GENUINE AND A GENIUS

Carnesecca’s greatness on court matched only by his heart off it

2 Dec 2024 - New York Post

Mike Vaccaro mvaccaro@nypost.com

THE phone buzzed in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, where buzzing phones are treated more harshly than germs, but there wasn’t a choice here. On the face of the phone was a name — “Lou Carnesecca” — and these were calls that always had to be answered.

“Coach!” I said.

“I saw where you wrote about that white suit that Rick Pitino wore yesterday at the Garden,” he said, in that most familiar, raspy voice, and even over the phone you could detect the twinkle in his eye. “And that his wife told him to wear it. And I saw where you mentioned that it was my wife, Mary, who told me to wear that awful old sweater that made me famous.”

“She told me that story once,” I said. “She said you had a cold, and she wanted to keep you from getting pneumonia.”

The old man laughed a hearty laugh.

“She always was looking out for me,” he said. “Although I wish now that she would have suggested a white suit like Coach Pitino’s. Can you imagine if I’d worn that instead?”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “Anyway,” Lou Carnesecca said, “I just wanted to say thank you for allowing people to remember me.”

That, of course, was one of the few things Luigi P. Carnesecca got wrong across 99 years and almost 11 months of a most extraordinary American life which finally ended, peacefully, Saturday afternoon. He was best known for the 24 years for which he coached the men’s basketball team at St. John’s. That is where he earned his fame.

But he earned a lasting part of the city’s heart, and its eternal basketball gratitude, in all of the smaller moments of grace, the daily acts of kindness. He was the son of a deli owner who Frank McGuire himself once told, flatly, would never be a good enough basketball player to make the varsity Redmen (though he was plenty good enough as a baseball player to help St. John’s to the 1949 College World Series).

“But he loved the game so much because every game he went to, it meant he was able to be around people. And Looie was the most people-person people person I ever met,” McGuire said one night in 1993, at the old Runyan’s saloon on 55th Street. “You want an impossible task? Go to any playground or high school in New York and try to find someone to say something bad about him. It’ll never happen.”

At first, he was simply one of the legions of men of his generation who took to coaching, who would’ve been happy spending 30 or 40 years at St. Ann’s, his alma mater, now Archbishop Molloy (where the teams are still called the Stanners). Later, he learned at the knee of the great Joe Lapchick during Lapchick’s second stint at St. John’s.

Once, Lapchick deputized Carnesecca to do whatever he could to make Connie Hawkins, perhaps the greatest of all New York schoolboy legends at Boys High, a Redman, and as usual it’s best to simply let Looie pick the story up from here:

“So I finally went to see this Superman play with my own two eyes. Boys High is playing Thomas Jefferson, and right at the start of the game here’s this beautiful kid blocking a shot, knocking it all the way to half court. There’s six kids scrambling for the ball but he gets it, tips it forward, grabs it at the free throw line and dunks it. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

He would always pause here, for effect.

“I ran out of the gym,” Carnesecca said, “and I didn’t come back.”

Hawkins was one that got away. A few years later, so would the only other high school player who merits the same paragraph as Hawkins, Lew Alcindor of Power Memorial. Alcindor was close with Lapchick but Lapchick was being forced to retire. Alcindor was unsure about entrusting his career to a rookie coach.

“I just didn’t know Coach Carnesecca very well,” Alcindor, by then Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, said almost apologetically a few years ago. I relayed that story to Carnesecca.

“I would’ve loved to get to know him better,” he quipped.

But he did get plenty, don’t worry. He won 526 games at St. John’s, almost all of them on the backs of city kids. Even as college basketball exploded all around him, Carnesecca would joke, “What do I need a private jet for? All I need to do my recruiting is a pocket full of subway tokens.”

Every year he’d always get two or three of the city’s very best, even as others migrated to places like Marquette and both Carolinas, North and South. Some kids who left — Reggie Carter, Curtis Redding, Matt Brust — wound up coming home, and were welcomed with open arms.

Then one day, Carnesecca was watching a CYO free-throw contest at Alumni Hall, the Johnnies’ oncampus arena that now bears his name. One of the kids, a 12-year-old sixth grader from Brooklyn’s St. Thomas Aquinas parish, hit 23 out of 25. He took notes. Six years later, that kid placed a phone call to Carnesecca that would change everything.

“Coach,” Chris Mullin, by then a McDonald’s All-American at Xaverian, “I’m coming.”

Together, they won 98 games in four years, won the first Big East Tournament ever played at Madison Square Garden in 1983, made it to No. 1 in the nation and the Final Four in ’85.

“Finally,” the coach joked that March, “I get to play the big room.”

But in truth, it was all the smaller rooms along the way — and after he retired in 1992 — that he filled with endless laughter and class that defined his legacy.

“Coach always said that on the day you die, the hyphen is what matters,” said Tom Pecora, the Quinnipiac coach who was part of a full generation of kids who grew up worshipping Carnesecca’s teams, then studying his every move once they decided to become coaches themselves.

“You have the day you’re born on the left and the day you die on the right. It’s the hyphen — what happens in the middle — that says how many lives you made better along the way. And there was nobody who touched more lives than Coach.”

That was the only term Pecora ever used. Not “Lou,” not “Looie.” Even to sportswriters, a more cynical lot, he was only “Coach.”

The first time I met Coach was at a press conference at St. John’s, 1999 or so. I told him I’d attended his camp when I was a kid and felt compelled to tell him, “I wasn’t a great player.”

He laughed gently as he prepared the needle.

“I know,” he said. “If you were, I’d remember you.”

Godspeed, Coach.