Lou Carnesecca, the only child of Italian immigrants who ran a grocery store on Manhattan’s East Side and who became one of the most colorful and successful coaches in college basketball history during a 24-year career at St. John’s, died on Saturday afternoon, the Post confirmed. He was 99.
Carnesecca, who retired from coaching in 1992 but who kept an office on the Queens campus for more than 30 years in his role as an assistant to the university president and who remained a presence at many of the team’s home games until 2022, would have turned 100 on Jan. 5.
A 1950 graduate of St. John’s, 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 in charge, including a Final Four appearance in 1985 when three Big East schools — Villanova and Georgetown were the others — reached the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament.
With a raspy voice and, in the latter stages of his career, sporting a pair of the worst-looking sweaters ever designed, Carnesecca’s teams won 526 games and lost 200 while he sent more than a dozen players to the NBA and ABA, including Chris Mullin, Mark Jackson, Jayson Williams, Bill Wennington, Billy Paultz, George Johnson, Walter Berry and the late Malik Sealy. Carnesecca, who was voted the Big East coach of the year three times, was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992, a few months before announcing his retirement.
“It’s going to be very difficult to put the ball down, but the time has come,” he said at the time. “There are two reasons, really. I have half my marbles and I still have a wonderful taste in my mouth about basketball. It’s a difficult decision, but it’s all mine.”
Carnesecca never took any credit for his considerable accomplishments, however. He often said he owed everything to his players.
“I don’t do anything. If I could coach, I would coach my guy to score a basket every time. That would be my strategy,” he said during a 1991 interview. “When you’re young, you think you’re a genius. You think you know everything about coaching basketball.
“Hey, let me tell you something about basketball. I’m coaching the Nets, see. I got Rick Barry and he takes us to the ABA championship [series]. The next year, I got the same players, same plays, only I don’t got Rick Barry. And we lose 53 games. Fifty-three games we lose.”
Carnesecca had a 114-138 record with the Nets, who in those days played their games on Long Island, not far from his home. But Carnesecca never warmed to the professional game and, despite having two years remaining on his five-year, $250,000 deal, he and the Nets mutually agreed to part ways following the 1972-73 season.
He returned to St. John’s in time for the next season after the coach who replaced him, Frank Mulzoff, asked out of his contract.
“I am basically a teacher, much better suited for the college game than the pro game,” Carnesecca said in his 1988 autobiography “Louie In Season” written with former Post writer Phil Pepe. “I wasn’t happy coaching in the pros. They knew I wasn’t happy.
“When I left St. John’s there was never any guarantee I would be able to return, no side deals that I could have my old job back simply for the asking. For all I knew, once I left the Nets, I might have had to take a job slicing salami. No doubt Pop would have liked that. … When St. John’s invited me back, I gratefully and hastily accepted.”
Following his return, Carnesecca enjoyed his greatest success. Within a few years, the Big East Conference was formed despite Carnesecca’s vehement objections. His rationale was simple. St. John’s already played the teams that would make up the original conference once a year. He didn’t want to play them twice. In addition, St. John’s was already a fixture in the NCAA Tournament. Carnesecca said he didn’t need winning a conference tournament to get him into the postseason.
“I wanted no part of it,” he said in 2012. “I didn’t think we needed it. Are you kidding? We’re St. John’s. We were still having our day in the sun. Play some of those schools twice a year and maybe again in a tournament? What did I need that for?
“And I turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Luigi P. Carnesecca was born Jan. 5, 1925 and raised in East Harlem. His father, Alfred, was a stone mason who had emigrated from Tuscany as did Lou’s mother, Adele. Alfred became a bricklayer upon coming to the U.S., but had a hard time finding work. So he opened a grocery store on 102nd Street and the family lived in an apartment over the store.
“We spoke only Italian at home when I was a kid,” Carnesecca wrote. “I didn’t start speaking English until I was 6 years old and went to school.”
When Carnesecca was 8, his father got sick, and following the advice of his doctor, the family returned to Tuscany. They stayed for a year but when World War II broke out, they returned to the United States. Alfred opened another grocery store, this one on 62nd Street, between First and Second avenues.
