Dom Amore: About that day George Brett blew his stack, but made a fan for life and kindred spirit in UConn’s Dan Hurley

A confused hush fell over the Yankee Stadium crowd of 34,000, still reeling over George Brett’s three-run homer, giving the Royals the lead in the ninth inning. Brett struck fear in Yankees crowds, and often made those worst fears materialize, as he did here on July 24,1983.

Umpire Tim McClelland, at the instigation of Yankees manager Billy Martin, got hold of Brett’s bat and laid it across the 17-inch home plate to judge whether or not Brett had smeared pine tar more than 18 inches up from the knob, which was the limit by rule.

“I didn’t know what they were doing,” Brett recalled. “I had no idea. I remember sitting in the dugout and somebody said, ‘they might call you out for using too much pine tar.’ And I never heard of that before. And my response was, ‘if they call me out for using too much pine tar, I’ll run out there and I’ll kill one of those SOBs.'”

McClelland called him out and Brett charged from the dugout in a rage, gesticulating wildly, barely avoiding hard contact, one of the most famous player-umpire confrontations in baseball history. The details and the back stories of the incident have faded, but Brett’s spontaneous combustion? Priceless. Timeless.

Children watch, children listen.

Dan Hurley, 10 years old, was watching the game on WPIX-TV in his Jersey City household of Yankees fans, and the next day he was in his back yard playing wiffle ball, imitating Brett, a faux chaw of tobacco, bent at the waist as he unfurled a level swing, letting go of the bat.

A Royals fan, a George Brett fan – and a kindred spirit – for life. If Brett’s reaction is a 10, Hurley, who coached the UConn men to the national championship, could score at least an 8 over a no-charge call in a 20-point blowout.

“The people that love their teams want to see the people that play for and coach their teams, like, lose their (bleep),” Hurley said. “You don’t get to the highest level as a coach or player unless you have unbelievable passion. In the end, sports are best when the people that play it are just incredibly competitive, and they’re just dying to win. The great, great competitors that give everything they have, emotionally and competitively, toward winning, those are the people the fans fall in love with, not necessarily the people with the best statistics.”

UConn head coach Dan Hurley signs new six-year, $32.1 million contract

Hurley may have been wired that way without watching The Pine Tar Game, but Brett’s going ballistic did offer a kid an example that, hey, it’s OK to let your anger show, let your passion show. If that’s the way it was taken, George Brett, 70, first-ballot Hall of Famer, AL batting champ in three different decades and the greatest player in Royals history, is delighted to learn he left such an impression on the coach of the national champs in Storrs.

“It’s a great feeling for me that you could impress a kid, not in your hometown, but in a different town, and all of a sudden you do something and he becomes a Royals fan, a George Brett fan just because of one thing that you did,” Brett said. “And maybe it changed the way he looked at sports, the way he coaches sports, I don’t know. I just feel very honored that the coach that won the college basketball championship, that I moved him in some direction at a very young age and maybe helped him become the coach he is.”

Hurley gets his share of technical fouls and has been ejected a time or two. “Nothing wrong with that,” said Brett, who was ejected by McClelland that memorable Sunday in New York.

But this story, like most stories involving Hurley and the UConn men in 2023, just keeps getting better. Hurley will throw out the first pitch when the Royals play the Yankees at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, one day short of the 40th anniversary of The Pine Tar Game.

“Really ironic,” Brett said “Oh, my God. I want to text him Sunday morning and tell him to throw a strike and wear a Royals jersey. He’d get booed out of the stadium if he wore a Royals No. 5 jersey, wouldn’t he?”

Even Hurley wouldn’t be that brazen. “Maybe under, I’ll wear it,” he said. “Though it would be hard not to do something George Brett asks you to do.”

The Huskies, who finished their 19th summer practice on Monday, will be honored Friday at Fenway Park, before the Red Sox play the Mets, and Hurley, who has never been to a Royals game, will be on to Royals-Yankees.

“…It’s been a surreal last few months,” Hurley said. “All the different things you experience when you do something like we did. You keep waiting to wake up from some of this stuff. To throw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium with your childhood team team in the other dugout, meeting the President, keys to the city, it keeps getting more surreal.”

Dom Amore: Dan Hurley did it his way, and for UConn men, national champs, there was no other

Eight years before Brett was called out, the Yankees lost a game in Minnesota in July 1975 when Thurman Munson’s game-tying RBI was nullified for violation of the same 18-inch pine tar rule. Manager Bill Verdon didn’t protest, the call stood, and George Steinbrenner replaced him with the combative Martin shortly thereafter.

The Royals and Yankees, who met four times in the ALCS between 1976 and 80, had a fierce rivalry. Martin was in his third stint as Yankees manager when his third baseman, Graig Nettles, tipped him off about Brett’s bat, and he waited for the right time to challenge it. The Royals did protest, and the call was overturned. They returned to New York a few weeks later to complete the game, a 5-4 victory for K.C.

“That’s what I’m known for now,” Brett said. “I’m synonymous with that film clip. It could be worse. I don’t care how long you play, you’re kind of remembered for certain things. Bill Buckner was a really good friend of mine. You know what he’s remembered for? It’s not a bad thing to be remembered as a guy who hit the home run off a Hall-of-Fame pitcher in the ninth inning of a game in New York, and for some reason gets called out. That’s what I’m remembered for. It’s not bad thing. It shows the passion I had to win, it shows I was a competitor, and it also showed I was a pretty good player to hit a home run off Goose Gossage in the ninth inning. It’s all positive things, as far as I’m concerned.”

Hurley spent the rest of the summer of 1983 arguing with his uncle Brian, a Phillies fan, about whether which team had the better third baseman, Brett or Mike Schmidt. Brett met his brother, Bobby Hurley, in Arizona, and learned that Dan was a Royals fan.

“My two sports idols growing up, George Brett and Boomer Esiason,” Hurley said.

Brett, who lives in Kansas City, roots for Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri in NCAA basketball, but followed UConn’s run to the Final Four.

“It was awesome, to see his brother there at the Final Four, and his Dad,” Brett said. “That was really cool. It was a good story, it really was.”

Brett will be in Cooperstown for induction weekend when Hurley appears Sunday, but hopes to get to the Huskies’ game at Kansas next Dec. 1 and meet Dan Hurley. Maybe he wears a UConn jersey?

“It’s just a great compliment,” Brett said. “You never know who’s watching. You’re playing a game in Yankee Stadium, there might’ve been 35-40,000 people there, who knows? And you never know what impact you’re going to make on anybody, and to have an impact on somebody who has gotten where he is – I’m getting goose bumps just talking about it.”