At 87, former UNC basketball star Lennie Rosenbluth still remembers the magic of 1957
Four miles away from the Dean Dome, in a comfortable chair inside a comfortable home decorated with memories from 60 years ago, sits the man who beat Wilt Chamberlain and led North Carolina to the 1957 national championship.
If you want to feel a little better about Tar Heel basketball — and most fans who wear Carolina blue could use a pick-me-up these days — take a seat in the other chair, right next to Lennie Rosenbluth.
Rosenbluth is 87 years old now. Since he moved back to Chapel Hill in 2010, he has been a near-constant presence behind the UNC bench for home games. But Rosenbluth has been unable to go to any games at the Smith Center this season due to complications from a fall he took in July (of course, if you’re ever going to miss a UNC season, this would be the one).
Rosenbluth’s mind is still sharp. His laugh is still strong. And he has a theory he’d like to share with you.
“Our 1957 team was the most important team in Carolina history,” Rosenbluth said. “Bar none. It all began there.”
That 1957 UNC team remains the only squad from the ACC to ever win a national basketball championship while also going undefeated. Finishing 32-0, that UNC team survived triple overtime twice in an amazing Final Four — first against Michigan State, then against Chamberlain and Kansas. Rosenbluth scored 20 points in the Tar Heels’ 54-53 win over Kansas in the final.
Rosenbluth’s “most important team” theory is not just based on the fact that the 1956-57 Tar Heels were the first team to win a men’s basketball national championship from the fledgling ACC, which had been established in 1953.
It also has to do with the fact that it was that ‘57 team that first had some of its games televised in North Carolina by a sports TV pioneer named C.D. Chesley, which helped pave the way for the wall-to-wall college basketball TV coverage we see today.
“We had the fans coming in,” Rosenbluth said. “We had the undefeated season. It made North Carolina a basketball state… It legitimized the conference to have a national champion. But most important of all, that team led Frank McGuire to hire a young assistant coach named Dean Smith.”
There’s some truth to all of that, although you can argue some of the particulars. N.C. State coach Everett Case had engineered a regional basketball dynasty in Raleigh with the Wolfpack long before the 1957 UNC team was formed. And McGuire, UNC’s flamboyant head coach at the time, might have met and hired Smith regardless of that undefeated season.
But it is true that McGuire and Smith first met when they roomed together, along with several other coaches, in a large hotel suite at the 1957 Final Four in Kansas City. That made for an awkward situation for Smith, an Air Force assistant coach at the time. He cheered hard for Kansas in the final since that was Smith’s alma mater.
McGuire understood school loyalty, though, and was impressed by Smith’s basketball acumen that week. He didn’t hire Smith immediately, but brought him to Chapel Hill in 1958 to be his lone assistant after ailing assistant coach Buck Freeman left UNC.
In 1961, Smith was promoted to replace McGuire, who had found himself in some trouble with the NCAA and departed for the NBA.
Smith basically begat Roy Williams, and five more UNC national championships have followed since that 1957 squad (two for Smith’s teams, three for Williams’ squads).
Rosenbluth’s magical season
For many younger basketball fans, Rosenbluth may be the best college basketball player you’ve never heard of. He was a 6-foot-5 All-American forward in 1957, averaging 28 points and 8.8 rebounds per game that year. He starred for a Frank McGuire-coached team that featured five New Yorkers as the starters.
That year Rosenbluth was also named the Helms National Player of the Year, winning that award over Chamberlain, among others. “I could do two things well as a basketball player — shoot and rebound,” Rosenbluth said.
Rosenbluth was a late bloomer — he was cut every single year from his school basketball team from seventh through 11th grade. At Chapel Hill, he was helped by the fact that he had a group of unselfish teammates and that McGuire never ran offensive sets.
It was similar to unstructured playground basketball in that way, which is what Rosenbluth had grown up with in New York.
“We had two in-bounds plays at Carolina under McGuire,” Rosenbluth said, “and that was it.”
N.C. State could have had him. But in Rosenbluth’s telling, legendary Wolfpack coach Case brought him to Raleigh, watched him work out (Rosenbluth said he didn’t know he had to actually try out and was in “terrible shape”) and then rescinded a previous scholarship offer at the last minute.
So Rosenbluth instead ended up at Chapel Hill. McGuire recruited him and offered him a scholarship without ever actually seeing him play. McGuire took Rosenbluth on the recommendation of a New York-based basketball scout named Harry Gotkin, who — back in the days when such scouting was legal — ended up steering many New Yorkers toward Chapel Hill.
