Hurley intrigued by Smith’s transition
Ex-NBA star, who played for UConn coach in high school, back in college
J.R. Smith spent 16 years making a fortune playing basketball and landing at the heart of some of the NBA’s most talked-about moments.
Now he’s back in the classroom for the first time since he was a member of a young Dan Hurley’s St. Benedict’s Prep basketball program in 2002-04.
“It’s cool, from a distance, just to see what he’s doing, the message that he’s sending about education,” said Hurley, who is entering his fourth season at UConn and coached St. Benedict’s in Newark 2001-10. “Life-long learner wanting to continue to grow and mature and develop as a man, intellectually. I think it’s such a beautiful message he’s sending.”
Smith, who went straight from St. Benedict’s to the NBA in 2004, has enrolled at North Carolina A&T. He has also joined the school’s golf team, making Richard Watkins his first coach at the amateur level since Hurley.
“I just loved coaching him because he had so much passion and love for basketball and he never cheated himself or our team any day in terms of how he showed up, competitively, to play, whether it was practice or game night,” Hurley said. “He always showed up. We’re both crazy passionate about basketball. And we’re both, probably, a little bit crazy. So it worked.”
Charismatic and even mildly controversial, Smith won two championships alongside LeBron James, was paid about $100 million and scored more than 12,000 points before retiring last year.
He was sometimes shirtless, like in the champagne shower celebration in the club after the Cleveland Cavaliers won the title in 2016. He was sometimes clueless, like when he ran out the clock after an offensive rebound, thinking the Cavs were leading a game that was tied, in the 2018 Finals. And he was often goofing around, once arriving to the arena on a hoverboard and once untying the shoelace of opponent Shawn Marion during a game.
Now Smith, 36, is the modern day Thornton Melon, Rodney Dangerfield’s character in the 1986 comedy “Back To School” who enrolled at the fictitious Grand Lakes University and joined the diving team.
He is documenting the experience one social media post at a time, writing about study halls and English papers and his new athletic journey, from finally gaining NCAA clearance to join Aggies’ six-player team to his disappointment in not being among the team’s players to actually participate and post a score in this past weekend’s HBCU Division I Invitational in Newman, Ga.
“I hated school growing up and I knew this would be a challenge, but that's not going to discourage me one second,” Smith tweeted on Aug. 27. “You have to be able to buckle down and lock into new journys [sic] and challenges coming in your life. Observe, learn and adapt.”
“75 of 75 on my African American History Quiz Today !!!!! ” he tweeted, with a gif of Tupac Shakur dancing, on Sept. 10.
Hurley has been keeping up from afar. He remains in occasional contact with Smith, mostly through social media, and attended his wedding several years ago. Hurley said his wife, Andrea, has remained in contact with the family, too. J.R.’s younger brother, Chris, also played at St. Benedict’s and they were briefly teammates with the Knicks.
Smith, of Lakewood, N.J., was co-MVP, with Dwight Howard, of the 2004 McDonald's All-American game and was selected No. 18 overall by the Hornets in the draft. He played for five NBA teams in his career, and spent the 2011-12 season with the Zhejiang Golden Bulls and leading the Chinese Basketball Association in scoring.
Smith was a prolific NBA scorer, averaging 23.7 points in his career and 30.7 for the Nuggets in 2007-08.
“He's a sponge right now,” Watkins told the Washington Post. “He's picking up everything and he's learning. I'm pretty sure he's a trash talker, we just haven't heard it, yet.”
Smith always had a lot to say in the NBA, known for his wisecracks, antics, 70plus tattoos and forceful dunks. He entered the NBA at 19 and wasn’t always known as the most mature player or person. He was suspended several times in his career, at least once for violating the NBA’s substance abuse policy — and once for throwing a bowl of soup at an assistant coach.
“That was the cool thing about being a high school coach,” Hurley said. “You don’t have a finished product. You’ve got a 15, 16, 17year old filled with all types of potential as young men. The success he had in his career — the amount of years he played, the amount of money he’s made, his production as a scorer and a 3-point shooter, Sixth Man of the Year, NBA champion — it gets muted, all the success he’s had, because of some of the social media or some of his just vibrant personality and fun-loving nature. But to see that fun-loving nature, and a little bit of immaturity at times, grow into this man is pretty cool to see the beginning of it, and the middle.”
Hurley is unlikely to make golf plans as his next gettogether with Smith.
“I’m not a golfer,” Hurley said. “I tried this summer. The plan was to play once or twice a month, try to get six, maybe eight, rounds. And it was once. The experience wasn’t awful and it was great to find a way to spend time with my boys, which was part of the motivation.”
Hurley said he played at Glastonbury Hills Country club with his sons, Danny and Andrew. He had purchased clubs several years ago.
“When I took them out, there were spiders webs on them — and the little baby spider pockets where spiders were on the clubs so long that they had given birth to baby spiders,” Hurley said. “I got frustrated out there.”
Hurley has no interest in playing the Travelers Championship Celebrity Pro-Am in 2022, or public golf of any kind.
“No chance, unless somebody wanted to just completely goof on me for an incredibly great cause, where it’s some charitable thing,” he said. “I would play if it was going to help somebody else, but I would never just play.”
Smith picked up golf as a hobby while in the prime of his basketball playing career.
“Had my first golf team practice yesterday!!” he tweeted Sept. 8. “The experience is amazing! Can’t wait for the opportunity to put our skills on as a team! So many great teammates with great tips to get around the course!! Learning so much from these dudes!”