherewithal to know that, ‘All right, I’m going to be attentive to every guy in this space just by being in really close proximity.’”

“I think the worst thing sometimes to say about the teacher and the class is there’s no discipline,” Hurley said. “Like, ‘The kids show no respect for the teacher.’ So for me it felt like if I ever went behind the desk, my presence wouldn’t be just as strong. And I’d be opening up the door for some level of anarchy.”

Most of Hurley’s classes had 20 or so students. Some called him “Coach.” Others called him “Hurley.” He assigned them nicknames. If someone wore a Dennis Rodman jersey, he became “Rodman” for the rest of the school year. If someone had slicked-back hair, he became “Slick.” Santamaria, a 2004 grad, was shortened to “Santa-man.”

Hurley announced test scores by football position and jersey number. Those who scored in the 80s were wide receivers. We got a Jerry Rice. Those who failed, scoring in the 20s, for example, would get a running back. Oh, we got an Emmitt Smith over here.

Certain positions you’d want to avoid, Hurley said.

“You would go in there and you’d know there was going to be a joke here and there,” Santamaria said. “I enjoyed his class because I knew there was going to be banter. There was going to be some humor, some zings being thrown around, which always made it fun.”

Hurley wore khakis and a basketball pullover. (“I’ve never been a clothes person,” he said.) He walked with swagger. Students called it the “Hurley Shuffle” and tried to mimic it in the hallway. “People have always made fun of the way I walk,” Hurley said. He had receding hair and a growing midsection. At lunch, Hurley would go with faculty members to Branch Brook Park where he would grab a few hot dogs with sauerkraut, onions or chili. Plan B was pizza.

His teaching style was direct. One student described it as, “Don’t bust my balls, I won’t bust yours.” Another joked that he felt like he had to get his work done because he didn’t want to have to run line drills in the gym. Nearly all agreed Hurley held them accountable.

“He cared about what he was doing and he cared about the kids that were with him,” said Jim Duffy, who also taught history. “I mean, the nickname stuff sounds cutesy, but to a certain extent that becomes a way of classroom management. Which is a whole trick to teaching because if you can’t manage a classroom, they’re going to eat you alive, whether you’re the basketball coach or not.”

Hurley’s second consecutive national title put him in rarefied air, but he still thinks of his high school coaching days. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

St. Benedict’s allowed students to hold jobs around the school. The program was designed to teach responsibility, while putting money in students’ pockets. Marcos Novoa’s job was to clean the gym, which included Hurley’s office.

Novoa didn’t have Hurley in class. He wasn’t much of a basketball fan. But nearly every day, he entered Hurley’s office, which was the size of a cubicle, and cleaned out his garbage or straightened his desk. He was a jokester. Hurley was a jokester. They got along well.

“We were all kids, but it almost felt like he could be one of us,” said Novoa, now a police officer in New Jersey. “If I had an issue, and I didn’t want to bring it to anyone important so to speak, I would probably feel more comfortable going to him first. To me, he was somebody I could relate to a little bit more than others.”

Mike Malinowski credits Hurley for getting him started on his path to teaching. One day in the fall of 2003, he was eating breakfast in the school cafeteria when Hurley and another teacher called him over. They asked Malinowski about his college plans. Malinowski listed four schools he was considering. Hurley told him he needed to choose Rutgers.

“He put me on that trajectory,’’ said Malinowski, now in his 15th year as a teacher. “I attended that university because of him. I went there, I met my wife. I got involved with a bunch of other great teachers and professors. I mean, indirectly, did it eventually lead me to become a teacher? … I can’t lie and say I became a teacher because of him, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say I’m a better teacher because of my experience with him.”

As a basketball coach, Hurley took St. Benedict’s to a national level. He went 223-21 over nine years, agonizing over each loss as Hurleys do. If St. Benedict’s had a difficult game coming up, he would have a test or a History Channel video ready for the next day’s class, something that would give him time to reset should the Gray Bees lose. Calling out was not something teachers did at St. Benedict’s. Hurley doesn’t recall taking one sick day in nine years.

(Speaking of losing, when Hurley called last spring to discuss the Lakers job, Leahy told him he was out of his mind and needed to think of his wife, Andrea. “You’re going to lose more games with the Lakers than you’re going to lose at UConn, and you’re a mental case when you lose,” Leahy said he told Hurley. “You’re going to come home to Andrea and she’s going to hit you over the head with a pot. You can’t do that.”)

Most of the St. Benedict’s students who spoke to The Athletic have followed Hurley’s career. From Wagner to Rhode Island, then to Connecticut, where the 51-year-old is starting his seventh season, they still see the same guy. Most said that if they would cross Hurley on the sidewalk, he may not know their names, but he would recognize their faces.

“I’m pretty sure if you put us in a room with Hurley, he’s gonna be the same exact person he was 20 years ago,” said Rui Ribeiro, a 2005 grad. “He’s going to crack jokes and make fun of this and talk about that. That’s just the type of person he is, which is good. You shouldn’t change just because you’re succeeding in life.”