UNC’s program wasn’t exactly big-time back then. Freshmen weren’t eligible to play on the varsity, and Rosenbluth remembers dressing for his first freshman game downstairs outside Woollen Gym and then running upstairs to enter the gym, where he was hopeful a crowd awaited.
“And the doors were locked,” Rosenbluth said. “We were standing there, the other team was standing there, and we had to go find somebody to unlock the doors. And then maybe 20 fans came.”
Even in his first year on the varsity, UNC was still very much a football school. It wasn’t cool for students to go to the basketball games.
“I’d walk down the hall of my dorm on campus,” Rosenbluth said, “and say, ‘I’ve got two free tickets for tonight’s game!’ Guys would be like, ‘I’m going to the movies. I don’t want to go.’ I’d end up throwing them away.”
That changed during that 1956-57 season, when UNC escaped a number of very close calls to grab the ACC’s lone bid to the NCAA tournament. Rosenbluth and his fellow New York starters — Tommy Kearns, Joe Quigg, Pete Brennan and Bob Cunningham — were often labeled “four Catholics and a Jew” in newspaper stories of the time. Rosenbluth was the lone Jewish player but said he never felt he was discriminated against because of it. He’s now a member of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
In the championship game against Kansas, the Jayhawks played a box-and-one for part of the game as they tried to slow down Rosenbluth. The Tar Heels, meanwhile, collapsed two or three defenders for much of the game on Chamberlain. The big man still scored 23 points and had 14 rebounds, but his teammates shot poorly from the outside. Rosenbluth scored 20 points but had fouled out by the third overtime.
However, UNC’s Quigg hit two free throws with six seconds to go and then deflected a pass away from Chamberlain in the final seconds to preserve the 54-53 victory. Rosenbluth and McGuire didn’t go directly back to Chapel Hill for the celebration, instead appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” To this day, Rosenbluth said that’s the one thing he regrets about the whole thing — he would have rather been celebrating at UNC.
An NBA disappointment
That game — one that Chamberlain once called the most painful loss of his life — was also the peak of Rosenbluth’s playing career. The Philadelphia Warriors picked him No. 6 overall in the first round of the 1957 NBA draft, but there he got stuck behind a future basketball hall of famer named Paul Arizin.
“I had high hopes until I got there and realized Arizin was my height, did the same things I did and hardly ever came out of the game,” Rosenbluth said. “It wasn’t a great experience for me. Plus, the average NBA salary in 1957 was $5,000 a year — not per game, not per minute, but per year. Big difference between then and now, when everyone’s making $5 million a year.”
Rosenbluth played only two NBA seasons, averaging seven minutes and 4.2 points per game. That was a far cry from the 26.9 points he averaged in three varsity seasons at UNC (still a school record for points per game in a career).
After those two unhappy NBA seasons, he quit and became a high school teacher and coach — first in North Carolina and then in Florida. The best player he ever coached in high school? Chris Corchiani, who later starred at N.C. State.
Rosenbluth and his wife, Dianne, now share a home in a leafy suburb in Chapel Hill. Rosenbluth’s memorabilia decorates a large part of the house — including his retired No. 10 UNC uniform (trimmed in red — an idea of the fashion-conscious McGuire), a photo of Rosenbluth and Chamberlain on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and his Philadelphia NBA uniform.
In July 2019, Rosenbluth was adjusting a thermostat in his home when he lost his balance and fell backwards. The resulting injuries — and recurring problems with knees that spent decades supporting him on basketball floors — have meant he has to get around with a walker for now. He still goes downtown to eat at Franklin Street, but he has avoided going to games.
“I don’t want to go to Carolina games with a walker or in a wheelchair,” Rosenbluth said. “I just don’t want fans to feel sorry for me. I’m getting better — I hope to go to the games next season. In the meantime, I just root at home and yell at the TV set and keep hoping that they break out of this slump.”
So the man who led UNC to that 1957 national championship that led to so much else for the UNC basketball program has himself a new project now.
“I just want to walk again — without the walker,” Rosenbluth said. “It’s tough, because I spent so much time in a hospital bed after the fall. I’ve got to build the muscles back up in my legs and everywhere else. But I see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I’m going to get back there to the Dean Dome. Probably not this season. But next season for sure.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2020 at 8:00 AM with the headline "At 87, former UNC basketball star Lennie Rosenbluth still remembers the magic of 1957."
