NEWTONVILLE, Mass. -- An all-time Massachusetts high school basketball legend was honored in the gym he used to call home last month.
His former head coach, Paul Connolly, and his alma mater Newton North honored Anthony Gurley and the 10-year anniversary of the back-to-back state champion Tiger teams from 2004-2006. Once the prince of the Massachusetts high school basketball scene and the king of the North basketball court, Gurley couldn’t be home for the honor. There was work to be done.
The path Gurley’s basketball career has taken -- from Winston-Salem to Amherst to five different European countries and, now, Canada -- is one he hardly expected when he embarked on his journey 10 years ago. In high school, he faced little push back on the court. Accepted as the best in Massachusetts by most, it was only when he was told what he couldn’t be that he finally accepted himself as the basketball player he is.
Once seemingly considered a lock for the NBA, Gurley’s professional career is a road that’s been well-traveled, but hardly well-lit. And 10 years after electrifying the MIAA basketball scene with teammates Corey Lowe and Jason Riffe, Gurley’s reminded that basketball success isn’t defined by the NBA. Instead it’s decided with perseverance and an unwavering sense of dedication.
High School Dominance
“It was like what you see in the movies. We were able to live that out. Honestly, that was probably some of the best moments of my life.” -- Corey Lowe, Newton North point guard (2002-2006)
Fifty-four games. Fifty-three wins. Three NCAA Division 1 athletes. Two MIAA Division 1 state titles.
The run the 2004-2006 Tigers went on was nothing short of dominant. Gurley served as the star shooting guard -- a Roxbury native who bused 90 minutes to the suburban Boston town. Newton North’s reign over the Massachusetts basketball scene has been rivaled few teams in recent memory. Paul Connolly’s team was so loaded that he recalled many intra-squad scrimmages at practice being played with a playoff game-like intensity.
“The scrimmages we had during those practices were so intense. It was played at such a high level. We’d match up even teams. We were so deep, so good one through 15. [Those scrimmages] really made us so much better in games,” Connolly said.
Despite the depth, Gurley was the spark plug of the Tiger offense. He is the school’s all-time leading scorer with 1,850 points, but according to Connolly, could’ve scored well-over 2,000.
“I could’ve kept him on the floor to score 30 points a game. But in those four years he shared the ball, the glory and the minutes with his teammates,” Connolly said.
Lowe, who went on to play for Boston University, added that a lot of blowout victories stunted their minutes and statistics. “There were some games where Anthony and I would be sitting before the end of the first half. It was like we’d warm up for a bit, play a few minutes, then sit back down.”
And despite all that, Gurley still owned the court.
Physically gifted with scoring the basketball from anywhere on the court, Gurley never fit the mold of the typical basketball star. He was humble off the court and studious in the classroom, but, perhaps most notably, the team’s hardest worker on the hardwood. The urge to get the most out of his game made him a ‘sponge’ according to his former head coach. He stoked his internal flame for greatness with a tireless work ethic to get to the next level. It was evident on the court.
Playing alongside Lowe, a childhood friend whom he played with since the sixth grade, Gurley was nearly unstoppable. The two played off each other and, often, played with opposing teams when both had the hot hand.
“There were some nights where we just felt like we were toying with some teams. If both of us were on, there was no one could stop us,” Gurley recalled.
No game was more exemplary than the 2005 South Final versus Brian Rudolph and New Bedford at UMass Boston’s Clark Athletic Center. In a game remembered for a controversial charging call on Rudolph in the waning moments, Gurley and Lowe combined for 71 of the team’s 88 points. The two teams would battle two more times over the next year in hostile environments, games Lowe characterized as “slobberknockers”.
The wins, however, didn’t always come with ease.
In the opening round of the 2006 Division 1 state playoffs, Brookline nearly stole a road victory and ended their back-to-back title run before it could even get started. But a huge three-point play with less than a minute to go by Gurley secured the victory and preserved history as we now know it.
Often times the Tigers were their own biggest nemeses.
With their success it was easy to believe the hype and revel in their own press clippings. It was up to Connolly to be the voice of reason and, sometimes, that meant telling his players what they needed hear and not what they wanted to hear.
“There are a lot of people in this basketball world that tell kids what they want to hear. I’m an old school coach where I tell kids what they need to hear sometimes. Kids need to be grounded and disciplined,” Connolly said.
“He was always a tough coach on me,” Gurley remembered. “He was tough on all of us. He really pushed us and got the most out of us. There were a lot of hard times playing for him. It wasn’t easy. But you look back on those times and they make you stronger.”
The 2005 senior night game against Needham High still remains vivid in the memories of Gurley, Connolly and Lowe. After a lackluster first half, Connolly unleashed a tongue-lashing on his team and Gurley in particular.
“He cussed me out so bad,” Gurley said. “I was so mad.”
“I can picture that whole event,” Lowe said with Connolly adding, “I remember that game vividly”.
Gurley wouldn’t delve into the exact reasoning, but Lowe suspected it had to do with complacency. No matter how the message was delivered, the message from Connolly was clear: don’t ever rest on your reputation. In the second half, wiping away tears of anger, Gurley played as a man possessed.
