Lou Carnesecca, legendary St. John’s coach who brought program to national prominence, dies at 99
(Top photo of Lou Carnesecca and his players at the 1983 Big East Tournament:
Andy Hayt / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
By Dana O'Neil
Lou Carnesecca, the charismatic basketball coach who brought St. John’s to national prominence and became one of the faces of the Big East’s golden era, died Saturday at age 99.
St. John’s confirmed the Hall of Fame coach’s death Saturday night. The school did not provide details on the cause of his death.
Carnesecca won 526 games and lost just 200 in his 24 years at St. John’s, leading the team to 18 NCAA Tournaments and the 1985 Final Four. He looked like everybody’s favorite uncle, a pocket-sized man in a world full of giants, shuffling about in his ugly sweaters. Lovable “Looie,” the king of one-liners and the maestro of the run-on sentence, charmed them all, and as it turns out, snookered them all.
“Looie? Please, he’d start the game with a, ‘Bless you, my son,’ and then add a bunch of words I won’t repeat,’’ former Maryland coach Gary Williams said. “He had a mouth on him. He just made sure everyone knew he went to Mass in the morning.”
Always high theatre, Carnesecca also was high caliber, the self-described lousy basketball player crafting a program stuffed with local high school stars who became the toast of New York.
Coaching at a time when Big East basketball had more plot twists than a Broadway play, Carnesecca was cast perfectly for St. John’s. A native New Yorker who believed the city had all he needed to build a winner, Carnesecca trumpeted the city’s parochialism for all it was worth. St. John’s was New York’s team, playing in New York’s basketball epicenter, Madison Square Garden, and Carnesecca served as the perfect showman. Animated on the sidelines and a colorful quote in the newspapers, he endeared himself to a town that suffers neither fools nor phonies because he was real.
“He never made an excuse, never said anything but ‘great game,’’’ former Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. “Never blamed anybody. In many ways, he was the best to compete against. It was never any of that bulls—. I have tremendous respect for him, probably the most I have for any coach that I’ve coached against.’’
Carnesecca grew up in Manhattan, the son of a grocery store owner who dreamed of something bigger for his son. He tried to pursue his father’s more scholarly ambitions, but the kid who grew up dashing from basketball playground to baseball sandlot couldn’t imagine a life without sports. Carnesecca idolized the local legends, college players and coaches of his youth, wide-eyed as he watched them play at Madison Square Garden.
Carnesecca tried to realize his parents’ ambitions, even enrolling in a pre-med program at Fordham. But he transferred to St. John’s after one year.
“I told him I wanted to be a coach and my mother said, ‘Look what you raised, he disrespected the family.’ They wanted me to be a doctor,’’ Carnesecca once said.
Instead, when he graduated, he went straight to the basketball court. He landed a job at his old high school, St. Ann’s (now Archbishop Molloy). He coached his first game in the Garden with St. Ann’s against another Queens team coached by Rocco Valvano, whose son, Jim, would become a basketball legend in his own right.
What Carnesecca failed to achieve as a player, he soon realized as a coach. Although strict and tough, he was also a people person and a teacher and loved relating to his players. He devised unorthodox practice schemes — he liked to make his players shoot over a broom in practice to learn how to arc the ball over shot-blockers — but could X and O with anyone. After an initial 11-loss season, St. Ann’s lost just 23 games in the next six seasons. In 1958, the high school team finished 32-0.
Carnesecca’s coaching prowess — and high school connections — got the attention of college coaches, and after that perfect season, he landed an assistant gig beside Joe Lapchick at St. John’s. Carnesecca’s friendly demeanor and New York authenticity helped St. John’s win plenty of living rooms in recruiting. Mandatory retirement rules forced Lapchick to step down when he turned 65 in 1965, and athletic director Jack Kaiser tabbed Carnesecca, the obvious choice, for the head coaching job.
Carnesecca continued the success Lapchick began, earning Metropolitan Coach of the Year honors in his second season. But after five years, he had his head turned by the pro game and jumped to the New York Nets of the ABA. His second team made it to the ABA Finals in 1972, but after star Rick Barry left, so did the winning.
“It wasn’t for me,’’ Carnesecca said of his dalliance with the pros.
By good fortune, just as Carnesecca was looking for an exit plan, his St. John’s replacement, Frank Mulzoff, was writing his own. Unable to agree with university administrators on the length of a new contract, Mulzoff walked and Kaiser, the athletic director, turned to Carnesecca, offering him the job again.
