Deaths (Obituaries)

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      Greg Lee, a Key Member of Two U.C.L.A. Title-Winners, Dies at 70

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      A master of the assist, he played alongside Bill Walton and Jamaal Wilkes on teams that John Wooden led to the N.C.A.A. championship in 1972 and 1973.Greg Lee, the point guard for Coach John Wooden’s unbeaten U.C.L.A. teams that captured the 1972 and 1973 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament championships, died on Wednesday in San Diego. He was 70.His death, at a hospital, was announced by the U.C.L.A. athletics department, which said the cause was an infection related to an immune disorder.At 6 feet 4 inches, a good size for a guard of his era, Lee became a starter in his sophomore season.He joined center Bill Walton and forward Jamaal Wilkes, U.C.L.A.’s stars, on the Bruins team that defeated Florida State for the 1972 tournament championship. Concentrating on a playmaking role since U.C.L.A. had a sharpshooting frontcourt, he handed out 14 assists in 34 minutes on the court while Walton connected on 21 of 22 shots, scoring 44 points, in the Bruins’ victory over Memphis State in the 1973 title game for their seventh consecutive national championship. Both those teams went 30-0.By U.C.L.A’s standards, the 1973-74 season, when Lee was a senior, proved something of a disappointment. The Bruins’ winning streak ended at 88 games when they were edged by Notre Dame, 71-70. They were defeated in double overtime in the N.C.A.A. tournament semifinals by North Carolina State, which went on to capture the title, and they finished with a record of 26-4 — impressive for almost any team, but not U.C.L.A.Lee averaged only 5.8 points a game for his three varsity seasons, but he averaged nearly three assists a game as a senior. His U.C.LA. teams had an overall record of 86-4.He was named a three-time academic All-American.Lee was selected by the Atlanta Hawks in the seventh round of the 1974 N.B.A. draft and by the San Diego Conquistadors of the American Basketball Association in its draft. He played briefly in the A.B.A. and, after becoming a free agent, reunited with Walton on the N.B.A.’s Portland Trail Blazers, who obtained him in a trade with the Hawks. He got into only a few games with the Blazers.Lee later played pro basketball in Germany for several seasons. But if his basketball career was over when he returned to the United States, his athletic career was not.He hadn’t played volleyball at U.C.L.A., but he joined the professional beach volleyball circuit in Southern California and went on to enjoy success in both singles and, teamed with Jim Menges, a former volleyball player for the Bruins, doubles. In their 30 matches between 1973 and 1982, Lee and Menges won 25 doubles titles and finished in second place three times and in third place once.Gregory Scott Lee was born on Dec. 12, 1951, in the Reseda neighborhood of Los Angeles, the youngest of three brothers. He starred in basketball at Reseda High School, where he was coached by his father, Marvin, who had played for U.C.L.A. in the 1940s under Wilbur Johns, the Bruins’ coach before Wooden. He was named the Los Angeles city player of the year during his junior and senior seasons at Reseda, when he averaged close to 30 points a game.He later earned teaching credentials from U.C.L.A. and taught mathematics and coached basketball and tennis at Clairemont High School in San Diego, whose 1979 class inspired Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and its 1982 movie adaptation.He is survived by his wife, Lisa; his son, Ethan; his daughter, Jessamyn Feves; his brother, Jon; and two grandchildren.Lee was grateful to Wooden for his guidance.“He did the same things with his stars as he did with his scrubs,” he was quoted as saying in “How to Be Like Coach Wooden: Life Lessons From Basketball’s Greatest Leader,” by Pat Williams with David Wimbish (2006). “He always focused on the details. He was a teacher who happened to be a basketball coach.” More

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      Herbert Kohler, Plumbing Mogul Who Created a Golf Mecca, Dies at 83

