Lou Carnesecca has his sleeves rolled up, as if he is ready to work the refs in the final minutes of a tense game. Another college basketball season is here, about the 80th since he started paying attention, and the king of Queens is sitting at his round kitchen table in Jamaica Estates, talking about life and death and the fickle bounces of the ball.
He lives a short bounce pass away from the St. John’s arena that carries his name, with his bride of 71 years, Mary, in the same Tudor-style house they have lived in since 1969. Carnesecca will turn 97 on Jan. 5, and people joke that he will outlive the statue of his fist-swinging self that was just unveiled inside his gym. He says he takes about 16 different medications to keep going, and man, does he keep going.
The wall phone rings and he quickly rises from his chair, bypassing his black cane on the way to answering. The grocery store is calling to tell the son of an East Side grocer that they are all out of his ordered broccoli. Carnesecca decides he will take the spinach instead, thanks the woman on the other end, and hangs up. “Nobody gets a call like that anymore,” he says through a laugh.
No, Looie does not communicate by email or texts. He says his dear Mary is the one who knows how to use a computer, and that’s OK. Carnesecca’s amazing New York story, from the Great Depression to the Great Pandemic, is best told through rotary phones or face-to-face chats over pastries and coffee in his home.
For starters, his father could not believe Luigi wanted to be a basketball coach. Alfredo, a stone mason, and his wife Adele had left Italy for New York on different ships in the early 1920s — Adele was quarantined at Ellis Island for 40 days over a potential outbreak of scarlet fever. They raised their boy in East Harlem, on 102nd Street, and then on 62nd Street, between First and Second Avenues, and they borrowed money to get by during the Depression.
Adele allowed down-on-their-luck customers to take home bread and milk without paying, and kept a list of what they owed on a board. “And when those people got their checks, they would come in and pay,” Carnesecca recalls. “It was very rare that we got stiffed.”
Lou helped out in the grocery store when he wasn’t playing stickball around the corner or baseball under the 59th Street Bridge. He was in the back of the store, listening to the Giants-Brooklyn Dodgers football game at the Polo Grounds on Dec. 7, 1941, when the radio man announced that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.
In the summer of 1945, around the same time the Japanese sank the USS Indianapolis, killing 879 sailors and Marines, Carnesecca was a Coast Guard member aboard the USS General H.B. Freeman, which was transporting more than 3,000 troops from Calcutta to Okinawa. He prayed the Rosary every day at sea, just as he was taught to do at St. Ann’s in Manhattan. The Freeman was never hit, the war ended, and Carnesecca has kept Rosary beads in his pants pocket for the rest of time.
His father had been raised an outdoorsman in the high mountains of his home country. Alfredo, or Alfred, wanted his son to chase the big American dream and become a doctor. That was the idea behind sending Lou to Fordham to study pre-med, before the kid quickly bailed on that plan. As it turned out, the boy wanted a life in sports.
Though he’d been a decent second baseman in his day — better with the bat than with the glove — Lou wasn’t much of a threat in anyone’s backcourt. As a rarely used reserve at St. Ann’s, determined to say he once took a shot in the old Madison Square Garden, the 5-foot-6 Carnesecca launched a long one in the closing seconds of a blowout victory over St. Simon Stock that cleared the backboard and all but landed on Eighth Avenue, inspiring his angry coach to pull him back to the bench. As a junior varsity player at St. John’s, Carnesecca scored a grand total of one basket, against Brooklyn College, at the 69th Regiment Armory.
But he had spent enough time around St. John’s coaching legends Frank McGuire and Buck Freeman to know he wanted their life. When Lou went home one day to tell his old man, Alfred turned to his wife and said: “Look what you raised. He’s going to disgrace this family.” Adele disagreed. Of course, mother knew best.
Carnesecca had some powerhouse teams at St. Ann’s, which soon became Archbishop Molloy, before he took a $6,000 job in 1958 as a St. John’s assistant to Joe Lapchick, the Hall of Famer he followed, starting in 1965, with his own Hall-of-Fame career. Looie left Alumni Hall in 1970 for the New York Nets and a brief crack at the pros, nearly winning the ABA title in 1972, before rediscovering his true love in the college game. St. John’s took him back in 1973, the Big East was born six years later, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Looie won 526 games over 24 seasons, and yet he says his most memorable victory is one that didn’t count — a 1977 exhibition conquest of the Soviet national team in overtime, made possible by a highly questionable free-throw lane violation call against the visitors.
