St. John’s legendary trainer Lou Carnesecca has died aged 99

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 Saturday afternoon. Post confirmed. He was 99.

Carnesecca, who would have turned 100 on Jan. 5, retired from coaching in 1992 but kept an office on the Queens campus for more than 30 years in his role as assistant to the university president and remained a presence at many of the team’s practices. home matches until 2022.

Carnesecca was educated at St. John’s in 1950 and also coached the ABA Nets for three seasons from 1970-73 before returning to his alma mater. His team, 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 some of the worst jerseys ever designed, Carnesecca’s teams won 526 games and lost 200 while sending 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. A three-time Big East Coach of the Year, Carnesecca was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992, a few months before announcing his retirement.

“It will be very difficult to put the ball down, but the time has come,” he said after his retirement. “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 tough decision, but it’s all mine.”

However, Carnesecca never took credit for his significant achievements. He often said he owed everything to his players.

“I don’t do anything. If I could coach, I’d 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 is a genius. You think you know everything about coaching basketball.

“Hey, let me tell you something about basketball. I coach the Nets, you see. I got Rick Barry, and he’s taking us to the ABA Championship (Series). The next year, I got the same players, the same plays, but I didn’t get Rick Barry. And we lose 53 games we lose.”

Carnesecca had a 114-138 record with the Nets, who these 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 left on his five-year, $250,000 deal, he and the Nets mutually agreed to part ways after the 1972-73 season.

He returned to St. John’s in time for next season after the coach who replaced him, Frank Mulzoff, asked for his contract.

“I’m basically a teacher, much better suited to the college game than the professional game,” Carnesecca said in his 1988 autobiography “Louie In Season,” written with former Post writer Phil Pepe. “I wasn’t happy training in the pros. They knew I wasn’t happy.

“When I left St. John’s there was never any guarantee that I would be able to return, no side deals that I could get my old job back just for asking. For all I knew, as soon I left the Nets, maybe I had to take a job cutting salami. No doubt Pop would have wanted it. … When St. John’s invited me back, I gratefully accepted.”

After his return, Carnesecca enjoyed his greatest success. Within a few years, the Big East Conference was formed despite Carnesecca’s vehement objections. His reasoning was simple. St. John’s already played the teams that would make up the original conference once a year. He wouldn’t play them twice. In addition, St. John’s already a fixture in the NCAA tournament. Carnesecca said he didn’t need to win a conference tournament to get him into the postseason.

“I didn’t want any part of it,” he said in 2012. “I didn’t think we needed it. Are you kidding? We’re St. John’s. We still had our day in the sun. Playing some of these schools twice a year and maybe again in a tournament?What would I use it for?

“And I was proven wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Luigi P. Carnesecca was born on January 5, 1925 and raised in East Harlem. His father, Alfred, was a stonemason who had emigrated from Tuscany, as was Lou’s mother, Adele. Alfred became a bricklayer when he came to the United States, but had difficulty finding work. So he opened a grocery store on 102nd Street and the family lived in an apartment above the store.

“We only spoke Italian at home when I was a child,” Carnesecca wrote. “I didn’t start speaking English until I was 6 years old and going to school.”

When Carnesecca was 8, his father fell ill and, on the doctor’s advice, 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 that Carnesecca’s love of sports blossomed, something his father, who enjoyed hunting and fishing, could never understand. The elder Carnesecca considered sports a waste of time and wanted his son to go to school and become a doctor.

“Become a doctor,” he often told Lou. “Be 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 and bowed to his father’s desire to become a doctor by taking a preparatory course.

But Carnesecca hated it and soon moved to St. John’s. Although 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. A good-hitting, no-field second baseman by his own account, Carnesecca 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 southern Jamaica named Mario Cuomo, later governor of New York.

Acknowledging 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 more 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.

He had his most successful season in 1984-85, when the Mullin-led Johnnies went 31-4 and reached the Final Four. Just before 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 jerseys.

“One was uglier than the other,” wrote Carnesecca, who quickly tossed the sweaters into a closet in her Alumni Hall office. “They looked like a kindergartener’s finger painting.”

They remained 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 listens to Mary, reached into the closet and grabbed one of the ugly sweaters.

Carnesecca got a lot of abuse when he wore it to the game at Pitt, telling everyone it was his lucky sweater. The sweater quickly took on a life of its own as the Johnnies went on an extended winning streak. Carnesecca carried it all the way to the Final Four in Lexington, Ky. where the Johnnies eventually lost to Georgetown in the semifinals.

The sweater is now in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 2004, Alumni Hall was renamed Carnesecca Arena, where a statue of Carnesecca was erected in 2021. Back in 2001, a banner was raised to the rafters at Madison Square Garden bearing Carnesecca’s name and his 526 win total.

“Hey, in my dad’s deli, the only thing on the ceiling was sawdust-covered prosciutto, and nobody ever wanted that,” he said at the time.

His father eventually gave up his desire for his son to become a doctor. Carnesecca learned several years later that his father would close his shop early, hop in a taxi, go to Madison Square Garden and buy a ticket to see St. John’s play. Alfred had befriended an officer who wanted to find him a seat where his son could not see him. He would be gone before Carnesecca knew he was there. It seemed that the old man was proud of his son, the trainer.

“I have had a ball,” Carnesecca wrote in the last sentence of his autobiography. “I would never have been a good doctor, and there’s only so much salami you can slice.”

Carnesecca is survived by Mary, his wife of 74 years, and daughter Enes.

When asked in 2021 by then-Post columnist Ian O’Connor if he spent time contemplating his own mortality, Carnesecca said, “I pray to the Blessed Mother to give me strength and courage to deal that’s coming. Of course it goes back to your faith, you know? And it’s out of my hands.”