HE’S MAH-VELOUS : Lou Carnesecca Is Just Too Mah-Velous for Words; He Wishes Every Coach Could Enjoy a Season Like the One He’s Having

Practice has ended, but the work day is far from over for St. John’s Coach Lou Carnesecca.

A reporter from the New York Daily News is at Alumni Hall on the St. John’s campus in Queens to interview Carnesecca, after which the coach is to be interviewed by a reporter from the New York Post. He got the columnist from the New York Times out of the way before practice.

Six television crews are waiting, some impatiently.

“Coach,” a television reporter says as Carnesecca begins his interview with the Daily News, “we need you right now .”

As Carnesecca tries to figure a way to accommodate all the reporters, an athletic department publicist interrupts to inform him that someone from the “Today Show” may be on campus the next day to interview the coach.

“ Mah-velous ,” Carnesecca says, meaning it.

No matter how harried his schedule, Carnesecca always has time to meet new friends. He said he learned that from his late father. “He told me, ‘Don’t have short arms and be there,’ ” Carnesecca said. “He meant that it was OK to take your hands out of your pockets to shake hands and be friends with people, and, if you’re needed, be there.”

Carnesecca has a few other simple rules to live by.

--Never underestimate your opponent.

--Don’t take shortcuts in life or in games.

--Drink orange juice, get plenty of rest and wear a coat.

But it is Pop’s home-spun philosophy, followed faithfully by his son, that has made Carnesecca one of the nation’s most popular college basketball coaches. Everybody loves Looie--his players, the fans, the media, even other coaches.

Former Marquette Coach Al McGuire once said: “Looie is the quintessential gym rat. But he’s also a people rat. He magnets them.”

But can he coach?

He has critics. They say that no matter how well Carnesecca knows the sport and teaches it, and there is no question he is among the best at teaching fundamentals, his style is too old-fashioned to get the most out of modern players and he is too excitable during games to have any control over their course. His critics say he is like a great automobile mechanic who, while he still wields a mean wrench, can no longer drive.

Carnesecca has a formidable rebuttal--his record. In 17 seasons as St. John’s head coach, his teams have won 367 games and lost 130. Under Carnesecca, the Redmen have never failed to appear in a post-season tournament.

This has been his best season. Before beginning play last week in the Big East tournament, St. John’s was ranked No. 2 in the nation with a 25-2 record. Before an 85-69 loss two weeks ago to Georgetown, the Redmen had won 19 straight games and were ranked No. 1 for five weeks. Despite Saturday’s loss to Georgetown in the Big East tournament final, the Redmen were made the top-seeded team in the NCAA West regional.

If Carnesecca has had a problem this season, it is that he has become a victim of his own success. Pop told him to be there when he’s needed, but he hasn’t figured out a way to be everywhere he’s needed at once.

As soon as he finishes one interview, there is another reporter waiting for him.

Newsday.

The Chicago Tribune.

The Los Angeles Times.

The Baltimore Sun.

The Floral Park High School Shield.

Two reporters from the high school newspaper were watching as Carnesecca worked the room. They are nervous about interviewing someone so well known, but they have seen nothing in his demeanor to frighten them. At age 60, the 5-6, slightly built Carnesecca, with his raspy, Vito Corleone voice, long face, sad eyes and jug ears, reminds one of the high school reporters of her favorite uncle.

When they identify themselves, Carnesecca feigns anger. “How did you get in here? Where’s your pass? Who did you bribe?”

The high school reporters begin to back away, not sure if he’s joking.

He lets them off the hook by grinning.

Extending his hands to them, drawing them closer, he says, “What are your names? I’m Looie. Nice to meet ya. Mah-velous .”

A few years ago, Carnesecca attended an awards banquet at Mama Leone’s, identified by many of the guidebooks as one of Manhattan’s best Italian restaurants.

As he was leaving, he turned to a friend and said, “C’mon, I’ll take you to a real Italian restaurant.”

Hailing a cab, they went across town to Il Vagabondo on East 62nd St.

In the front of the restaurant is a bar. Men left behind from a time when the neighborhood was filled with people from the old country gather there to drink red wine, trade stories and listen to arias and ballads. In the back is the dining room, separated by a wooden railing from a bocce court.