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      The billionaire chief of a family company known for its bathtubs, toilets and faucets, he brought championship play to a tiny Wisconsin town.Herbert V. Kohler Jr., who built a century-old family business known for bathtubs, toilets and faucets into a multibillion-dollar global enterprise and turned a tiny company town into an unlikely stop for the world’s top golfers, died on Sept. 3 in Kohler, Wis. He was 83.The death was announced on the Kohler Company website. No cause was cited.As a young man, Mr. Kohler bridled at his father’s wish that he join the business full time after college.“That just wasn’t my cup of tea,” he told Forbes in 2010.But he ultimately took the path that had effectively been set for him when his grandfather John Michael Kohler, an Austrian immigrant, bought a Sheboygan, Wis., foundry with a partner in 1873.The company, which began as a maker of plows and other agricultural implements, took a defining turn 10 years later when its patriarch put enamel on a cast-iron vessel used as a horse trough and for scalding hogs and sold it to farm families as a bathtub.Kohler was on its way to literally becoming a household name.The company’s fixtures were included in a 1929 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of contemporary home design. Its colorful “The Bold Look of Kohler” advertising campaign was introduced in 1967.By 1972, when Herbert Kohler Jr. took the top job at the privately held business, which also made engines and generators, it had $133 million in annual sales and was the second-largest U.S. producer of kitchen and bath fixtures, behind American Standard.When he retired as chief executive in 2015, it had annual sales of $6 billion. In 2018 it was the top choice for bath fixtures and accessories among U.S. builders, according to the research firm Statista.Under Mr. Kohler, the company acquired makers of furniture, cabinets and tiles; built or bought factories in China, Mexico, India, Europe and elsewhere; and developed two-person bathtubs, robotic toilets and a shower with stereo sound.He also started a golf and hotel business that attracted three P.G.A. championships, a U.S. Senior Open, two U.S. Women’s Opens and last year’s Ryder Cup to Sheboygan County and allowed him to put his mark on the seaside Scottish town where the game was born.Mr. Kohler’s vision, drive and appetite for risk fueled the company’s growth. He might have been slow to embrace his dynastic destiny, but when he did, it was with gusto.“I loved it,” he told Forbes, “because I saw so much potential for change.”Mr. Kohler and his wife, Natalie, at his Whistling Straits golf course, the site of last year’s Ryder Cup.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesHerbert Vollrath Kohler Jr. was born on Feb. 20, 1939, in Sheboygan, about an hour north of Milwaukee. His father was the Kohler Company’s chairman and chief executive. His mother, Ruth (De Young) Kohler, was a historian and a former women’s editor at The Chicago Tribune.Young Herbert’s mother died when he was a teenager, and he was sent east to boarding school, initially at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where, he told Forbes, “there wasn’t a rule or regulation I didn’t break.”Dismissed from there, he went to the Choate School in Connecticut. After graduating, he entered Yale, his father’s alma mater, but he lacked focus and left. He served in the Army Reserve and then studied math and physics at the University of Zurich. It was, he told The Chicago Tribune in 1994, “a period of total rejection of a prescribed life.”Returning to the United States, he enrolled at Knox College in Illinois. He studied acting, dabbled in poetry and edited what he described in a 2012 interview with Cigar Aficionado magazine as a “wild political newspaper.”“One of my friends called me ‘the first of the great unwashed,’” he told Forbes. “That’s a hell of a note for the son of a bathroom baron.” (At the time, he was mostly estranged from his father. “I seldom spoke to the poor man,” he said.)While at Knox, he met his future first wife, Linda Karger, who was directing a play he was in. They married in 1961 and divorced in the 1980s.Mr. Kohler’s attempt at independence continued at Furman University in South Carolina, where he enrolled briefly while also working. But he was soon back at Yale. He graduated in 1965 with a degree in industrial administration and joined the Kohler Company as a research technician.He became a company director in 1967; vice president of operations a year later, when his father died; executive vice president in 1971; and chairman and chief executive a year after that.One hurdle Mr. Kohler faced in taking the helm was the company’s bitter history with organized labor, including a United Auto Workers strike that began in 1954 and lasted more than six years — the longest such walkout in U.S. history at the time.