THERE is a billiard table in the garage of Dr Adrian Hurley's waterfront property at Lake Macquarie that has not had a billiard ball on it for years.
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It is instead covered with boxes of files and folders containing interview notes and information about every Boomers and Opals player and coach to have represented Australia at an Olympic Games between 1956 and 2000.
Decades of the nation's Olympic basketball memories and milestones are contained in those cartons, which Hurley has steadily added to and used as reference material to compile a definitive history of the sport he has dedicated much of his life to, and shaped in the process.
The seeds for such a book were sown at a Boomers reunion at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, where Hurley and other founding fathers of Australian hoops pined for a tangible record of the past to pass on to the next generation of Olympians.
"I've always believed that your future is built on your past," Hurley says.
"Cricket has the 1948 'Invincibles', the Socceroos have their World Cup qualification stories, and sports like rugby league and rugby union have well-documented stories detailing their history.
"But basketball doesn't have anything like that, and we wanted to have something to recognise our own history and traditions.
"Because there had been nothing substantial written about our Olympic basketball history, it sort of felt like we didn't exist, so we felt it was important that the players coming through should know about those that went before them."
Hurley is putting the finishing touches on his tome, to be published as a limited-edition coffee-table book later this year.
One of Australian basketball's brightest minds, Hurley coached the Boomers at the 1988 and 1992 Olympics and at the 1986 and 1990 FIBA world championships.
In charge of a team containing Andrew Gaze, Luc Longley, Phil Smyth, Ray Borner, Mark Bradtke and Andrew Vlahov, Hurley coached Australia to fourth place at Seoul in 1988 - the first time the Boomers had ever reached an Olympic medal round.
A life member of Basketball Australia, he was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 1991 and was an inaugural inductee into BA's Hall of Fame in 2004.
He coached Perth to the 1995 National Basketball League championship and led the now defunct Hunter Pirates to successive play-offs in 2005 and 2006, earning NBL coach-of-the-year honours in 2005.
Though he stepped down last year as president of Basketball NSW, Hurley remains one of the game's most revered and respected figures, and has accepted an offer from recently appointed Boomers coach Andrej Lemanis to join his staff as a mentor and consultant.
Hurley said Australia's first Olympic team had its origins in post-World War II migrant camps.Young men who had fled their ravaged eastern European homelands were introduced to basketball in transitory camps in Europe, then maintained their interest and continued their development after arriving Down Under.
Tracking down those 1956 Melbourne Olympians, and sourcing scoresheets and post-tournament reports from Basketball Australia, proved his most difficult task.
"No one really knew where anything was - 'maybe it's in a box somewhere', that sort of thing - so it soon became evident that this was going to be a problem," he says.
Hurley said he had profiled about 150 Boomers and Opals, including the coaches and referees who represented Australia at the Olympics between 1956 and 2000.
He said information about Olympians and Olympic teams from 2004 onwards would be easier to find for whoever decides to write the next chapter.
"Hopefully this will be a good starting point that recognises and acknowledges the history and traditions of our game."