“It was our place and our referees,” Carnesecca remembers with a smile. “I walked into their dressing room after and asked their coach, [Alexander] Gomelsky, ‘Do you think we would’ve won this game in Moscow?’ And he just looked at me.”
Looie’s most painful defeat isn’t on his college record either: the 1954 city championship and 31-game winning streak he lost at St. Ann’s, to La Salle, on a last-second shot. Carnesecca still recalls how devastated he was walking home in the rain on that cold, grim night.
The best college player he ever coached? Yeah, that one’s easy. Christopher Mullin of Brooklyn, the one who led St. John’s to the 1985 Final Four. “I knew him since he was this big,” Carnesecca says, lowering his hand to his knee.
The toughest college player he ever faced? Yeah, even easier. Patrick Ewing of Georgetown, the one who denied him a chance at a national title. In later years, after Ewing and Mullin became Dream Team teammates and friends, Looie told Patrick, “You don’t know how much I hated you.”
Carnesecca coached against everyone from John Wooden to Mike Krzyzewski. He never missed a postseason tournament berth in 24 years, and never seriously considered moving his recruiting base outside the five boroughs. “Why should we?” he asks. “That’s where all the players were.”
Those players, he says, are responsible for Alumni Hall being named in his honor in 2004, and for his colorful sweaters being a thing, and for his statue going up two weeks ago. Those players, he says, are also responsible for putting his father in the St. John’s crowd after Looie had become a pretty big deal.
Without telling his son, Alfred sometimes would close up his store and take a cab to catch St. John’s on the back end of a Garden doubleheader. Looie only found out about it from a former player who had shared a beer with his father at a game. “I don’t know if Pop knew a basketball from a bocce ball,” Carnesecca says.
Alfred had taught his son that he “shouldn’t wear a big hat.” In other words, don’t make a fuss over yourself. So Alfred bought his own ticket, and often sat alone, and cheered when the other fans wearing red cheered. The grocer and stone mason who once thought coaching would bring shame to the family name never told his son that he was proud of him, but after attending those St. John’s games, he didn’t need to.
Looie still has a considerable head of hair, parted on the side, over those famously sad eyes and famously long mug. “Michelangelo couldn’t have helped my face,” he said in his famously raspy voice at his statue ceremony, when he recalled a time in the city subway system when “for 5 cents you could go from Van Cortland to Coney Island. Not bad.”
The world has changed. Back in his kitchen, Carnesecca says the coronavirus pandemic is the worst event he has lived through, and he has lived through a ton. The Wall Street Crash, the wars, 9/11. Looie has also attended too many funerals of former players and fellow coaches.
When asked if he has spent time pondering his own mortality, Carnesecca says: “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 timeout.”
No, but coaches always establish targets and always keep score. When asked if has a goal of living to 100 and beyond, Carnesecca says: “No I don’t. I’ll be happy to reach 97, if I can make that. The number 100 doesn’t mean anything. They’re going to say the same nice things about me at 97 or 100, right? Have you ever gone to a funeral where they say bad things about the guy? I do know if I get to heaven, God’s not going to ask me how many games I’ve won.”
Carnesecca still attends some St. John’s games, by the way, even though he thinks he might soon need to graduate from his cane to a walker. Looie has great respect for the current coach, Mike Anderson, and his old-school approach. If he doesn’t get to Tuesday night’s opener against Mississippi Valley State, Carnesecca will make up for it at a higher-profile matchup.
Like most coaches who experienced the golden age of college basketball, Looie would love to see some stability restored to the sport, especially, he says, “with players jumping all over the place” through the transfer portal. But there is nothing he would change about his life away from the game.
Looie still has his health; he still has his girlfriend from the neighborhood, Mary, whom he started dating as a teenager; and their daughter Enes, who is a constant help. He still has all of his charmed memories from 80 years in the game.
“I love it so much,” Carnesecca says, “that I would have coached for nothing.”
College basketball’s most priceless treasure has spoken. Time to play ball.
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