“Rightly or wrongly, everyone knew the name Kohler because of the strike,” Mr. Kohler told The New York Times in 1973. (There have been two, much shorter, strikes since then, in 1983 and 2015.)The family was also in danger at the time of having its control of the company slip away amid a dilution of its shares’ value. Mr. Kohler engineered a reverse stock split that slashed the number of shares and gave him and his closest relatives near-total control.With his position solidified, Mr. Kohler reinvested heavily in the company, which was already associated with innovative design. He kept the emphasis on form as well as function, opening the Kohler Design Center, a museumlike product showplace, and, with his sister, Ruth, creating a residency program for artists.John Torinus, who got to know Mr. Kohler as business editor of The Milwaukee Sentinel, described him in a phone interview as a “genius” and a “tough cookie” whose fascination with design resembled that of Steve Jobs.“He was very particular about everything, down to the smallest detail,” said Mr. Torinus, who is now the chairman of Serigraph, a Wisconsin company that makes decorative parts for other businesses’ products, including, sometimes, Kohler’s.That focus undoubtedly helps explain what Sarah Archer, a design and culture writer, called the company’s enduring place in the bathroom firmament.“They weren’t just selling cleanliness or modernity,” she said via email. “They were offering a kind of mini-vacation.”Mr. Kohler married Natalie Black, a former chief legal officer and current board member of the Kohler Company, in 1985. She survives him. His survivors also include a son, David, Kohler’s chief executive since 2105 and now its board chairman as well; two daughters, Laura Kohler, a board member and senior company vice president, and Rachel Kohler, also a board member; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.In the late 1970s, Mr. Kohler decided to get into the hospitality trade by making a resort hotel out of a run-down building that had originally been used to house company workers after the foundry moved four miles west of Sheboygan in 1899 to what became the town of Kohler. Many people around him scoffed, but he forged ahead.“He didn’t like to give up on anything that was part of his heritage,” said Richard Blodgett, the author of “A Sense of Higher Design: The Kohlers of Kohler” (2003), a company-commissioned corporate history.Mr. Kohler’s instincts proved correct. The hotel, the American Club, opened in 1981. Augmented by a private hunting and fishing preserve, a tennis club, restaurants, shops and a spa, it was soon a tourist magnet.Still, something was missing.“You have this boutique resort hotel, but you don’t have your own golf course,” Mr. Kohler, speaking in a 2015 interview, recalled customers telling him. “That’s kind of embarrassing for a C.E.O.”Mr. Kohler had little interest in the game, but he quickly immersed himself in it.Working with Pete Dye, who was once called the Picasso of golf-course design, he developed two nearby championship-caliber courses, Blackwolf Run and Whistling Straits.Mr. Kohler deepened his golf investment in 2004, buying a hotel alongside the famous Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, and the nearby Duke’s Course.Not all his golf projects have gone smoothly. Local environmentalists thwarted plans for a course on the Oregon coast, and the development of a new one near Kohler has been slowed by residents opposed to its reliance on public land, and by the discovery of Native American artifacts and human remains on the property.Mr. Kohler shrugged off such obstacles. He pressed on, guided by a phrase adapted from the 19th-century British critic John Ruskin and found in an old stained-glass window at the American Club: “Life without labor is guilt. Labor without art is brutality.”Kitty Bennett contributed research. More

