St. John’s legendary coach Lou Carnesecca dead at 99

Lou Carnesecca, the only child of Italian immigrants who ran a grocery store on Manhattan's East Side and became one of the most colorful and successful coaches in college basketball history during his 24-year career at St. John's University, spoke Saturday afternoon. He died in Post confirmed. He was 99 years old.

Carnesecca, who retired as a coach in 1992 but remained an office on the Queen's campus for more than 30 years as assistant to the president and remained a presence at many of the team's home games through 2022, would have made the switch. . 100 people on January 5th.

A 1950 graduate of St. John's University, Carnesecca also coached the ABA Nets for three seasons from 1970-73 before returning to his alma mater. His teams, then known as the Redmen, reached the postseason every year he was coach, and in 1985, three Big East schools (the others being Villanova and Georgetown) reached the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament. They advanced and advanced to the final four.

With a raspy voice and, late in his career, wearing the worst looking sweater ever designed, Carnesecca's teams won 526 games and lost 200, while he played with Chris, including Mullin, who sent more than a dozen players to the NBA and ABA, Mark Jackson, Jason Williams, Bill Wennington, Billy Poults, George Johnson, Walter Berry and the late Malik Seeley. Carnesecca, a three-time Big East Coach of the Year, was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992, just months before announcing his retirement.

“It will be very difficult to contain the ball, but the time has come,” he said at the time. “Actually, there are two reasons. Even though I only have half a marble, I still have a great taste in my mouth about basketball. It's a difficult decision, but it's all my decision.”

But Carnesecca never took credit for his great accomplishments. He often said it was all down to the players.

“I don't do anything. If I could coach, I would coach my players to score baskets every time. That's my strategy,” he said in a 1991 interview. . “When you’re young, you think you’re a genius, you think you know everything about coaching basketball.

“Hey, let's talk basketball. I coach the Nets. We got Rick Barry and he's going to take us to the ABA Championship. [series]. The next year, I got the same players, the same plays, I just didn't get Rick Barry. And they lost 53 games. Lose 53 games. ”

Carnesecca had a 114-138 record with the Nets, who at the time played on Long Island, not far from his home. However, Carnesecca never adjusted to the professional game, and even though he had two years left on his five-year, $250,000 contract, he and the Nets agreed to part ways after the 1972-73 season.

He returned to St. John's in time for next season as his successor, coach Frank Marzoff, asked for a release from his contract.

“I'm basically a teacher, and I'm much better suited for the college game than I am for the professional game,” Carnesecca said in his 1988 autobiography Louis Inn, which he wrote with former Post writer Phil Pepe.・I mentioned it in “Season''. “I wasn’t happy coaching in the pros. They knew I wasn’t happy.

“When I left St. John's, there was no guarantee that I would be able to return, and there was no collateral deal that would allow me to return to my old job simply by asking, as far as I knew. I might have had to get a job slicing salami after I left the Nets. I'm sure Pop would have liked that. …I was grateful when St. John's invited me back. And I quickly agreed.”

After returning home, Carnesecca achieved his greatest success. Within a few years, the Big East Conference was established, despite Carnesecca's fierce opposition. His rationale was simple. St. John's was already playing teams that make up the annual original conference. He didn't want to play them twice. Additionally, St. John's University was already a regular in the NCAA Tournament. Carnesecca said they don't need to win the conference tournament to advance to the postseason.

“I didn't want any part of it,” he said in 2012. are you kidding? We are St. John's. We still had our day in the sun. Playing some of those schools twice a year and maybe even playing them again in a tournament? What was the need for that?

“And it turns out I was wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Luigi P. Carnesecca was born on January 5, 1925 and raised in East Harlem. His father Alfred was a mason who emigrated from Tuscany, as did Lou's mother Adele. Alfred came to America and became a bricklayer, but had trouble finding work. There he opened a grocery store on 102nd Street and his family lived in an apartment above the store.

“As a child, we only spoke Italian at home,” Carnesecca wrote. “I didn't start speaking English until I was six years old and going to school.''