When he was a boy, Carnesecca lived across the street from the restaurant, in an apartment above the deli-grocery store owned by his father. Carnesecca earned spending money by running numbers for the man who lived next door.

The neighborhood has changed, but he returns occasionally for the memories and the minestrone. Both, Looie says, are mah-velous .

Marvelous, in case you haven’t guessed, is Carnesecca’s favorite word. He uses it only when he is particularly delighted, or when he is describing someone or something very special, which means he uses it in every other sentence.

His star player, Chris Mullin, is mah-velous .

Georgetown’s star player, Patrick Ewing, is mah-velous .

New York City is mah-velous .

“New York is the greatest city in the world, even if there is no grass,” he says.

Carnesecca’s parents were Italian immigrants, who had something better in mind for his future than taking over the neighborhood numbers racket. They wanted him to become a doctor. He wanted to be a basketball coach.

In 1946, Carnesecca enrolled at St. John’s and played on the baseball team as a utility infielder. Except for seven years--1950-1956--as a high school coach and three years--1970-1973--as coach of the American Basketball Assn.’s New York Nets, he has been at the university ever since. He was an assistant coach to Joe Lapchick for eight years before becoming the head coach in 1965.

When he says that basketball is his entire life, his friends say he is only slightly exaggerating.

If he’s not coaching basketball, he’s watching it.

An absent-minded professor who is constantly misplacing his car keys or his bifocals or both, Carnesecca used to spend hours unraveling game films. A former St. John’s trainer, Lou Delcollo, said that going to the basement in Carnesecca’s home for post-game film sessions was always an adventure.

“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 says.

The advent of the video recorder has allowed Carnesecca to pop a cassette into the machine and be done with it.

So what does Carnesecca do with the time saved?

“Watch more films,” Delcollo says.

When Carnesecca is not coaching or watching basketball, he’s talking about it. He spends several weeks each summer conducting basketball clinics, usually in Europe or South America. He speaks fluent Italian and passable Spanish, filling in the blanks in his vocabulary with Italian.

He probably knows more basketball coaches throughout the world than any other coach. While conducting a clinic a few years ago in Torino, Italy with New York Knicks Coach Hubie Brown, so many Italian coaches were greeting Carnesecca with kisses on the cheek that Brown threatened to call the New York Post gossip columnist.

The thrill of Carnesecca’s life, he said, was coming to Los Angeles last summer for the Olympic basketball tournament.

“The only game I didn’t see was Egypt versus China,” he says.

As a result of his obsession with basketball, he is virtually oblivious to everything else happening around him.

Former Seton Hall Coach Bill Raftery recalls going to a restaurant a few years ago with Carnesecca and their wives.

Bill Talbert, the former tennis star, spotted Carnesecca and came over to introduce himself. Carnesecca greeted Talbert as if they were old friends. While they were talking, Raftery leaned over to the coach’s wife, Mary, and said, “When Looie sits down, I bet he asks you who that is.”

Several minutes later, Carnesecca sat down, leaned over to Mary and said, “Who in the hell was that?”

Everyone else at the table laughed.

Turning red from embarrassment, Carnesecca said, “I know, I know. It’s the first baseman for the Yankees.”

Looie is on his knees, begging his team to play harder, looking, as one magazine writer said, like Al Jolson singing “Mammy.”

Looie is directing his players, like a traffic cop at rush hour in Midtown. Looie is gesturing at the officials, like a miniature Bobby Knight. Looie is pacing, gesturing, coaxing, screaming.

These are Carnesecca’s poses.

They are easier to capture this season because of the NCAA rule restricting coaches to a box that extends 28 feet from the baseline. He calls the coach’s-box rule “anti-Italian.” For the most part, it has kept him in his place, which is somewhere in the vicinity of the St. John’s bench.

Big East Commissioner Dave Gavitt tells this story about one of his games against St. John’s when he was the coach at Providence College.

“Looie and I both were on the officials almost from the start of the game. They gave us both a warning, threatening us with technicals if we didn’t stay on the bench. Looie can’t stay on the bench.

