The Miracle of St. Anthony is a book written by Adrian Wojnarowski. I think son writes for yahoo sports. Anyways, it's a book that CHRONicles a year in the life of the St. Anthony's high school basketball program located in Jersey City. The school is arguably the most successful basketball program in the country, winning something like 28 state titles (it ended the season ranked #1 in the USA Today poll this year). There's been a who's who from the program, players like Bob Hurley Jr., Roshon Mcloud, Terry Dehere, and many other D-1 players. The only thing I knew previously about Jersey City was from Joe Budden, so I thought that everyone from the area was a drug addict who was really depressed, but could write really good punch lines using pop culture items, and hated his boss. But boy was I wrong. This book painted a completely different picture. Holy shit, I just looked up the school on wikipedia and Joe Buddens actually graduated from the school. That's some fuckin crazy shit right there. I wonder what Bob Hurley Sr. thought of "Pump It Up."


This is one of those books where it uses sports as a larger reflection of the area. It's kind of like Friday Night Lights in that way, all epic and shit. St. Anthony's is run by two nuns and Bob Hurley Sr., who is the most famous high school coach in America. Since the school is a private school with under 200 students enrolled, it's up to Hurley to use his connections and tours to make enough money for the school to run one more year. And the school is located in one of the roughest neighborhoods of Jersey.


As for the season itself, the team consists of a senior class which Hurley calls the worst of his career in terms of behaviour. I don't want to get too much into it, partly cause I don't remember their names, but shit got too deep. But I do remember that this really rich white kid from CT ended up going to St. Anthony's so he could get a better shot at getting a D-1 scholarship. His mom got him his own apartment to live in and everything. Shit, give me some of that money.

One thing that's tite about these books is that you can always see, years later, how the kids turned out. You'll definately recognize some of the names in here from watching college ball. None of the seniors made any noise, but there is a junior in the book, Ahmad Nivins, who is now the best player on St. Joe's. I watched him play in the tourney that week, and that was tite. And there is also this freshman in the book named Mike Rosario who gets some run on varsity. Hurley calls him potentially one of the best players he's ever seen. He got recruited by big time d-1 schools and will be going to Rutgers next year.

All in all, this is the best sports book I've ever read. Shit just got too deep. That's the thing with this book, it broke down shit at so many levels. Reading this book gave me a deeper understanding of a lot of things like what it takes to win at the high school level and how serious New Jersey high school ball is. This book is like The Wire of high school basketball books. If you read one book in your entire life, make it this one.

- Yu the critic writer

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