LENNIE ROSENBLUTH
Lennie Rosenbluth played in only eight high school basketball games.
In the NBA, he played in 82 games over two seasons (1957; 1958) for the Philadelphia Warriors, who drafted him in the first round.
He was the 6th overall pick.
Not much there, right?
Wrong.
Lennie Rosenbluth, who died on June 18, was one of the great college basketball players of all time.
Any era.
The 1957 national championship team leader and captain at North Carolina was the school’s record-holder for most points ever scored by a Tar Heel in three years (2,047).
No one has come within 5 points of his 26.9 ppg scoring average, since.
His single-season Heels record of 28.0 ppg, set in 1956-’57, appears etched in perpetuity.
And that was well before the 3-point shot.
Rosenbluth scored 897 points that season, a Carolina record.
And what a season it was.
But we’ll get to that…
Rosenbluth helped lead the Heels past Michigan State in the 1957 NCAA semifinals in triple overtime, and then Kansas in the final–once again in triple overtime.
The Jayhawks had a fellow named Wilt Chamberlain patrolling the paint.
The games were played within 20 hours of one another.
Same for both teams playing in the final extravaganza, of course.
There were no TV timeouts.
Only one minute between overtimes.
The Tar Heels went on to defeat Chamberlain’s Jayhawks 54–53 for the NCAA championship, North Carolina’s first, which brought credibility to the fledgling Atlantic Coast Conference.
Wilt, who had averaged 30 ppg during the season, was held to 23 by the 6’5” Rosenbluth.
UNC finished a perfect 1956-’57 slate at 32–0.
Only 4 NCAA Division I schools can boast undefeated national championship campaigns–and none since 1976.
There have been 7 such seasons:
1975-’76 Indiana–32–0;
1972-’73 UCLA–30–0;
1971-’72 UCLA–30–0;
1966-’67 UCLA–30–0;
1963-’64 UCLA–30–0;
1956-’57 North Carolina–32–0; and
1955-’56 USF–29–0.
Pretty serious company…then and now.
Lennie Rosenbluth’s route to Chapel Hill was a circuitous one.
As a high school student at James Monroe in the Bronx, he worked summers at a hotel in the Catskills, a popular resort area for city vacationers.
Hotels and country clubs in the region fielded basketball teams to play one or two nights a week, as entertainment for the guests.
“That helped me,” Rosenbluth recalled.
“…Most of my games I played against older players that had graduated from college.
I got more experience playing against them than I did playing against high school players.”
Red Auerbach noticed.
Of course, he did.
Auerbach coached a summer team in the Catskills, against whom Rosenbluth played.
“I played very well against them, and he invited me to come up to Boston for workouts at the beginning of my senior year.”
Work out he did–for two weeks, no less–and Auerbach wanted to draft Rosenbluth directly out of high school.
But there were rules against that then.
St. John’s coach Frank McGuire wanted Rosenbluth, but Lennie wanted out of the city life.
It was almost NC State and not North Carolina, as it turned out.
Then-NC State head coach Everett Case scouted him when he was still at James Monroe, and also playing for an all-black team at the Carlton YMCA in Brooklyn.
Case invited Rosenbluth to work out with State when the team was playing at Madison Square Garden, and after that invited him and his father to visit the campus in Raleigh.
When there, Case insisted that Lennie work out with the team.
Sounds reasonable, but…
“I said, ‘Coach, I’m out of shape, I have no clothes to work out, I have no sneakers.’”
Obviously, Case had all the equipment.
Apparently, the new sneakers created blisters.
“Those kids were throwing the ball down at my feet and over my head.
I played about as bad as you can play…
After two days of limping and hurting, he calls me into his office and said, ‘Lennie, I know I offered you a scholarship, but you didn’t sign anything.
I only have one scholarship left.’
And he tells me he can’t afford to waste it on me.
He thought I should try a lower level of ball.”
So, Case passed on Rosenbluth.
McGuire was on it.
He’d heard what had happened with State.
McGuire called Rosenbluth.
“I said, ‘Coach, I would love to play for you, but I don’t want to play in the city,’” he recalled.
“He said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m leaving St. John’s. I’m probably going to either North Carolina or Alabama.’
I said, ‘Coach, wherever you go, I’ll go with you.’”
And that’s how it all began.
As it happened, Alabama would not accept McGuire’s assistant coach, Buck Freeman.
Seems he may have had a drinking problem.
North Carolina had no such reservations.
So Rosenbluth, a Jew from New York, hitched his wagon to the Irish Catholic McGuire.
“I liked the way he coached.
When I watched him at St. John’s, he never yelled at a player.
If a player made mistakes, and people in the Garden were yelling ‘Take him out!’…Coach would not take him out until maybe a minute or two later when the crowd settled down, and he would talk to him.
I liked that.
Other coaches were yelling at players.”
When the college chapter was written, Lennie Rosenbluth was named 1957 ACC Player of the Year; ACC Male Athlete of the Year; Helms Hall of Fame Collegiate Player of the Year; and MVP of the 1957 ACC Tournament.
Later he was inducted into the Helms College Basketball Hall of Fame.
In 2002, he was named to the ACC 50th Anniversary Men’s Basketball Team as one of the 50 greatest players in ACC annals.
Until 1992, Rosenbluth was the only collegian to be named NCAA National Player of the Year; ACC Player of the Year; ACC Tournament MVP; and NCAA regional MVP in the same season.
His feat has since been matched by Duke’s Christian Laettner and his alma mater’s Antawn Jamison.
Wilt Chamberlain has been gone for more than two decades.
Arguably the greatest player who ever lived, he boasted that he squired more than 20,000 women in his day.
Probably would have been hard-pressed to remember names and numbers.
Bet he would have remembered Lennie Rosenbluth.
