Jay Williams looking to return to the NBA

No link since this is in the Sacramento Bee's archives. I don't know who exactly was at fault, but doesn't look like the person who hit Hurley was too innocent:

Grateful & unfulfilled

Ten years ago today, Dec. 12, 1993, former Kings guard Bobby Hurley nearly lost his life in a car accident. He knows how lucky he is to be alive, but he also wonders what might have been.

By Mark Kreidler -- Bee Sports Columnist - (Published December 12, 2003)

What's funny, Bobby Hurley says, is that you never do reconcile all the facts with all the emotions. Maybe, really, it's not even possible. What's funny is that you can feel lucky to be alive and frustrated as hell in the very same moment, because they don't come from the same places, those feelings.

There is life, and there is basketball. And if you are Bob Hurley, of the Jersey City, N.J., Hurleys, there is life and basketball and life and basketball. It's all one stew.

So he can say, as he did Thursday, "I feel lucky."

And he can say, as he did Thursday, "I had things I wanted to achieve," with an ache in his voice that carries from one coast to another over the phone.

And it can all be true. Because -- well, because it is.

It seems unfathomable, the passage of time. Ten years ago tonight, Bobby Hurley was an NBA rookie out of Duke, fresh off an NCAA championship and trying to find his way with the downtrodden Kings, a franchise every bit awful enough to have held the seventh pick in the 1993 draft, the one it used on a slightly built 6-foot guard who was 12 parts heart to every one part athletic ability.

The Kings had just finished a lousy loss to the lousy Clippers, Hurley's 19th game as a pro, with 14 defeats to show. He wasn't handling the losing well. He lingered in the locker room at Arco Arena for a while afterward, moping, commiserating with teammates, mostly thinking to himself.

And then he got into a Toyota 4Runner, failing to secure his seat belt, and crossed the overpass away from Arco and headed west, down to the intersection of Del Paso and El Centro roads.

He got ready to turn left onto El Centro. It was late evening, Dec. 12, 1993.

You know how he feels about it now?

He feels grateful.

He feels unfulfilled.

"For the longest time, I'm still thinking about Bobby Hurley, the basketball player," says Bobby Hurley, the man with a second life.

And there is room for all of that. And that's what's funny.

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That Hurley survived the accident that ensued at Del Paso and El Centro, the brutal car crash that pushed him to the brink of death, shattered his basketball-centered existence and became one of the darkest chapters in the Kings' history, is one of those situations that you can explain in one of two ways.

You can cite the stacks of coincidental and beneficial evidence, the staggering connected series of events that had to occur for Hurley to have lived through his injuries or even left the scene breathing. Or you can say, "Miracles."

Either way, there's not a lot of room for disappointment. There isn't much room, in the recounting of this part of the story, to do anything but marvel at the wonder of it all.

And Hurley does marvel, even now. He knows that, by rights, the 1970 Buick station wagon that slammed into him could have killed him on the spot. Blasted out of his car by the force of the impact, thrown down a steep ditch and into muddy water, he could have died on the spot.

Mike Batham knows it. An engineer from the Yuba City area, Batham happened to be driving along that empty stretch of road -- in 1993, the intersection was so desolate, it was often used as a staging ground for amateur drag races -- when the Buick shot past him erratically going the other way, apparently with no headlights.

And Batham remembers the rest -- "Vividly," he says now. He heard what he calls "the deafening sound of the crunch," and saw the sparks that must have come from the impact of the metal on the two autos. He clearly remembers getting out of his own car and rushing to Hurley's truck, circling it twice before realizing there was no one inside it.

"He was down there on his hands and knees in the water, maybe 1 1/2 feet of water," says Batham. "He was mumbling something -- I probably heard the mumbling before I saw him -- and as he turned to look toward me, he either slipped or fell and his face went into the water."

And Hurley would have died then. But Mike Batham was there, to pull Bob's limp body up into a sitting position out of the water. And an off-duty police officer, Jeff Okray, and Okray's wife, Linda, had pulled up, one of them in possession of a cell phone to call for emergency help.

And then Hurley's fellow rookie on the Kings, forward Mike Peplowski, the son of a nurse, drove over the hill and saw the scene. Peplowski rushed out of his car, grabbed a blanket or coat, hurried down to help and went white with shock when he realized who the injured person was.