Hurley, who was recently inducted into the St. Benedict’s Hall of Fame, said teaching was a lot like coaching. Classes were like practices. Tests and quizzes were like games. He wanted to show students he was prepared. He wanted to make it fun. He wanted to show he cared. Looking back, he considers it the most important time of his professional life, which is why he once talked with Leahy about returning one day to teach history and coach ball, a career come full circle.

With UConn about to chase a third consecutive national title, Hurley knows this seems far-fetched.

“I’ve always in my mind … who knows at the end whether you’ve had enough of the high end of sports and you just wanted to get back to pure coaching or an experience like that,” he said, before pausing. “In the end, maybe. Who knows.”

(Top photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)

Culture

Champions League Briefing: Does this make Amorim the new Fergie? Why did Vinicius Jr. stand still?

Published

1 day ago

November 6, 2024

Press Room

Champions League Briefing: Does this make Amorim the new Fergie? Why did Vinicius Jr. stand still?

Just when you thought the Champions League group stage was becoming predictable…

Manchester City and Real Madrid, the two teams mostly likely to win it all this season, took two beatings Tuesday night that shook the competition up.

New Manchester United boss Ruben Amorim quite possibly saved his best for last at Sporting CP, signing off from his final home game with a 4-1 victory over Manchester City. Meanwhile, AC Milan added to Madrid’s many problems in Spain’s capital with a 3-1 victory.

The third most likely team to win the 2024-25 Champions League? Liverpool. And they brushed aside Bayer Leverkusen and Xabi Alonso 4-0 at Anfield to reinforce their credentials.

These are the big talking points from Tuesday’s action.

Does this make Amorim the new Fergie?

“If we win they’ll think the new Alex Ferguson has arrived, which is very difficult to maintain,” Amorim said.

Arise, Sir Ruben. His words, spoken on the eve of his final home match in charge of Sporting, feel pretty pertinent, don’t they?

Manchester United are now favourites for the 2025-26 Premier League title and Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City dynasty is about to come crumbling down.

Okay, fine, let’s just calm down a bit. But also, let’s get massively carried away with this remarkable result.

Two years ago Manchester City blitzed the Portuguese team 5-0 on aggregate in the Champions League last 16, but on Tuesday they showcased just why United were so keen to land Amorim after his team walloped Guardiola’s shellshocked side.

It must have been an incredibly bittersweet night for Sporting’s fans, who celebrated one of the best victories in the club’s recent history knowing they may not see the like again for a while. They said goodbye with a huge tifo which read “Obrigada” (thank you) and Amorim returned the favour with a night to remember.

In the battle of the Nordic goal-loving strikers, the clear winner was Viktor Gyokeres, whose hat-trick took his tally to 23 goals in 15 matches for club and country this season. He has only failed to score in three games.

(Gualter Fatia/Getty Images)

Amorim will surely want to take Gyokeres with him to Old Trafford via a rumoured €100 million release clause, although with Ineos tightening the purse strings, perhaps the Etihad, with the soon-to-be director of football Hugo Viana, who leaves Sporting at the end of the season, might be a more likely destination. Gyokeres and Erling Haaland up front together? The nets will need reinforcing.

A perfectly placed ball from Geovany Quenda and a thumping finish from Viktor Gyökeres 😤
Sporting are level against Man City! pic.twitter.com/cg9rdzT1QU
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— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) November 5, 2024

There’s just no stopping Viktor Gyökeres in that position 🤖
21st goal of the campaign for the Sporting striker.
📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/uhgkDhbuuZ
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) November 5, 2024

The two managers won’t have to wait long for a rematch. If Amorim can do the same with Rasmus Hojlund or Joshua Zirkzee up front when his Manchester United team takes on City and Guardiola on December 15th, you can make plans for the statue already.

Inconsistent Milan turn it on at the Bernabeu

AC Milan’s 3-1 victory in the Bernabeu was as surprising and stunning as Sporting’s win.

Milan can be infuriatingly inconsistent – they’re a lowly seventh in Serie A, already eight points off leaders Napoli, albeit with a game in hand. They lost their first two Champions League matches (to Liverpool and Bayer Leverkusen) before struggling past 10-man Club Bruges to claim their first victory on Matchday 3.

Here, though, they were at their very best, and uncoincidentally so were Rafael Leao and Theo Hernandez, who on their day must be one of the most exciting left-sided pairs in European football.

New manager Paulo Fonseca boldly dropped both of them earlier in the season and Leao has been left on the bench in the league lately, but as Alvaro Morata told The Athletic last week, “He’s the best player on the team and just needs to keep doing what he’s doing.”

Morata restored Milan’s lead when putting them 2-1 up after Leao’s shot was saved. Leao then set up Dutch midfielder Tijjani Reijnders, who had scored twice against Bruges last time out, to seal a memorable victory in this clash of European football giants.

(Angel Martinez/Getty Images)

With AC Milan now facing Slovan Bratislava, Red Star Belgrade, Girona and Dinamo Zagreb in their final four matches, the path of progression to the last 16 via an automatic qualification spot should be straightforward.

