Tweet This
Bob Hurley is where he's been for nearly 50 years, fighting to win games, battling for high school kids to grab hold of the opportunity basketball gives them.
Showtime has joined him and viewers don't even need a subscription to the cable network in order to watch the Naismith Hall of Fame coach who has won 28 state titles at St. Anthony High School.
The story of St. Anthony has been told before, and in multiple formats, but this Showtime project is different.
In the past, there have been countless news articles in local and national publications. Preeminent NBA reporter Adrian Wojnarowski wrote the bestselling book The Miracle of St. Anthony. The documentary The Street Stops Here aired nationally on PBS.
The Showtime documentary captures Hurley's intense leadership style and the current iteration of the nationally known program he has built. The series, Legacy: Bob Hurley, even reveals stories that haven't been told before about the Catholic high school in Jersey City, N.J.
Legacy is episodic. The installments run in 10 to 15-minute parts accessible on YouTube and Sho.com, the network's website.
Showtime offered the series free of charge to give non-subscribers a taste of the sports stories the network airs, Legacy producer and director Brian Dailey said.
Legacy follows Hurley in the locker room before and after games, in timeout huddles. Cameras tracked the 69-year-old coach through a workout while he wore a "Straight Outta White Eagle" t-shirt, a parody of N.W.A.'s merchandise fashioned with an ode to St. Anthony's former gymnasium. In that scene, Hurley spoke about his love for boxing and it's just one of the plethora of leadership insights viewers will pick up.
" It's not who you are when you're on top of things, but it's who you are when you have to respond to a situation where you're hurt or you're losing your legs. You have to come up with strategy while you're also physically deteriorating," he said.
What also makes this St. Anthony story different is that the production crew is on-site chronicling what could be St. Anthony's last year of existence.
In recent years, Catholic high schools have made a mass exodus from the inner city. As most of these institutions shuttered their doors, St. Anthony remained open because, as one school trustee says in the documentary, of what Hurley has accomplished.
The first five episodes of Legacy have already launched. The sixth, and final episode, is waiting for a crucial meeting to take place between St. Anthony and the Newark Archdiocese.
For years, St. Anthony has operated at a deficit. It costs $14,000-per-student, but the school only charges $6,500 a year for tuition. This forces St. Anthony to raise about $1.5 million annually. In the past, the school has taken out loans from the archdiocese. Now, the archdiocese wants the school to begin paying back the loans, show it can close the annual budget gap and raise enrollment by 21 percent.
With the future of the school at stake, the filmmakers made an unexpected pivot. "It started as a content project on a super compelling story and it shifted a little bit to feeling an obligation to help the school stay open," Dailey said.
Last month, Showtime hosted a New York City fundraiser to benefit St. Anthony. The public can donate through a GoFundMe page.
The final episode of Legacy will detail the outcome of the meeting with the archdiocese. That meeting is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, April 5. The final episode is slated to be available on Monday, April 10.
In the interim, binge-watch all five episodes below.