Hurley kept asking Peplowski if he was going to die. Peplowski kept saying no.

But as he did so, the former Michigan State star constantly fingered the rosary he'd stuffed into his pocket.

"I grabbed that rosary and started to pray," Peplowski says now. "And the reason was -- and this sounds morbid -- but I knew that whatever was going on at that scene, death was very present. It was very present."

And it was denied. Peplowski and Batham kept Hurley conscious long enough for an emergency ambulance to arrive. Once transported to UC Davis Medical Center, Hurley's most life-threatening injury -- his trachea and left lung had been ripped apart and needed to be reattached -- was quickly diagnosed by a resident, Dr. Russell Sawyer.

Sawyer recognized the trauma because he had just finished reading a chapter on the subject. The author? Dr. F. William Blaisdell -- one of the surgeons on duty at the medical center that night, and part of the team that put Hurley back together again.

He'd been pummeled nearly to death, his body so swollen, his parents barely recognized him when they arrived the next day. He broke ribs, tore up a knee, fractured a shoulder blade, suffered two collapsed lungs. He'd been smacked by a car operated by a man who would eventually be convicted on misdemeanor charges of reckless driving and driving without a license.

It was going to be months of recovery and rehabilitation, and a long return to a career that for all intents had just been crushed.

You know what Blaisdell called him? The 1-in-100 exception to the rule, is what. Most cases like Hurley's never reach the emergency room, let alone survive the night. Hurley was -- are you ready for this? -- the lucky one.

"And I was lucky, I really was," Hurley says. But he was also a basketball junkie, the son of a coach and a coach's wife, the brother of a player and future coach. He was a gym rat. He was defined by it.

And he didn't feel lucky again for a long, long time.

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When he speaks to you now, in the classic Jersey accent that says "Hurley," it is with the voice of a 31-year-old man who knows both what he gained and what he missed. Bobby Hurley got to live. The cost, generally speaking, was his game.

He never recovered his quick step, never regained his full velocity. His return to the Kings in 1994 was halting and underproductive and didn't get much better.

The two-time NCAA champion languished on the bench, relegated to the second unit. Eventually, he was traded to Vancouver, then released, and a second comeback attempt ended in the summer of 1999 when he blew out his knee playing in a Jersey Shore league.

By Hurley's admission, it took him years to get over the pain of his aborted career. By his admission, he still isn't over it, and in some ways he never will be. It isn't a peaceful thought. It's just the fact.

"But wait a minute: People don't know what this kid went through to even get back on the court," says Kings executive and broadcaster Jerry Reynolds.

"I'm not saying Bobby was going to be a star, but I guarantee you 99.9 percent of the players out there would never have returned to even put a shoe on an NBA floor again. Bobby wound up with five years in the league on sheer guts."

And he should appreciate that. And he says he does.

"But you have to understand, I had a lot of pride in my game," Hurley says.

"I mean, 6 feet, not a ton of athletic ability -- it took a lot for me to get where I had gotten, and where I thought I was going to go. The life, post-accident, really hurt my pride as a basketball player."

He is grateful. And he is unfulfilled.

And, in one of those basketball-story developments, he's back. After years away from the game, during which Hurley began a very successful thoroughbred business, the consummate gym rat accepted a job in September as a Philadelphia 76ers scout.

The job keeps him mostly on the East Coast, near the Jersey Shore-area home he shares with his wife and three children. Long term, he is open to the possibility of coaching.

"But I really want the right situation," says Hurley, who applied for the top job at Columbia last spring and didn't get it. "I want to do things right, the way I want to do them."

It's an incompleted life, and of course a blessed one. Peplowski, now chief financial officer of a development group and living with his family on a 200-acre spread outside Lansing, Mich., devotes his spare time to fund-raising for a pediatric-dedicated emergency room at the local hospital.

"I've talked to Bob a few times. He's got a life going on," Peplowski says.

"And ultimately, at the heart of it, you know what that whole night showed me? There's a lot of good in this world."

Hurley knows it. He was saved by it, really. It's one reason Mike Batham wears a watch inscribed with a special thank you, a gift from Hurley on the one-year anniversary of Dec. 12, 1993.

"Someone's basketball career, in the larger scope of things -- it's no big deal," says Bobby Hurley.

It doesn't feel that way every day, or even every minute. But life goes on. Sometimes, that in itself is the miraculous part.