It was in that East Side neighborhood Carnesecca’s love of sports blossomed, something his father, who liked to hunt and fish, never could understand. The elder Carnesecca considered sports a waste of time and wanted his son to go to school and become a doctor.
“Be a doctor,” he often told Lou. “Be a somebody.”
After graduating from St. Ann’s Academy — which later moved from Manhattan to Queens and is now Archbishop Molloy High School — in 1943, Carnesecca spent three years in the Coast Guard. After his discharge he enrolled at Fordham University, bowing to his father’s wish he become a doctor by taking a pre-med course.
But Carnesecca hated it and soon transferred to St. John’s. While he never played basketball for the Johnnies’ varsity he did play baseball for the legendary Frank McGuire, who coached both the baseball and basketball teams. Carnesecca, by his own account a good-hit, no-field second baseman, was part of the 1949 St. John’s team that reached the College World Series.
While still a student, Carnesecca filled in as coach of the freshman baseball team. His center fielder was a kid from South Jamaica named Mario Cuomo, later the governor of New York.
Recognizing his extreme love of basketball and his inability to play it, McGuire put Carnesecca to work scouting players, scouting opposing teams and refereeing scrimmages.
“I loved it,” Carnesecca wrote. “It made me feel important and it made me feel like I was making a contribution. The more I did it, the more I loved it. I liked it even better than playing.
“I was convinced that this was my calling.”
After graduation, Carnesecca took a job coaching basketball at St. Ann’s before leaving a few years later to become Joe Lapchick’s assistant at St. John’s. He replaced Lapchick in 1965 when Lapchick reached the university’s mandatory retirement age of 65 and Carnesecca never won fewer than 17 games in any season while coaching the Johnnies.
Wagner after a basketball game at Carnesecca arena on the
St. John’s campus on Nov. 13, 2015. Paul J. Bereswill
He had his most successful season in 1984-85 when, led by Mullin, the Johnnies went 31-4 and reached the Final Four. Just prior to the start of that season Carnesecca received a gift from the coach of the Italian women’s national team — a pair of garish red, blue and brown sweaters.
“One was uglier than the other,” wrote Carnesecca, who quickly tossed the sweaters in a closet in his Alumni Hall office. “They looked like some kindergarten kid’s finger painting.”
They stayed buried in that closet until January when the Johnnies were scheduled to leave for a game in Pittsburgh and Carnesecca was under the weather. His wife, Mary, suggested he bring a sweater so Carnesecca, who said he always listened to Mary, reached into the closet and grabbed one of those ugly sweaters.
Carnesecca took a lot of abuse when he wore it to the game at Pitt while telling everyone it was his lucky sweater. The sweater soon took on life of its own as the Johnnies went on an extended winning streak. Carnesecca wore it all the way to the Final Four in Lexington, Ky. where the Johnnies eventually lost to Georgetown in the semifinals.
The sweater now resides in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2004, Alumni Hall was renamed Carnesecca Arena where in 2021 a statue of Carnesecca was erected. Back in 2001, a banner was raised to the rafters at Madison Square Garden bearing Carnesecca’s name and his victory total of 526.
“Hey, in my father’s delicatessen the only thing on the ceiling was sawdust-covered prosciutto and no one ever wanted that,” he said at the time.
His father eventually gave up on his wish his son become a doctor. Carnesecca learned years later his father would close his store early, jump in a cab, head to Madison Square Garden, and buy a ticket to watch St. John’s play. Alfred had befriended an usher who would find him a seat where his son couldn’t see him. He would be gone before Carnescca knew he was there. It seemed the old man was proud of his son the coach.
“I have had a ball,” Carnesecca wrote in the final sentence of his autobiography. “I would never have made a good doctor and there’s just so much salami you can 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 whether he spent time pondering his own mortality, Carnesecca said: “I pray to the Blessed Mother that she gives me the strength and courage to handle what’s coming. Of course, it goes back to your faith, you know? And it’s out of my hands. I can’t call time out.”
