Dom Amore: If Dan Hurley isn't the center of attention this March, he's never far from it

NEW YORK — Near the end of ESPN’s E60 documentary on Dan Hurley, his assistant coach revealed the great truth of the piece.

After winning the national championship at UConn, Luke Murray said, Hurley felt he had finally earned “a seat at the table.”

In response, Bob Hurley Sr., said, “He should have his own table.”

When Dan Hurley sees the finished product, which will debut Saturday morning at 11 a.m. on ESPN, with an extended version available for streaming on ESPN+, if he hasn’t already, he might find some inner peace in that. Or he may not, since life rarely offers real finality. There is always another mountain to climb, another obstacle to overcome, and if there isn’t, most of us need to invent them to keep ourselves engaged in living.

Dan Hurley, who began another postseason Thursday night with the UConn men at Madison Square Garden, scene of some of his highest highs and lowest lows, is in the fight once again and, on this level, he is winning again, even if the Huskies have lost a few more basketball games than the past couple of years. Rick Pitino may be the ‘It’ coach at the moment with the ‘It’ team in the Big East with St. John’s, others may be the trendy picks to win the championship and dethrone the back-to-back championship Huskies.

But Hurley is not far from the center of attention. This has been a big week.

Both CBS’ “60 Minutes” and ESPN’s signature documentary series have presented Hurley’s complexity and his compelling story to the living rooms all over the country, into every living room where the player he may want and their families will be watching.

“I want to be able to have a great impact on the lives of young people, the way I needed it,” Hurley told ESPN’s venerable interviewer, Jeremy Schaap.

On Thursday, with the Huskies playing so late, I captured my place in the Garden’s press room and watched them both. If you are a UConn fan and do the same, it would surely juice you up all over again. If you’re college basketball fan, you may learn a few things not well known outside Connecticut.

Or, if you’re easy pickings for a good human drama, you’ll be pulled in because, love him or not, Dan Hurley is compelling. He hides nothing, he runs from nothing that might be awkward or embarrassing. In his years in Connecticut, he never has. He stared down his defeats with as much intensity as he exalts in his victories.

“I think you need more coaches like me in sports and not less,” Hurley said, in a defiant moment. “Sports are getting softer, not enough people living and dying with every possession, striving, giving everything they have to win it.”

These episodes have been in the works for a while, and tackled the subject of Hurley fresh off the meltdowns in Hawaii back in November. Since that time, the Huskies steadied and took a 22-9 record into the Big East Tournament and Hurley finished the regular season with — are you sitting down? — one technical foul. No ejections, fines, suspensions or smashed clipboards. Since you may not read this before the UConn-Villanova quarterfinal game, I’ll stress those are regular-season stats.

I’m scoring the dueling docs a solid hit for 60 Minutes, a home run for ESPN, which had more time and a better grasp of the nuances to present Hurley’s story.

The 13-minute piece on 60 Minutes, “A Method to His Madness,” skimmed the surface of Hurley’s life and personality but the approach was what you’d expect from a news program, even the best there has ever been, dabbling in sports. Correspondent Jon Wertheim calls Hurley a “human furnace of intensity, hell-bent on wringing every ounce of potential from his players.” No argument there.

Actually, the leftover content, 5 1/2 minutes available on 60 Minutes Overtime, was rather valuable, dealing with the Lakers’ story. There is no mention of any player in the main piece, most of that is probably on the cutting room floor, but in explaining his decision to stay at UConn Hurley got the chance to express his empathy for players.

But the 60 Minutes piece offered a headline, as Hurley said half his roster was considering transferring, and some may have already picked a new school. When the Huskies go to New York, Hurley said he didn’t understand the “consternation” that caused, mostly among Connecticut fans. Frankly, neither do I. Long before the eased transfer rules and name-image-likeness money, players who are getting getting minutes were transferring. No one goes to college to sit on the bench. Hey, UConn had players leave even after the championships. It just shows how even a tame observation from Hurley can take on a life of its own.

More revealing was Geno Auriemma’s appearance as Hurley’s voice of reason following the Hawaii debacle. Auriemma, we learned, and saw supporting video, came to a practice to help calm Hurley down and told him to focus on the joy of relationships with players and getting the most out of a team. If winning championships were the only thing that mattered, he should get out of coaching, “because it’s not going to happen every year, buddy.”

The ESPN documentary, “The Other Hurley,” with access to immense past footage, interspersed interviews Hurley did as a high school senior and right out of college with the sit down it did recently. It presented fascinating contrast.

Again, most of the hour documentary dealt with issues and delivered anecdotes a Connecticut fan has read, because Hurley tells his story freely. But the story of a youngest of two sons, with a legendary coach as a father and a superstar player as a big brother, striving to make his own mark is one that never gets old. Virtually anyone can relate to it.

The same is true for those dealing with mental health, and the issues that come with trying to live up to impossibly high standards, pride that comes with reaching and exceeding those standards, the let down that comes with achieving them and then starting over. Hurley plunges the depths of his decision to take a hiatus from the game after a Seton Hall game at Madison Square Garden. When his brother, Bobby, was clinging to life after a car crash, a 1994 clip shows Dan saying, “It should be me in that bed.”

And in both pieces, a theme is how driven Coach Hurley has been, and still is, by his failures as a player, even if he is now almost certainly destined to join his father in the Naismith Hall of Fame. Without the championships, he said, he might still be “haunted” in some way.

The air was rife with three-peat talk when these pieces were in the production stages, then it died down as losses mounted and was in danger of being outmoded until the Huskies finished the season with three wins in a row. They’re back on the national radar and Hurley remains at the center of things, where he seems to enjoy the view.

In both, Hurley expressed his embarrassment over telling an official, “don’t turn your back on me, I’m the best coach in the (bleeping) sport.” As for the “two rings, Baldy” moment in Creighton, sorry, that’s kid stuff. If your a fan of Hurley, you’re likely a bigger one after watching these. If you’re put off by his brashness and swagger, maybe you will understand him better. It’s compelling, human stuff and, in the month where college basketball is top of mind, Dan Hurley’s name is still on a lot of lips.