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      Tom Weiskopf, British Open Winner and Golf Course Designer, Dies at 79

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      A four-time runner-up at the Masters, he won 16 PGA Tour events starting in the late 1960s and later became a television commentator.Tom Weiskopf, who won 16 PGA Tour events, most notably the British Open, and became a prominent golf course architect and broadcaster, died on Saturday at his home in Big Sky, Mont. Weiskopf, who was found to have pancreatic cancer in 2020, was 79.His death was announced by the PGA Tour.Hailed for what was considered a perfect and powerful swing, Weiskopf won five times on the PGA Tour in 1973, his shining moment coming at the British Open, played at the Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland. He led wire to wire, defeating Johnny Miller and Neil Coles by three shots with Jack Nicklaus four strokes back.Weiskopf was the runner-up four times at the Masters and tied for second at the 1976 United States Open. He also won the Canadian Open in 1973 and again in 1975, when he captured a one-hole playoff over Nicklaus, his fellow Ohio State University alumnus. Weiskopf was a member of the United States Ryder Cup teams in 1973 and 1975.Weiskopf turned pro in 1964 and played on the PGA Tour from 1968 to 1982.He later joined the Senior PGA Tour, now known as the Champions Tour, and defeated Nicklaus by four strokes in the 1995 United States Senior Open.Weiskopf in 1975 at the Masters golf tournament. He and Johnny Miller tied for second, one stroke behind Jack Nicklaus.Bob Daugherty/Associated PressThomas Daniel Weiskopf was born on Nov. 9, 1942, in Massillon, Ohio, the oldest of three children of Thomas Weiskopf, a railroad worker, and his wife, Eva Shorb, both of whom had enjoyed success playing in Ohio tournaments.His passion for golf was kindled when his father brought him to the United States Open at Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, in 1957.“He took me straight to the practice range and pointed out Sam Snead,” Weiskopf recalled in the book “Chasing Greatness,” the story of the 1973 Open, by Adam Lazarus and Steve Schlossman. “The sound of Sam’s iron shots, the flight of the ball, thrilled me. I was hooked even before I started playing.”Weiskopf helped take Benedictine High School to the Cleveland city golf championship as a junior and senior, and then was recruited to Ohio State by golf coach Bob Kepler. Nicklaus was a senior on the Buckeyes’ golf team when Weiskopf arrived in Columbus. But they were never teammates, since N.C.A.A. rules prohibited freshmen from competing.Weiskopf embarked on his second golf career, as a course designer, and teamed with the golf architect Jay Morrish to create Troon North in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1984. “I knew I had to get away from the game for at least a year so I thought I’d see if I liked architecture,” he told Golf Digest in 2009. “I could still go back on tour if I wanted but I never did.”His achievements as a golf course designer included Loch Lomond in Scotland and TPC Scottsdale’s Stadium Course, the site of the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open since 1987.Weiskopf was part of the CBS team that covered Nicklaus’s victory in the 1986 Masters.When asked to provide viewers insight into Nicklaus’s thought processes in the final holes, he replied, “If I knew the way he thought, I would have won this tournament.”He also worked as a golf analyst for CBS Sports, covering the Masters, and contributed to ABC Sports and ESPN’s coverage of the British Open.Weiskopf defeated Nicklaus by four strokes in the 1995 United States Senior Open.John Ruthroff/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWeiskopf’s survivors include his wife, Laurie, and his children Heidi and Eric from his marriage to his first wife, Jeanne.When Weiskopf won the British Open, he paid tribute to his father.“Even now, I wish my father was alive to see this,” he said. “I didn’t put my best in front of him and doggone it, as long as I’m playing this game I’m going to do my best. I really wanted to win this tournament more than any other major tournament I ever played in.”When he redesigned the municipal North Course at Torrey Pines at San Diego in 2016, Weiskopf reflected on his career as a golf architect.“You create aesthetic value by having big mature trees, beautiful vista water features and bunker styles,” he said. “That creates the beauty of the golf course, I think. How could you find a better piece of property than this piece of property, for 36 holes of golf?” More

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      Pete Carril, Princeton’s Textbook Basketball Coach, Dies at 92