But only if they can find that elusive consistency.

Noel Gallagher was City’s best performer on the night

If you thought TNT Sports were dumbing down their coverage even more by inviting Oasis legend Noel Gallagher into the commentary box for City’s game at Sporting, well, you would be wrong.

In what probably says far more about the standard of punditry on English football screens, Gallagher was a breath of fresh air in that he spoke common sense. Yes, it’s a wacky concept, stick with us.

Sure, he said ‘we’ when talking about his beloved City, but this was no Sky Sports Fan Zone gimmick, nor was he overly biased. (He thought the decision to award City a penalty for handball was harsh and questioned things like bringing Kevin De Bruyne on for the final seven minutes, probably fearing for his hamstrings.)

There was no melodrama, silly noises, or horrible ‘banter’ like you get when certain other pundits talk about the teams they support.

But Gallagher is an actual fan (he was in the away end at Bournemouth on Saturday) and just says things like they are, backed here by insight and statistics, and even a foreshadowing of City wasting chances and needing to score a second goal — which came 37 seconds before Sporting equalised. It would be easy to ridicule his comments because he’s Noel Gallagher, like comparing Gyokeres’ penalty technique to Troy Deeney’s, until you stop and realise that it’s true.

He did let himself down by saying, “Some songwriting genius wrote once; ‘We see things they’ll never see’, and that’s Guardiola for ya,” leading to raucous laughter from commentator Darren Fletcher. But we’ll forgive him that one.

Anyway, Gallagher’s was probably the best City performance of the night as they suffered a third successive defeat in all competitions for the first time in six-and-a-half years.

They wasted chances in the opening half an hour, only having Phil Foden’s fourth-minute goal to show for their dominance, then Haaland blasted a penalty against the bar when he had the chance to pull it back to 3-2.

Injuries are clearly having an impact, particularly in defence with teenager Jahmai Simpson-Pusey making his first senior start at the back. With 73 per cent possession and 20 shots to nine, it’s not as if City were outplayed, far from it.

But they really are missing Rodri, who may become a more deserved winner of the Ballon d’Or in some people’s eyes by virtue of not playing.

Speaking of which…

Vinicius Jr. stood tall, then stood still

It was a mixed night for Vinicius Junior, who was having a good evening when he levelled things for Real Madrid with a Panenka penalty, minutes after the Bernabeu had booed the Champions League anthem to express their displeasure at him not winning the Ballon d’Or.

𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒍. 𝑨𝒔. 𝒀𝒐𝒖. 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆. 🥶
Vinicius Jr sends Mike Maignan the wrong way with a classy panenka 😎
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📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/IG9FFDZgVh
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) November 5, 2024

Vini Jr. goes for the Panenka vs. Mike Maignan 😮‍💨 pic.twitter.com/VkPPG2NOYN
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) November 5, 2024

Vinicius Jr had won the penalty himself from a foul by former Tottenham Hotspur defender Emerson Royal, but from then on Madrid melted and the sight of Vinicius Jr. stood completely still as an Aurelien Tchouameni pass didn’t reach him (seconds later Milan were 2-1 up) was one of the night’s defining images.

So too was Jude Bellingham kicking a water bottle in frustration after being substituted.

This was Madrid’s second defeat of the competition in four games (they also lost 1-0 at Lille) and, coming off the back of the 4-0 humiliation at home to Barcelona in their last league match, it encapsulates a season that is threatening to unravel.

They will surely still reach at least a play-off for the last 16 with ease, but with a trip to Liverpool next on Matchday 5, the usually composed Carlo Ancelotti may have to start sweating a little.

Alonso’s Leverkusen stumbling as Slot’s Liverpool fly

Anfield is not a place you want to have to go and get a result right now.

Liverpool maintained one of only two 100 per cent records in the new Champions League format (the other being *checks notes* Aston Villa, who visit Club Bruges on Wednesday) with a serene 4-0 victory over Bayer Leverkusen.

In contrast to Amorim, whose stock is sky high as he prepares to move to the Premier League, Xabi Alonso’s reputation is starting to take a little bit of a hit, just months after he was touted as the best thing since sliced bread but resisted the temptation of a Premier League move.

Arne Slot got the Liverpool call instead and the above stats reflect, yet again, how he has got this Liverpool team purring very quickly.

Luis Diaz scored a second half hat-trick including a chip that could only have looked more delicious with a dollop of mayonnaise on the end.

The ball from Curtis Jones and the CHEEKY Luis Díaz finish 😳
Anfield loved that one 👏 pic.twitter.com/FebrhSqnYK
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) November 5, 2024

Liverpool v Leverkusen = The Luis Diaz Show ✨
All three goals from the Colombian in their 4-0 victory… ⚽️⚽️⚽️#UCLonPrime pic.twitter.com/fqh6uW0aQq
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— Amazon Prime Video Sport (@primevideosport) November 5, 2024

Slot and Liverpool are flying at the top of the Premier League and the Champions League. Alonso and Leverkusen were never going to reach the impeccable heights of 2023-24, but the difficult second-season syndrome is kicking in.