By Any Name, Looie Has Found Success

His father owned and operated Carnesecca’s Italian Delicatessen on Manhattan’s East Side. Little Looie gave his old man a hand as soon as he got home from Our Lady of Perpetual Help grammar school, this being back in the mid-1930s, long before he joined the Coast Guard and went off to serve in the war and then came home to play and coach basketball for St. John’s University in Queens.

The deli was his kind of place.

“Ay, ‘Carnesecca!’ ” he said, with an exaggerated wave of the hand, holding court before tonight’s NCAA Midwest Regional game against Ohio State. “You know what it means, don’t you? It means ‘dry meat.’ ”

“Better than ‘dead meat,’ ” said the guy in his face.

Looie laughed.

“Same thing,” he said. “That’s what we’ll be if we don’t win this game.”

“You’ll be Carnesecca.”

“Look! Look at this!” Looie said excitedly, flipping over a place card someone from the NCAA had set in front of him. “Over the years I’ve seen a lot of different spellings of it. I’ve seen what’s been done to the names of a lot of good Italians, in ‘The Untouchables’ and all sorts of places. But look at this!”

The card identified him as Coach Carnescecca .

“Karna-Skekka!” Looie howled. “Look at this thing! They made me Japanese!”

Now the guy in his face laughed.

“Whatsa matter? You’re not Italian? You got no Italians out there in Los Angeles? Carne! Carne! It means ‘meat’ in Spanish, Latin, Italian, everything. Probably in Japanese, for all I know. C’mon, say it after me: Carne! Carne! “

Well, here it is, another big week in the happy-go-lucky life of Coach Dry Meat, and he is enjoying it while it lasts. He’s just hangin’ around, tellin’ tales. The game? What about the game? The kids play the game. The coach doesn’t do anything. The kids do all the work. How you doin’? Call me Looie.

How will you. . . .

“How do I know what’ll happen in the game? I never took a shot in my life!”

But will you. . . .

“Hey, I won’t do anything! If I could coach, I would coach my guy to score a basket every time! That would be my strategy!”

But Ohio State. . . .

“Ohio State! Oh, God, I remember once we played ‘em at the Garden when they had (Jerry) Lucas and (John) Havlicek, and it was Christmas week, and it was snowin’ out, and I remember the whole team started walkin’ home afterward, and we walked all the way from 48th Street all the way past 14th Street and we didn’t even know it was snowin’ out because we were so stunned at what Ohio State did to us!”

Uh, yes, Looie, but this Ohio State team. . . .

“Whatsa matter! You didn’t appreciate my story?!”

Looie, Looie.

A guy took another tack. Asked him if he always felt the same way, that the coach had little to do with whatever happened. For 23 years, Lou Carnesecca has been coaching St. John’s, with time off for good behavior in 1970-73 to coach the professional New York Nets of the old ABA.

Which, naturally, came up.

“Oh, no. When you’re young, you think you’re a genius. You think you know everything about coachin’ basketball. Hey, let me tell you something about basketball. I’m coachin’ the Nets, see. I got Rick Barry, and he takes us to the ABA championship. Next year, I got the same players, the same plays, only I don’t got Rick Barry. And we lose 53 games. Fifty-three games we lose!

“I mean, will that shrink your head or what?”

He delights in having done so much. Playing JV ball for St. John’s. Hitting .300-plus for a College World Series team. Teaching health and hygiene at St. Ann’s Academy. Winning three high school championships there. Getting his Master’s degree from St. John’s. Returning there to be Joe Lapchick’s right-hand man. Taking over from Joe in 1965.

“Hey, I don’t know. I never been to the Kentucky Derby. I never been to the speedway at Indianapolis. But I know what the excitement of college basketball is like, and it’s enough for me. I like the enthusiasm of youth. I like how frantic everybody gets. It’s a life, it’s a business, it’s a job. It’s not so much rah-rah as you’d think. But it’s enough for me.”

And being 66 years old without an NCAA title. . . .

” . . . is what?” Looie said. “I’ll tell you what. How many guys never even got to the Final Four? How many guys got to the Final Four and got fired? I got some successes in my life. It’s not like unrequited love or anything.”

Still, you won’t coach forever and. . . .

” . . . and what? I know. It’s frightening to me, not being around it. I like being around the kids. That’s why some people coach bird dogs.”

Some people do what?

“You know. Train bird dogs. You know. For hunting. It’s beautiful. The dogs do exactly what you tell ‘em and they don’t talk back. It’s like coachin’ basketball.”

It’s like what?

“Hey, I’m kiddin’!” Looie said, hooking an arm around a guy’s shoulder, walking him down the hall. “Can’t you tell I’m kiddin’? Hey, can you believe the way they had my name? Karna-Skekka! They made me Japanese!”