Navy Sports

GreatAmerican
Sun, 27 Apr 2008 15:55:19 +0000

GORDON WHITE: Carnevale: Survives War, Lands in Hall of Fame

Well before the birth of the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1953; before Frank McGuire arrived at Chapel Hill in 1952 and led North Carolina to its first NCAA basketball championship in 1957; and long before Dean Smith succeeded McGuire in 1961, there was an heroic, young Navy ensign who took the Tar Heels to their first NCAA basketball championship game in 1946.

The 29-year-old Ben Carnevale was lucky to be alive, let alone be boss of an already well-established basketball program when he followed Bill Lange as Carolina’s coach in 1944.

Less than two years before taking over at Chapel Hill, Carnevale was in charge of a Navy gunnery crew aboard the U.S. merchant ship, SS Rambler. After delivering supplies to our troops that had invaded North Africa, Nov. 8, 1942, the Rambler was returning to the U.S.A. when it was torpedoed by two German submarines and sank off the West African Coast one December night in 1942.

Carnevale and a number of his mates survived five days in a lifeboat before sighting the coast of Africa. They were picked up by a friendly ship’s crew, thus making possible one of the longest and most impressive careers in American college basketball coaching and intercollegiate and Olympic athletic administration.

Discharged in 1944 after fully recovering from his ordeal at sea, Carnevale took the North Carolina job for only two seasons before moving to the United States Naval Academy in 1946. He coached there for 20 years, taking six Navy teams to postseason tournaments (NCAA and NIT) before turning to athletic administration and numerous executive positions in college and Olympic sports.

Carnevale, a native of New Jersey and graduate of New York University where he played basketball under coach Howard Cann, died just a month ago on March 25 at the age of 92. He was one of the finest men I knew in intercollegiate sports, always a gentleman and friend.

Ben never talked to me or many other folks about his World War II brush with death, although we always knew he had come through some sort of narrow escape to earn the Purple Heart.

Mark Carnevale, one of Ben’s five children, spoke with me last week and read excerpts from old papers he possessed that told the story of that dreadful night in December 1942. Mark, 47, played on the PGA Tour and now serves as a reporter for PGA Tour events on XM Radio.

According to Mark, the Rambler was struck by two torpedoes – one from each of the two subs flanking the American ship. The Rambler did not last long before going under. Apparently it rolled over so much that Ben Carnevale simply slid down the deck and stepped into a lifeboat that was already in the water with some survivors aboard.

Then the two German subs surfaced and came in toward the Rambler survivors. Carnevale tossed his hat, which was obviously an officer’s cap, into the Atlantic and told the men in the lifeboat not to say a word.

German sailors, with their fingers on the triggers of machine guns beneath the sub’s conning towers, demanded to know who the Americans were, what ship that was and what they were doing there. After nary a reply during many long minutes of an obvious standoff, the Germans decided to go hunting more Allied shipping instead of shooting this bunch of helpless American sailors.

That is how Ben Carnevale survived to become a hero of both the World War II and of basketball to which he devoted his life.

I got to know Ben shortly after he took the Navy job as I covered many of his Navy games through 1966. These included some hard-fought Army-Navy games that were always the final game of the regular season in those days. I covered his finale as Navy’s coach when Army whipped Navy, 70-56, at West Point, Feb. 26, 1966.

That game was not only Carnevale’s last game as a college basketball coach; it was the first of six Army-Navy games for Army’s 25-year-old rookie head coach, Bobby Knight.

Carnevale’s last game as a coach was not a pleasant exit. But I wrote in my story of that game:

“Although his last game was a losing effort, Carnevale leaves Navy with the reputation of being an Army beater. His Navy teams have beaten Army 13 times and lost only seven.”

When at either Army or Navy, beating the other academy tops all other endeavors. Carnevale was truly a Navy success as a naval war hero and as the winningest basketball coach in Naval Academy history (257 victories and 160 defeats).

Twenty years earlier, Carnevale also lost his final game as North Carolina coach when coach Hank Iba’s Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) beat the Tar Heels, 43-40, to win the NCAA championship for the second year in a row. But that was North Carolina’s first NCAA title game, a true achievement for the Tar Heels.

Carnevale left Navy to become the athletic director at his alma mater, NYU, 1966-1972, and then athletic director at William and Mary, 1972-1992. His administrative career included the presidency of the National Invitation Tournament, chairman of the United States Olympic Basketball Committee, eight years on the NCAA Basketball Tournament Committee, member of the International Basketball Board and commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association.

The first NIT was held at Madison Square Garden in 1938 with six teams entered. Carnevale was a senior on the NYU team that finished fourth when Temple won the tournament. That initial NIT set the tone for all that followed, including the NCAA championship tournament that began the next year because of the big success of that new NIT.

Carnevale was the Cranford High School (N.J.) basketball coach when World War II interrupted his career in the sport he loved. When he returned from war, he took on the North Carolina head coaching job for only two years before taking the position at Navy which, in those days, seemed to be an upward move.

Throughout his coaching and other work, Carnevale maintained a devotion to teaching basketball. He became one of the nation’s most popular professors of basketball. Whenever there was a Carnevale clinic, the coaches would line up early and in large numbers to hear him lecture on the bouncing ball.

Joe Lapchick, the coach of St. John’s and the New York Knicks over half a century ago, said, “Ben’s a classic clinician. It’s at clinics where you separate the men from the boys in coaching. Ben could impart knowledge to other coaches as well as any man.”

A teacher, a coach, an administrator and a real American war hero, Carnevale was admitted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970. Carnevale belonged there. After all, he worked with, coached against and was a colleague of so many other Hall of Fame members such as Howard Cann, Hank Iba, Frank McGuire, Dean Smith, Joe Lapchick and Bobby Knight that it simply had to rub off on this kind gentleman of basketball.

Gordon White served 43 years as a sports reporter for The New York Times. His e-mail is sports@thepilot.com.