“If Frank didn’t go, I would be cutting salami!” Carnesecca joked. Instead, he came home and never entertained leaving again.
St. John’s flourished anew under Carnesecca, the coach drawing on his lifelong contacts to convince local kids to stay home and star. “I think the furthest we went was Jersey,’’ he said.
He found stars in the high schools and the playgrounds, using the draw of starring for the hometown team and playing at the Garden.
At the time, East Coast basketball still played second fiddle to its peers in the ACC, with the Northeast lacking the organization that a conference affiliation offered. So when St. John’s knocked off Duke in the 1979 NCAA Tournament second round, the victory sent shock waves around the country and announced St. John’s as a new player on the national scene. That team would go on to the regional finals before losing to underdog Penn.
By the next season, St. John’s had a new home. Carnesecca wasn’t initially sold on Dave Gavitt’s pitch for an East Coast-based conference. He liked the way things were, scheduling as he saw fit. But Gavitt wooed the coach over a few bottles of wine, and immediately, Carnesecca saw Gavitt’s plan for the genius idea that it was. Selling St. John’s became even easier in the Big East.
Carnesecca coaxed more and more players to stay home and star. He signed Bill Wennington out of Long Island, Mark Jackson out of Brooklyn and Walter Berry, who carried the nickname “The Truth,” from Benjamin Franklin High to the St. John’s campus.
In 1981, he landed his biggest recruit, a sweet shooter out of Brooklyn who was a regular at Carnesecca’s camps.
Chris Mullin considered all of the college basketball powerhouses, but in the end, he couldn’t find a good reason to leave home. Together, he and Carnesecca elevated St. John’s to its pinnacle, the arrival of the great player dovetailing perfectly with the arrival of another high school great to the Big East, Patrick Ewing at Georgetown. The two players put their schools and conference on the national stage, deepening old rivalries forged in the ECAC and igniting new ones with Big East members. The same St. John’s team viewed as an upstart when it knocked off Duke grew in national prominence, led by the entertaining coach who was always ready with a quip.
Carnesecca wearing one of his bold sweaters at a 1991 game against Duke.
(Photo: Richard Mackson / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
It all coalesced perfectly in 1985 when St. John’s rolled to the No. 1 ranking and a showdown with No. 2 Georgetown. Earlier that season, an under-the-weather Carnesecca tossed on a sweater — fairly hideous maroon, with V-shaped stripes in blue and red — before a game against Pittsburgh. St. John’s won, and the superstitious Carnesecca kept wearing the sweater. St. John’s kept winning, all the way up to that February game against Georgetown.
It was a game built for the hype machine — No. 1 versus No. 2, rivals, Mullin versus Ewing — on national television. “Thick with tension,’’ was how broadcaster Len Berman remembered it. Until John Thompson Jr., whipped open his gray suit jacket, revealing an exact replica of Carnesecca’s sweater.
“It immediately diffused all of the tension,’’ former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese remembered.
Everyone remembers the sweater game. Few remember Carnesecca’s response. The next time he faced Thompson, he walked onto the court with a string of white towels tied together, managers holding them aloft as if he was a king in a processional. That was always the thing about Carnesecca; he could give as much as he could take and was as much a part of the Big East mayhem as his peers. But between his colloquialisms and his size, he got away with more. He cussed at officials and extended the coaching box to near halfcourt, rarely earning so much as a second glance let alone a technical.
“I don’t know if it was his size or people couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying,’’ former Seton Hall coach P.J. Carlesimo said. “He said some unbelievable stuff, but he also said it in a nice way.’’
And to Boeheim’s point, Carneseccca handled losing with grace. The 1985 St. John’s team, easily his best, won its way to the Final Four, one of a trio of Big East teams to make it to the national semifinal. Once again, though, Georgetown bested its rival to advance to the title game. Asked about the loss years later, Carnesecca chose to talk about the ride instead. “It was wonderful,’’ he said.
Carnesecca retired in 1992 and was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame the same year. In 2004, the school renamed Alumni Hall in his honor. Carnesecca never coached again but never quite left St. John’s either. He retained an office on campus, operating as the school’s de facto goodwill ambassador, a regular at games until his health made the trips a little more difficult.
A trail of coaches failed to match his success at St. John’s. Mike Jarvis took the team to the Elite Eight in 1999, the deepest run for a St. John’s team not coached by Carnesecca.
“You know what it was for me?” Carnesecca said. “It was heaven.’’
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