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 colorful courtside persona, died on Saturday. He was 99.
His death was confirmed by Brian Browne, a spokesman for the university, who provided no other details.
When Carnesecca took over as the St. John’s head coach in 1965, the university, while rich in basketball tradition, played as an independent. It had begun a gradual move to the Jamaica section of Queens from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn 10 years earlier, and its Alumni Hall athletic building was only four years old.
With the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979, St. John’s began competing regularly against leading basketball programs.
Carnesecca took St. John’s to 18 N.C.A.A. championship tournaments and six N.I.T. tournaments, including the 1989 championship, and his teams won the Big East tournament championship in 1983 and 1986.
St. John’s won 526 games while losing 200 in Carnesecca’s two stints there, from 1965 to 1970 and then, after his three seasons coaching the New York (now Brooklyn) Nets in the old American Basketball Association, from 1973 to 1992.
St. John’s was ranked No. 1 in the two major national polls for five consecutive weeks late in the 1984-85 season. Led by the all-American Chris Mullin (a future St. John’s coach), Mark Jackson, Walter Berry and Bill Wennington — all New Yorkers except for Wennington, who was from Montreal — St. John’s reached the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Final Four that season before falling to Georgetown in the semifinals.
Midway through the season, Carnesecca caught a cold, and his wife, Mary, suggested that he wear a sweater for his next game. He went through his closet and picked out a garish dark brown one with large red and blue chevrons across the front, a gift he had received a few years earlier from a visiting Italian coach.
He wore the sweater through a prolonged winning streak, though as Carnesecca remarked to reporters at one point, “It’s ugly, isn’t it.”
Fans sent him sweaters after that, and Carnesecca began wearing them regularly at courtside while roaming the sidelines, dancing up and down as he exhorted his players to greater feats.
Carnesecca, known to just about everyone as Looie, spent hours watching game films at his home, though he wasn’t always the most organized at times, as a former St. John’s trainer, Lou DelCollo, told it.
“You’d pick up the reel that was labeled as the first half of the Georgetown game, put it on the projector and find out it was the second half of the Providence game,” DelCollo told The Los Angeles Times in 1985.
Although Carnesecca never won an N.C.A.A. championship, the longtime Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski was highly impressed. “In sports you’re often judged by what you haven’t done,” he told The Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1991. “But what Louie has done is just incredible.”
Carnesecca was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., in 1992.
Luigi Carnesecca was born on Jan. 5, 1925, in Manhattan, the only child of Alfredo and Adele Carnesecca, Italian immigrants who owned an East Harlem delicatessen. He attended St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan (now Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens), sitting on the bench as a basketball scrub, but he did experience a thrilling moment at the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue.
“I was a terrible player,” he once told George Vecsey of The New York Times. “But I always wanted to be a coach. I was coaching 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 played high school games in the Garden, and we were up by 40 points against St. Simon Stock, and the coach put me in, Dave Tobey, God rest his soul.
“I was smart enough not to take the ball out of bounds, because, hah, I knew I would never get it back, so I got the ball and as soon as I cross the 10-second line, I let it fly. I didn’t even hit the rim or the backboard. The coach just took me right out of the game, and that was it.”
After service in the Pacific with the Coast Guard during World War II, Carnesecca enrolled at St. John’s, where he got into three games as a junior varsity basketball player and played the infield for the baseball team.
Following his graduation in 1950, he coached 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 was succeeded in his high school posts by Jack Curran, who coached at Archbishop Molloy for 55 years.
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 general manager and coach of the Nets. His teams made the A.B.A. playoffs in each of his seasons and reached the league finals in 1972, losing to the Indiana Pacers. He had an overall record of 114-138 with the Nets.
Carnesecca grew weary of the pro basketball grind. “It’s pretty hard to give the same halftime talk 118 times a year,” he said while announcing his retirement as St. John’s coach in April 1992.
St. John’s renamed Alumni Hall as Lou Carnesecca Arena in November 2004. When Mullin was introduced by Carnesecca at his own Hall of Fame induction in 2011, he said, “I chose the best coach in the best city.”
Following his coaching years, Carnesecca became a special assistant to the St. John’s president, working in community relations.
St. John’s said in a statement that Carnesecca is survived by his wife of 73 years, Mary (Chiesa) Carnesecca; a daughter, Enes Carnesecca; a granddaughter, Ieva; a niece, Susan Chiesa; and a nephew, John Chiesa.
In January 2001, Madison Square Garden raised a red and white banner emblazoned “526,” for Carnesecca’s 526 career victories in 24 seasons at St. John’s.
“I’d be less than honest if I said I wasn’t thrilled,” 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 have been slicing salami.”
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