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      Without athletic scholarships, he made outgunned teams winners by keeping them moving and unnerving opponents, leading to one of the biggest upsets in college basketball.Pete Carril, who coached men’s basketball at Princeton for 29 years and scared big-name opponents with his undersize, often underskilled scholars playing an old-fashioned textbook game, died on Monday. He was 92.His family announced the death in a statement posted on the Princeton Tigers’ website. It did not say where he died or give the cause of death.As the men’s head coach from 1967 to 1996, Carril (pronounced care-ILL) taught a thinking man’s basketball at Princeton. As an Ivy League member, Princeton could not offer athletic scholarships, and its academic demands were high, but Carril’s teams, almost invariably outmanned and overmatched, still won twice as often as they lost.His record at Princeton was 514-261, with 13 Ivy titles, 11 appearances in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s championship tournament, two in the National Invitation Tournament (his team won in 1975) and only one losing season. Fourteen of his Princeton teams led the nation in defense. In 1997, he was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.He emphasized a deliberate off-the-ball offense that kept players passing the ball and setting screens until a shooter was open or someone broke free to the basket in a patented backdoor play. The scores were low, and no matter how much opponents prepared, they were frustrated and often lost their poise.“Playing Princeton is kind of like going to the dentist,” said Jim Valvano, the North Carolina State coach who died in 1993 at 47. “You know that down the road it can make you better, but while it’s happening it can be very, very painful.”The New York Times sportswriter Bill Pennington wrote: “The most unsophisticated basketball fan could admire and understand a Pete Carril team at first glance. The most devoted hoops junkie could be spellbound by a Pete Carril team in motion. It was basketball not of talent, but of team. It may not be the way everybody should play, but it was the way everybody used to try to play.”In the N.C.A.A.’s annual tournament, Carril’s teams might lose to national powers but not before unnerving them and threatening an upset. In the first round alone, Princeton lost to Georgetown by 50-49 in 1989, Arkansas by 68-64 in 1990 and Villanova by 50-48 in 1991.Carril’s final college victory came on March 14, 1996, in Indianapolis, in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament against U.C.L.A., the defending champion. Thirteenth-seeded Princeton, 7 points behind with six minutes left, scored on — what else? — a backdoor with 3.9 seconds left and won. The next day, The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, ran this headline across Page 1:“David 43, Goliath 41.”Carril said he was under no illusions: “If we played U.C.L.A. 100 times, they would win 99 times.” (The Tigers went on to defeat, 63-41, in the second round against Mississippi State.)Around the Princeton campus he was a revered, raspy-voiced figure in a well-worn sweater and baggy khakis (or, when he dressed formally, a bow tie). A colleague once described him as “a rumpled Lilliputian who would look as out of place in an Armani suit as he would in a Vera Wang gown.” And during games he was known for an animated coaching style.Every year at his first practice session, Carril made the same speech to his players.“I know about your academic load,” he said. “I know how tough it is to give up the time to play here, but let’s get one thing straight. In my book, there is no such thing as an Ivy League player. When you come out of that locker room and step across that white line, you are basketball players, period.”But he also told his players:“Princeton is a special place with some very special professors. It is something special to be taught by one of them. But you are not special just because you happen to go here.”Pedro José (later known as Peter Joseph) Carril was born on July 10, 1930, in Bethlehem, Pa. His father, an immigrant from Spain, worked for 40 years at the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel and, his son said, never missed a day of work.In high school in Bethlehem, Pete was an all-state basketball player, and at Lafayette, where he played for Butch van Breda Kolff, he was a Little All-American. Then, for 12 years, he coached high school basketball in Pennsylvania while earning a master’s degree in education from Lehigh University in 1959.In the 1966-67 season, he coached Lehigh to an 11-12 record. Then, van Breda Kolff, who was coaching Princeton, left to coach the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association. Princeton considered Bobby Knight and Larry Brown as successors. Instead, it took Carril.He left college coaching after the 1995-96 season.“I’ve been dodging bullets for 30 years,” Carril said. “I find I’m not seeing as much. I used to think the kids felt my coaching was worth five points a game to them. Maybe it was, but I get the sense they don’t feel that way now. I think I make less of a difference.”The next year, he became an assistant coach of the Sacramento Kings of the N.B.A. under Coach Rick Adelman, spending most of his time breaking down game tapes. He remained with the team for most of the next decade, retiring in 2006, but three years later, at 78, he rejoined the Kings as a consultant.“Being an assistant doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “The aggravation and the pain in your stomach and the headaches that you get when you see things that are done wrong or when you lose, or all those problems you have as a head coach, I’d had enough.”With Dan White he wrote “The Smart Take From the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril” (1997). His coaching methods were even the subject of an academic paper by a Fordham University marketing professor, Francis Petit, titled, “What Executives Can Learn From Pete Carril.”Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Carril at Princeton in 2007. “People ask me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’” he once said. “I tell them I don’t.”Aaron Houston for The New York TimesCarril was ambivalent about his success. He once said: “People ask me, ‘How do you want to be remembered?’ I tell them I don’t.”But he will be remembered, even though none of his teams gained the ultimate honor. He brushed that off, too.“Winning a national championship is not something you’re going to see us do at Princeton,” he said in his final years there. “I resigned myself to that years ago. What does it mean, anyway? When I’m dead, maybe two guys will walk past my grave, and one will say to the other: ‘Poor guy. Never won a national championship.’ And I won’t hear a word they say.”Frank Litsky, a longtime sportswriter for The Times, died in 2018. William McDonald contributed reporting. More

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      Uwe Seeler, One of Germany’s Greatest Soccer Players, Dies at 85