“I was all over the place -- stealing the ball, dunking on everybody. It brought out a different side of me. It definitely fired me up,” Gurley said.
Then on a defensive possession early in the fourth quarter, Gurley swiped the ball from a Needham guard and streaked toward the basket. “I dunked it so hard I tried to take the rim off,” Gurley said. And on the way back with the home crowd erupting, Gurley shot an enraged look toward his coach. His message was clear: “I hear you coach. I’m here now.”
“Boy did Anthony respond,” Connolly said. “I remember all that. I understood what that stare down meant. He challenged me. I challenged him.”
Beginning His Journey
The end of a historic high school run queued up the next step in Gurley’s basketball journey. His hoops hype extended far outside of the New England region, drawing then-Memphis head coach John Calipari, North Carolina State’s Herb Sendek, the late Wake Forest head coach Skip Prosser and Boston College’s Al Skinner to Newton North’s gymnasium.
“The whole recruiting process was a fun time. Just having a bunch of schools come up to Newton to meet with me and my family. It was a fun time,” Gurley said.
The decision ultimately came down to staying home with the local basketball power, BC, or taking a chance on himself and going to Wake Forest. He chose to leave home, a difficult decision for Boston’s beloved basketball prodigy. It was his relationship with Prosser, who helped produce such NBA stars as Chris Paul, Josh Howard and David West, that tipped the scale in Wake Forest’s favor.
“I always liked Wake Forest and could see myself there. Just the type of guy Coach Prosser was and the program he ran sold me,” Gurley said.
His time with Prosser and Wake Forest would be short-lived, unfortunately.
He enjoyed a respectable freshman campaign, playing in 31 games and averaging 6.4 points. On Feb. 21, 2007, Gurley jumped on the scene with a 24-point performance at home against Georgia Tech. He ended the season in line to be a starter his sophomore year.
Still, he missed home. He had expressed his difficulties adjusting to Winston-Salem with Prosser, who urged him to stick it out. Shortly thereafter Prosser passed away, after collapsing on a routine morning jog. At 56 years old, Prosser died due to a “sudden massive heart attack”.
“It was so unexpected,” Gurley said. “He was so young. It was a tough time for me early on.”
Whispers echoed through the halls of Lawrence Joel Veteran’s Coliseum that Gurley was worried about playing time. Future NBA pros Jeff Teague and James Johnson were on the roster, but he played toe-to-toe with them during summer sessions. A new coach whom he didn’t have the same relationship aided in his decision to return home.
“Coach [Prosser] passed and that took the wind out of me. I was young and I probably didn’t handle the situation properly. I decided to go home,” Gurley said.
Gurley chose UMass with then-coach Travis Ford, and sat out the next year due to NCAA transfer rules. He spent that time in the gym, and in reflection. Although it was home, Amherst is not downtown Boston. It was a new experience with a new team and a new coach. That was an adjustment year.
Ford was replaced before Gurley could even take the court in a Minuteman uniform. It would be his third coach in as many years at the college level.
“I was not expecting the coaching change at the end of the year,” Gurley said. “I had to re-focus again because I’m playing for a brand new coach and prove to him [I can play]. That was another obstacle I had to overcome.”
But Gurley responded. Excelling at first as a shooter off the bench, Gurley jumped into a starting role his junior season.
Shaking the Label
After finishing second on the Minutemen in points per game with 13.6, Gurley decided to test the NBA draft waters following his junior season. He entered the draft, but never hired an agent. In workouts Gurley was paired up with three eventual first-rounders: Eric Bledsoe, Avery Bradley and Dominique Jones, with Gurley going “toe-to-toe” with them.
He eventually returned to UMass for his senior season, taking away from his NBA draft experience two things: 1. being more aggressive on the defensive front, and 2. he projected as a combo guard at the next level. But he knew he could compete with college’s elite players.
At 6-foot-3, Gurley is an undersized two-guard, but not the distributor of the basketball to play the point. The prognosis: he was labeled a ‘tweener -- too small to play the shooting guard without a history of ball-handling to excel at the point.
The NBA draft evaluation only fueled him for his senior campaign in Amherst, where he averaged 18.7 points and 4.4 rebounds. A renewed sense of confidence coupled with a prove-you-wrong mentality, Gurley was hell bent on shaking that label.
“That really propelled me,” Gurley admitted. “That [season] was a big stepping stone for me. I had nothing to lose and proved myself -- proved the type of player I could be. Coming off my NBA draft workouts that summer my confidence level was super high.”
At the end of his senior season in 2011, Gurley declared for the NBA draft. But June 23 came and went without calling Gurley’s name.
“[Teams] wanted me to play point guard, but wondered if I had the ball skills to do it. I think that might’ve been one of the things that kept me from playing in the NBA,” Gurley said.
“Sometimes coaches and basketball society locks people into positions,” Connolly said. “It used to be the big five positions. Now you hear combo guards or playmaking guards. If you ask me who the point guards of the Golden State Warriors are I’d say Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. They’re both playmaking guards. Is Draymond Green a small forward or a stretch four?”
