Lou Carnesecca and Matt Brust: 'Like father and son'
Photo of St. John's Basketball player Matt Brust from the December 28, 1986 edition of Newsday Credit: Newsday File/Chris Gierlich
Matt Brust was nothing short of bereft on Sunday morning after the passing of Lou Carnesecca, who died on Saturday at the age of 99.
As Brust spoke about the iconic St. John’s coach, there was a deep sadness in his voice and words didn’t come easily. He occasionally choked up with emotion.
“What do you say about the man who saved your life?” Brust said, his voice cracking. “My life felt shattered and he took me in and showed me nothing but love and kindness . . . and he became like my father. He taught me to survive some of the things I was going through personally.”
To most looking in, Carnesecca was a great blend: a competitor with charm, a winner with humility, a beloved and charismatic New Yorker.
To most who played for him, he was something more: a source of wisdom and motivation, a basketball savant and a galvanizer of teams.
To Brust, things ran much deeper.
“Matty and Lou were like father and son,” said Ron Linfonte, who spent 39 years on the St. John’s bench as the head athletic trainer. “Lou was closer with him than any other player I know.”
Brust, a Babylon High School graduate, was the youngest in a family of highly successful athletes. His brother Jerry pitched for Miami in the 1974 College World Series and his brother Chris played with Michael Jordan on the 1982 North Carolina national championship team.
Matt Brust, a three-time Newsday All-Long Island basketball player, was celebrated across the Island when he chose the Tar Heels. But when he and coach Dean Smith didn’t mix well, Brust decided to transfer in the middle of his freshman year.
“I was not in a good way,” Brust said. “You have to understand that when you are leaving a place like North Carolina, people in my community back in Babylon just kind of turned their back on me. I guess I was viewed as a failure to everyone on Long Island.”
Brust said his father wasn’t present in his life, so it was just him and his mother who went to see Carnesecca in the middle of the Red Storm’s 1984-85 Final Four season.
“He got up from behind his desk and said, ‘Let’s get your mom some tea,’ ” Brust recounted. “And the next thing he said was ‘We’re going to help you, boy.’ And I told him, I know you guys are running No. 1, but I’m taking a stab.”
Brust recounted the numerous things that made him feel like a bad fit with Smith, and when he made the point that Smith had a rule against cursing that he kept running afoul of, Carnesecca put both hands up and said: “Stop, stop stop — never trust a guy who doesn’t curse. Now go get registered.”
“It was like 1,000 pounds came off me,” Brust said.
In practice and games, Brust became Carnesecca’s poster boy for hustle. Off the court, he gravitated toward the coach, even making uninvited appearances at coaches’ meetings.
“He’d say, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I’d say, ‘Making sure your hearing aid works,’ ” Brust said, some joy in his voice.
Brust was a senior captain on the 1988-89 team that won the NIT, and the two kept the close connection. “I was glad I could give him that,” Brust said.
He recounted a visit to Carnesecca’s home sometime after his 1992 retirement when the coach greeted him with “let’s go in the kitchen.” Brust was puzzled.
“Guests in the living room, family in the kitchen,” Carnesecca explained.
Brust called and spoke to Carnesecca last week as his health declined. He was 36 days short of his 100th birthday when he died.
“He said, ‘I just had a tough week — I’m fine,’ still sharp as a tack,” Brust said. “He really wanted to do the 100 [birthday] thing, a competitor to the very end.”
Roger Rubin returned to Newsday in 2018 to write about high schools, colleges and baseball following 20 years at the Daily News. A Baseball Hall of Fame voter since 2011, he has covered 13 MLB postseasons and 14 NCAA Final Fours.