When Carnesecca was eight years old, his father became ill and, on the advice of doctors, the family returned to Tuscany. They stayed for a year, but returned to the United States when World War II broke out. Alfred opened another grocery store. It is located on 62nd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues.

Carnesecca's love for the sport blossomed in that East Side neighborhood, but it was never understood by his father, who loved hunting and fishing. Carnesecca, the eldest son, thought sports were a waste of time and wanted his son to go to school and become a doctor.

“Be a doctor,'' he would say to Lou. “Be someone.”

After graduating from St. Ann's Academy (later moved from Manhattan to Queens and now Archbishop Molloy High School) in 1943, Carnesecca spent three years in the Coast Guard. After being discharged from the hospital, he accepted his father's wishes to become a doctor and enrolled at Fordham University, where he took preparatory courses to become a doctor.

However, Carnesecca disliked it and soon transferred to St. John's. Although he never played basketball on Johnny's varsity team, he did play baseball under the legendary Frank McGuire, who coached both the baseball and basketball teams. Carnesecca, by his own account, was a good-hitting Norfield second baseman and a member of the St. John's team that advanced to the College World Series in 1949.

While still a student, Carnesecca took over as coach of the freshman baseball team. His center fielder was a kid from southern Jamaica named Mario Cuomo, who later became governor of New York.

McGuire, aware of his extreme love for basketball and his inability to play, tasked Carnesecca with tasks such as scouting players, scouting opposing teams, and officiating scrimmages.

“I loved it,” Carnesecca wrote. “It made me feel important and that I was contributing. The more I did it, the more I loved it. I loved it even more than playing.

“I knew this was my calling.”

After graduating, Carnesecca took a job coaching basketball at St. Ann's, leaving a few years later to become an assistant to Joe Lapchick at St. John's. When Lapchick reached the college retirement age of 65 in 1965, Carnesecca never won fewer than 17 games in any season while managing the Johnnys.

His most successful season was 1984-85, when Marin's Johnnys went 31-4 and reached the Final Four. Just before that season began, Carnesecca received a gift from the coach of the Italian women's national team: a flashy sweater in red, blue, and brown.

“One was uglier than the other,” Carnesecca wrote, immediately throwing the sweater into a closet in her office in Alumni Hall. “It looked like a kindergartner’s finger painting.”

They were buried in that closet until January, when the Johnnys were scheduled to leave for a game in Pittsburgh, but Carnesecca was hit by bad weather. His wife, Mary, suggested he bring a sweater, and Carnesecca, who always listened to Mary, reached into his closet and grabbed one of the ugly sweaters.

Carnesecca received a lot of abuse when he wore it to a game at Pitt, telling everyone it was his lucky sweater. Sweater soon took on a life of its own as Johnny continued his winning streak. Carnesecca wore it all the way to the Final Four in Lexington, Kentucky, where the Johnnys ultimately lost to Georgetown in the semifinals.

The sweater is currently housed in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2004, Alumni Hall was renamed Carnesecca Arena, and in 2021 a statue of Carnesecca was erected. Back in 2001, a banner with Carnesecca's name and his 526 career wins was hung in the rafters of Madison Square Garden.

“You know, there was nothing but prosciutto covered in sawdust on the ceiling of my father's delicatessen, and no one wanted that,” he said at the time.

His father eventually gave up on his son's desire to become a doctor. Years later, Carnesecca learned that his father would close the store early and jump in a cab to Madison Square Garden to buy tickets to see the St. John's play. Alfred had made friends with an usher who helped find a seat for his son where he couldn't see. He will be gone before Carnesca knows he is there. The old man seemed proud of his son, his coach.

“I had a ball,” Carnesecca wrote in the last sentence of his autobiography. “I wouldn't have been a good doctor, and there's too much salami to slice.”

Carnesecca is survived by his wife of 74 years, Mary, and daughter Enes.

When asked in 2021 by then-Post columnist Ian O'Connor if he had spent any time reflecting on his own mortality, Carnesecca said: Of course, it goes back to your faith. And it's out of my hands. A timeout cannot be declared. ”