Lennie Rosenbluth, the All-America ahead who led a North Carolina group with a beginning lineup of New Yorkers to an unbeaten season and an exhilarating victory over Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas squad within the 1957 N.C.A.A. basketball match championship recreation, died on Saturday. He was 89.
His loss of life was introduced by North Carolina’s athletic division, which didn’t cite the trigger or say the place he died. He had been residing in Chapel Hill, N.C., house to the college’s principal campus.
Rosenbluth, at 6 toes 5 inches, averaged 28 factors per recreation within the 1956-57 season and beat out Chamberlain for the Helms Basis School Basketball Participant of the Yr award. His Tar Heels went 32-0 and capped their season with a 54-53 triple-overtime victory over Kansas, with Rosenbluth scoring 20 factors earlier than fouling out late in regulation. Chamberlain, who went on to turn out to be one of many Nationwide Basketball Affiliation’s most dominant gamers, was held to 23 factors after averaging 30 in the course of the common season.
Within the semifinals, Rosenbluth hit two leap photographs within the third time beyond regulation of North Carolina’s 74-70 victory over Michigan State and completed with 31 factors.
A local of the Bronx, he performed sparingly for the basketball group at James Monroe Excessive Faculty in that borough however made a powerful displaying taking part in basketball at Catskill summer time resort motels, a magnet for main New York metropolitan space gamers. He got here to the eye of Frank McGuire, who was named the North Carolina coach in 1953 after taking St. John’s, positioned in Brooklyn on the time, to the N.C.A.A. title recreation.
Rosenbluth was within the vanguard of a participant pipeline from New York to North Carolina orchestrated by McGuire.
“Basketball was not but a very nationwide sport, and the sport was nonetheless most of the time a metropolis recreation, performed greatest, it was believed, in New York,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Occasions in 1999. “However it was a nasty time for the faculty sport in New York. The purpose-fixing scandals of the early ’50s had destroyed the game domestically.”
McGuire developed a North Carolina group that thrived in a largely Protestant area with a lineup that featured Rosenbluth, who was Jewish, and 4 Catholic teammates: Tommy Kearns, who had performed highschool ball at St. Ann’s, in Brooklyn; Pete Brennan, from St. Augustine, additionally in Brooklyn; Joe Quigg, from St. Francis Prep, in Queens; and Bobby Cunningham, from All Hallows, within the Bronx.
Rosenbluth averaged 28 factors and eight.6 rebounds a recreation within the Tar Heels’ 1956-57 common season. His 2,047 profession factors are probably the most ever by a North Carolina participant who appeared in solely three seasons.
He was named a second-team All-American by The Related Press and United Press Worldwide for the 1955-56 season, when he was a junior, and a “consensus” All-American for the 1956-57 championship season, which means {that a} host of shops agreed that he was among the many high 5 gamers in school basketball.
He was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors because the sixth participant chosen within the 1957 N.B.A. draft. However the Warriors already had the high-scoring Paul Arizin at small ahead. Rosenbluth, his backup, averaged solely 4.2 factors a recreation in his two professional seasons.
Leonard Robert Rosenbluth was born on Jan. 22, 1933, a son of Jack and Rose Rosenbluth. His father labored within the tv manufacturing enterprise.
After graduating from North Carolina and taking part in for the Warriors, Rosenbluth taught American historical past and coached basketball at a highschool in Wilson, N.C., east of Raleigh. In a comparability of kinds to his Tar Heel nationwide championship group, he as soon as quipped how “my first 12 months, we had an ideal season once more, besides we misplaced each recreation.”
Rosenbluth once more taught historical past and coached highschool basketball in Florida for some 35 years. When his first spouse, Helen (Oliver) Rosenbluth, generally known as Pat, was discovered to have most cancers, they returned to Chapel Hill in order that she might be handled within the College of North Carolina hospital system. She died in 2010. He married Dianne Stabler in 2011.
Rosenbluth had a daughter, Elizabeth; a son, Steven, and grandchildren from his first marriage. A listing of survivors was not instantly out there.
He was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel and the Nationwide Jewish Sports activities Corridor of Fame and Museum in Commack, N.Y., on Lengthy Island.
In 2002, the Atlantic Coast Convention chosen Rosenbluth for its Fiftieth-anniversary basketball group and named him one of many 50 best athletes within the historical past of the convention. North Carolina retired his No. 10.
Throughout the 2006-2007 school basketball season, Michael Jordan and James Worthy, who performed on the Tar Heel championship group of 1982, attended an occasion for North Carolina title groups. They thanked the gamers who introduced North Carolina to nationwide basketball prominence in 1957.
As Rosenbluth advised it to The New York Occasions, “They have been saying issues like, ‘You guys bought all of it going.’”
