Lou Carnesecca, the Hall of Fame coach who took St. John’s University to national basketball prominence and who was known for his quick wit and versatile court personality, died on Saturday. It was 99
His death was confirmed by Brian Brown, a university spokesman, who did not provide other details.
When Carnesecca took over as St. John’s head coach in 1965, the university, while rich in basketball tradition, acted as an independent. It had begun to gradually migrate to the Jamaica Queens section from Bedford-Stuyvesant near Brooklyn 10 years ago, and its Alumni Hall athletic building was only four years old.
Since the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979, St. John’s has regularly competed against leading basketball programs.
Carnesecca took St. John’s to 18 NCAA championships and six NIT tournaments, including the 1989 championship, and the teams won the Big East championship tournament in 1983 and 1986.
St. John’s won 36 games while 200 in Carnesecca, losing two games there, from 1965 to 1970, then, after three seasons in the New York (now Brooklyn) nets in the old American Basketball Association, from 1973 to 1992.
St. John’s was ranked No. 1 in two major national polls for five consecutive weeks during the 1984-85 season. Led by All-Americans Chris Mullin (future St. John’s coach), Mark Jackson, Walter Berry and Bill Wenington — all New Yorkers except Wenington, who was from Montreal — St. John’s reached the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four that season before falling to Georgetown in the semifinals.
Halfway through the season, Carnesecca caught a cold and his wife Mary suggested that he wear a sweater in the next game. He went through his closet and pulled out a blue one with red and blue stripes on the front that he had received as a gift from a visiting Italian coach a few years earlier.
He wore a woolen vest throughout the win, although Carnesecca told reporters at one point, “It’s dirty, it’s not.”
Fans sent him mourning afterwards, and Carnesecca began to carry them round the court regularly, wandering to the sides, dancing, and lowing, in order to exhort his men to greater deeds.
Carnesecca, known to almost everyone as Looie, spent hours watching sports at home, though he was always the most disciplined, as St. John’s coach Lou DelCollo once told it.
“You’d want to take out a reel that’s labeled the first half of the Georgetown game, put it on a projector and you’d prove it’s the first half of the Providence game,” DelCollo told the Los Angeles Times in 1985.
Although Carnesecca never won a NCAA championship, longtime head coach Mike Krzyzewski was very impressed. “In sports you often judge what you didn’t do,” he told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1991. “But what Louie did is incredible.”
Carnesecca was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1992.
Alois Carnesecca was born on January 5, 1925, in Manhattan, the only child of Alfredo and Adele Carnesecca, Italian immigrants who owned an East Harlem delicatessen. St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan (now Archbishop Molloy High School of Queen’s), sitting on the bench as a basketball scrub, but experienced a lasting moment at the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue.
“I was a terrible pitcher,” George Vecsey of the New York Times once said. “But I always wanted to be a coach. I was the coach of the little kids in the neighborhood, so they put me on the team at St. Ann’s, but I never played.”
He added: “This was in the days when we were playing in the Garden and we were down by 40 points against St Simon’s Stock and the coach brought me in, Dave Tobey, God rest his soul.
“I was smart enough not to catch the ball out of bounds because, hah, I knew it would never come back, so I caught the ball and as soon as I crossed the 10-second line, it went flying. I didn’t hit the rim or the backboard. The coach just pulled me out of the game, and that was it.”
After serving in the Pacific with the Coast Guard during World War II, Carnesecca enrolled at St. John’s, where he played in three games as a junior varsity basketball player and played on the field for the baseball team.
Following his graduation in 1950, he played basketball and baseball at St. Ann’s. He returned to St. John’s in 1957 as an assistant basketball coach under Joe Lapchick, the former Knicks coach, and succeeded Jack Curran, who led the 55-year-old to Archbishop Molloy.
Carnesecca was named head coach at St. John’s when Lapchick retired.
He won his 100th game in 1970, then left St. John’s for a lucrative contract as the general manager and coach of the Nets. His teams made the ABA playoffs in each of their seasons and reached the league finals in 1972, losing to the Indiana Pacers. He had an overall record of 114-138 with the Nets.
I’m tired of grinding meat for basketball. “It’s pretty hard to deliver the same speech 118 times a year,” he said when announcing his retirement as St. John’s coach in April 1992.
St. John’s Alumni Hall was named Lou Carnesecca Arena in November 2004. When Mullin was inducted by Carnesecca into his Hall of Fame induction in 2011, he said, “I chose Redula as the best in the city.”
After years of coaching, Carnesecca became a special assistant to the president of St. John’s, working in public relations.
In St. John’s account Carnesecca is survived by his wife of 73 years, Maria Carnesecca; daughter Enes Carnesecca; niece, Eve; niece Susanna Chiesa; and his nephew John of Chiesa.
In January 2001, Madison Square Garden erected a red and white banner emblazoned with “526”, for Carnesecca’s 526 career victories in 24 seasons at St. John’s.
“I’d be less than honest if I wasn’t shocked,” he told The Times days before the ceremony, reflecting on how a boy raised by immigrant parents who ran a deli had succeeded in big-time sports. “I could be slicing salami.”
Mike Ivon the seeker contributed.