When he went overseas to play professional, the label followed him. Still focused on molding himself into NBA form, Gurley tried to morph into the combo guard scouts wanted him to be; play the pick-and-roll, distribute and defend the ball. But that’s just not who he is. Not as a player and not as a person.
He’s a shooter. He’s a scorer. He’s an attacker. Those are the labels he earned for himself, regardless of size or lack thereof.
“The one thing I’ll say about Anthony is that he can score the ball. He can put the ball in the basket. For him, he’s a guard,” Connolly said.
Gurley left Israel, his second stint overseas following a stop in New Zealand, with a realization: he is who is and he can’t change that. He’s not going to try to fit a round peg in a square hole any more. All he could do is play the game that got him to that point. NBA or not, he knows he’s a certain type of player and he’s knows what he’s not.
“At some point you just have to accept yourself for who you are and continue to do what you do best. I had so many people telling me that I’m not a point guard, or I don’t have the size to play the two-guard. At the end of the day I am a shooting guard and I accepted myself for who I am,” Gurley said.
Still, there are days when he tunes into his hometown Boston Celtics and watches Avery Bradley crossover on the parquet floor in a similar combo guard role and thinks, ‘Man, I was in a workout with him’.
Accepting the NBA Dream May Be Over
Upon going undrafted in 2011, Gurley opted for the NBA Developmental League and reluctantly turned down a handful of offers to play overseas. Still eager and still hungry to prove he could make it in the league, he was willing to sacrifice fast money for a shot to catch someone’s eye -- even if it was short lived.
“This was a point in time of me really trying to live out my NBA dreams. It didn’t really work out the way I hoped,” Gurley said.
He played one game in the D-League with the Bakersfield Jam. In six minutes of play, he scored two points.
Admittedly, he didn’t know what the professional game was all about. He didn’t understand the business aspect of it, and came to learn quickly how cutthroat it could be. No longer able to hide in the bubble of a college campus where breakfast, lunch and dinner are only a card swipe away and rooms are taken care of in scholarship fees, he needed money to live. The developmental league of the NBA does not have the same pay structure of the NBA or, for this matter, most European leagues.
Players have an upside of $25,000 annually with an entry pay of $13,000 in the D-League. Average overseas players can secure a $65,000 contract with relative ease. Some league salaries can start as high as $100,000. Added to that, clubs often will pay a player’s taxes to the country they are playing in as well as provide lodging and transportation.
With a financial wrinkle added to the professional game, Gurley bolted overseas. In his own words, a player has a short time to maximize his or her potential earnings.
“[The difference in pay] is not even close,” Gurley said. “It was my rookie season. The D-League is good for exposure, but the pay isn’t something you can live off of.”
While across the pond Gurley has played for the Naturex Szte Szedeak Szeged in the Hungarian A Division, Hapoel Midgal Haemak in the Israeli National League as well as the ESSM Le Portel Cote d’Opale the Pro B division in France -- earning himself another label in the process, basketball journeyman.
With each new stop he brought with him something from his previous stay. Playing in Hungary made him a tougher player, regularly practicing two-a-days through a six-month period. Israel made him become more cerebral and forced him to grasp the intricate team concepts of European basketball. He explained that the Euro game is systematic. Isolation and fast-break athleticism of the American game doesn’t mesh with European coaches. The game is more tactical.
The NBA’s window of opportunity gets closer to being shut as he draws closer to 30 years of age. Now at 28, Gurley is no longer chasing the NBA dreams he once had.
“I decided to stay overseas. If the NBA ever calls, I’ll deal with that then, but until then I’m going where the money is,” Gurley said. “I don’t need the NBA to validate my career.”
Still Grinding
Currently the money has taken him 261 miles northeast of Bangor, Maine and across the Northumberland Strait from Prince Edward Island. After competing and completing a player combine in front of the Canadian National Basketball League commissioner and coaches, the Moncton Miracles signed him.
“Anthony is a talented shooting guard that has the ability to do a lot of scoring for us,” Miracles’ coach Serge Langis said.
Gurley admitted that this is probably the lowest level he’s played at, but nevertheless he’s still playing. He’s still standing.
“You can’t take anything for granted and prove yourself every minute of every day,” he said.
During his down time, when he’s not the two-man for the Miracles, he’s sharing that sentiment to youths and players of all ages around the Boston area. Along with his best friend Lex Mongo and a few college teammates, Gurley opened up iHoops Academy--a training operation that dedicates themselves to teaching skills on the court and mentoring kids off of it.
A basketball journeyman with a pure shot, Gurley is taking the opportunity to enlighten those younger than him what it takes to make a life out of basketball with or without the NBA on his resume.
Aside from honoring the back-to-back state title teams on Friday, Gurley will be inducted to the Newton North Hall of Fame in March. Regardless of the NBA giving him another shot, Gurley is always willing to take a shot on himself. And as his history has proven, he’s hardly missed those shots.
Who knows where the future will take Gurley next. But no matter where he lands he will always be welcomed home.