“There was a close call near the end of our bench that went against St. John’s. When I looked up, Looie was standing next to me. Then he realized where he was. He knew the official was going to see him and nail him.

“So he sat down between me and the trainer. There was no seat there, but he squeezed in and made his own seat. He sort of squinched down and ducked his head so the official wouldn’t see him. That got me laughing. After we took the free throws, he scampered back to his bench.”

Carnesecca tells this one on himself.

“I was giving this official a hard time about a call. He looked over at me with this puzzled look on his face and said, ‘Looie, what are you doing?’ I said, ‘Coaching, like I’m supposed to be.’ I looked around and realized I was in the second row, sitting next to a woman and her son. I was very embarrassed.”

His critics say that if he exercised more self-control, he would have a greater influence on the game.

In one game this season, during a timeout in which Carnesecca spent at least a minute and a half ranting about the officiating, Mullin was overheard to say, “Yeah, Coach, but what do you want us to do ?”

His players, however, defend him.

“He’s in charge of the rehearsals, then he lets us go out and perform,” junior Ron Rowan says.

Carnesecca’s defense is no defense. Coaching, he says, is overrated.

That is the lesson he learned from James Freeman, the St. John’s coach for nine seasons until 1936.

“He told me many, many years ago that your players are 60% to 70% of the game; coaching is 10% to 15%,” Carnesecca says. “I told him that doesn’t add up. He said the rest is luck. That measuring rod still stands today. I know coaches who don’t want to hear that, but it’s true. I’m not trying to denigrate coaching. I’m trying to be realistic.”

Carnesecca got an advance lesson in that theory when he coached the ABA’s Nets. They advanced to the playoffs each of his three seasons, reaching the finals in 1972, but they made it in 1973 despite losing 54 games.

“The pros are the best,” he says. “I can’t believe how good they are. It was like going straight to heaven. It took me two years after I came back to St. John’s to get involved in the college game again. College ball is like slow motion.”

But when Carnesecca spoke, the pros didn’t always listen.

He once threw a piece of chalk at Rick Barry, who wasn’t paying attention during a halftime discussion.

“I’m a teacher, not an orchestrator,” Carnesecca said when he returned to St. John’s in 1973. He said he entered the pros as a psychiatrist and left on the couch.

A dozen years later, he says, “The pros were a great experience for me. I heartily believe that all college coaches should spend one year in the pros. It’s a great eye-opener, especially for those who have Napoleonic tendencies.

“When I had Rick Barry, a mah-velous player, I went to the ABA finals. When he left the next year, I lost 50 games. I was running the same plays, saying the same things at halftime, coaching the same style. You figure that one out.

“People think I’m something, but I haven’t changed one iota from last year to this year. My players have more experience. They’ve gotten better. But I’m the same. When Chris Mullin and my other seniors leave after this season, come see how good a coach I am. We won’t lose 50 games because we don’t play 50. It’s a good thing we only play 27.”

That also is a good thing for Jeri Morabito, 23, a volunteer assistant coach who has the most demanding job on the St. John’s bench. In the third game of the season, Carnesecca stormed out of the coach’s box and was assessed a technical foul. Fordham missed the shot; St. John’s won by one point. Since then, Morabito has been responsible for keeping the coach boxed in.

Morabito sits at the end of the bench closest to the scorer’s table, tugging on Carnesecca’s pants leg when the coach steps too near the line.

Sometimes, when he’s trying to shake loose in the heat of battle, Carnesecca swings an elbow at Morabito.

“I didn’t make the rule,” Morabito tells him. “I just got stuck with the job.”

But Morabito also has restraints.

“I can’t grab The Sweater,” he says. “If I do, and it rips, it’s goodby Jeri.”

For years, Carnesecca wore the same uniform to every game. Tan jacket, blue dress shirt, brown trousers.

Feeling chilled before a game in Pittsburgh this season, he pulled a crew-neck sweater over the blue dress shirt.

The sweater, given to him a couple of years ago by an Italian national coach, was dark brown with large red and blue chevrons.

“It’s not a good-looking sweater,” he admits. “I might even term it ugly.”

But when the Redmen won at Pitt, Carnesecca decided to wear the sweater until they lost a game.

Superstitious?

“Nah,” he says, “but I would never go against it.”

That’s the same thing he said a few years ago about Delcollo’s cap. Someone gave the trainer a cabbie’s cap, which Carnesecca said looked stupid. Delcollo said the team won the last time he wore it. Carnesecca said he liked the cap, liked it so much in fact that Delcollo was forbidden to take it off during games until the team lost.

Through 18 more victories this season, Carnesecca wore the sweater over his blue dress shirt.

It became known in New York as The Sweater. The New York Daily News carried a story in the fashion section instructing people how to stitch one just like it. Imitations were sold on street corners in Queens. Carnesecca said he hired a “couple of torpedoes” to act as bodyguards for The Sweater when he wasn’t wearing it.

The winning streak finally ended when Georgetown Coach John Thompson, wearing one of the cheap imitations of The Sweater, brought the No. 2 Hoyas into Madison Square Garden and beat the Redmen.

Asked afterward about the fate of The Sweater, Carnesecca said he would give it another chance.

“I’m not a front-runner,” he said.

Three days later, in the final game of the regular season, Carnesecca again wore The Sweater. But underneath, instead of the blue dress shirt, was a navy blue knit. The Redmen beat Providence to clinch their first Big East championship outright.

With another victory in hand, Carnesecca retires to an office in Alumni Hall to meet the press. Reporters and photographers are waiting for him as he finds a chair in the corner and sits. They crowd around him, flashing pictures and sticking microphones, tape recorders and reporter’s notebooks in his face.

“I don’t have claustrophobia, but you’re going to give it to me,” he says. “After 17 years, you’re giving me claustrophobia.”

Everyone backs off, giving him his space, but, a few moments later, he is again cornered.

“Whatsa matter?” he says, fidgeting with the hearing aid in his right ear. “You want me to talk louder?”

Even when he is in full voice, Carnesecca talks barely above a whisper.

But, now, he has a cold, which he hasn’t been able to shake for several weeks, and is suffering from laryngitis.

“I should go two days to the hospital; I mean it,” he says. “But how can I do that now? There’s practice, and there’s games, and there’s travel, and when there’s none of that, I come to the office, and there’s 9,000 phone calls.”

The majority of the calls are from people who want tickets.

Carnesecca doesn’t say no to any of them.

Most of the people have learned through the years to call back to one of the assistant coaches and ask if Carnesecca really has any tickets to give. They know Looie can’t say no.

An hour after most of the reporters have left, Carnesecca is still in the office to talk to a couple of stragglers from out of town.

Asked if he has been able to enjoy the success this season, with the pressure of being No. 1 and the media demands and the cold, Carnesecca is momentarily stunned.

“Of course, I enjoy it,” he said. “Who wouldn’t enjoy it? You’d have to be a cuckoo nut not to enjoy it. I lost 50 games one year. Try enjoying that. We haven’t won the whole thing, but so what? Nobody can take the things we’ve accomplished this season away from us. We’ve had our day in the sun. The kids have been mah-velous , just mah-velous .

“Of course, they’ve had to be a little careful. So many reporters are coming around, the kids don’t have time to eat. They can’t go to classes without someone sticking a microphone in their faces. Mullin has had to put his house off-limits to reporters. He can’t breathe.

“But, please , we should enjoy it. I don’t think I’ll ask God for another year like this because I want other coaches to have a year like this to enjoy. If I stopped coaching tomorrow, I’d say, ‘Hey, my cup is overfilled.’

“The players don’t appreciate that now, but they’ll look back four of five years from now and realize how much fun they had. I tell them to enjoy it because we only pass this route once.”

He is asked what he hopes his players through the years have learned from him.

“I really don’t know,” he says. “I just hope they come back to see the old coach so I can yell at them.”

Do they?

“Oh yeah,” he says. “They do, when they want tickets.”

As he is leaving, Carnesecca is reminded of a press conference the next day.

“If the doctor says, ‘Don’t go,’ I won’t go,” he says. “I should go, though.”

The next day, he goes.

Mah-velous .