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      He led West Germany to the 1966 World Cup, but his teams never won a title. Pele included him on his list of the world’s premier living players.Uwe Seeler, who led West Germany to the 1966 World Cup final as captain of the national team, has died. He was 85.Christian Pletz, a spokesman for Hamburger SV, the club Seeler played for from 1953 to 1972, said on Thursday that Seeler’s family had confirmed the death. The cause was not given. A local newspaper in Norderstedt, north of Hamburg, said he died at his home in that city.Regarded as one of the best German players of all time, Seeler was famous for his overhead kicks and his ability to score goals from the unlikeliest of angles.He was also known for his humility and fairness, and respected for his unwavering loyalty to his hometown club. He received offers from clubs in Spain and Italy, most notably a huge offer from Inter Milan in 1961, but he opted to stay with Hamburg.Seeler scored 445 goals in 519 appearances for Hamburg in the Oberliga and Bundesliga leagues. He remains the team’s all-time high scorer in the Bundesliga, the top league in Germany, with 137 goals.Hamburg, which had been the only remaining team to have played every season in the Bundesliga since the league’s formation in 1963, was relegated to the second division in 2018.Seeler scored 43 goals in 72 games for West Germany, which was the runner-up to England in the 1966 World Cup and won a third-place medal four years later in Mexico. He was a member of the German team for 16 years.“While I was at four World Cups, I’d have liked to have won the title once,” he said. “I didn’t have the luck.”“Still,” he added, “everything was wonderful. I regret nothing.”He was voted German soccer player of the year in 1960, 1964 and 1970.Pele, the Brazilian soccer great, included Seeler in his list of the world’s greatest living players in 2004.“His handling of the ball was perfect, his shot precise, and what really amazed me was his ability to head the ball,” Pele said.In a special supplement to celebrate Seeler’s 80th birthday in 2016, the Hamburg club wrote: “If Uwe Seeler laced up his boots, then the opposing goalkeeper could dress up warmly and preferably put on a second pair of gloves, because Seeler scored from everywhere and in every possible way. Whether overhead kicks, flying headers, shots from distance, volleys, lobs, opportunist strikes — he always found a way to get the ball over the line.”Seeler won the German championship in 1960 and the German Cup in 1963 with Hamburg, but he also endured heartbreak with near misses in the European Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Hamburg lost to Barcelona in the European Cup semifinals in 1961 and to Milan in the Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1968.Seeler, who was born in Hamburg on Nov. 5, 1936, suffered repeated health setbacks in recent years. In May 2020 he underwent an operation to repair a broken hip after a bad fall at home. He lost his hearing in his right ear and had problems with balance after a car accident in 2010. He also had a pacemaker fitted and had to have a tumor removed from his shoulder, the news agency DPA reported.Seeler and his wife, Ilka, were married for more than 60 years. They had three daughters. His grandson Levin Öztunali plays for the Bundesliga club Union Berlin. Seeler’s older brother, Dieter, also played for Hamburg. His father, Erwin, worked on a barge in Hamburg’s port and was also known for playing soccer in that city.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Lennie Rosenbluth, Who Led North Carolina to a Title, Dies at 89

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      With a starting lineup of New Yorkers, the undefeated Tarheels beat a Kansas team led by Wilt Chamberlain in triple overtime to win the 1957 N.C.A.A. championship.Lennie Rosenbluth, the All-America forward who led a North Carolina team with a starting lineup of New Yorkers to an unbeaten season and a thrilling victory over Wilt Chamberlain’s Kansas squad in the 1957 N.C.A.A. basketball tournament championship game, died on Saturday. He was 89.His death was announced by North Carolina’s athletic department, which did not cite the cause or say where he died. He had been living in Chapel Hill, N.C., home to the university’s main campus.Rosenbluth, at 6 feet 5 inches, averaged 28 points per game in the 1956-57 season and beat out Chamberlain for the Helms Foundation College Basketball Player of the Year award. His Tar Heels went 32-0 and capped their season with a 54-53 triple-overtime victory over Kansas, with Rosenbluth scoring 20 points before fouling out late in regulation. Chamberlain, who went on to become one of the National Basketball Association’s most dominant players, was held to 23 points after averaging 30 during the regular season.In the semifinals, Rosenbluth hit two jump shots in the third overtime of North Carolina’s 74-70 victory over Michigan State and finished with 31 points.A native of the Bronx, he played sparingly for the basketball team at James Monroe High School in that borough but made an impressive showing playing basketball at Catskill summer resort hotels, a magnet for leading New York metropolitan area players. He came to the attention of Frank McGuire, who was named the North Carolina coach in 1953 after taking St. John’s, located in Brooklyn at the time, to the N.C.A.A. title game.Rosenbluth was in the vanguard of a player pipeline from New York to North Carolina orchestrated by McGuire.“Basketball was not yet a truly national sport, and the game was still more often than not a city game, played best, it was believed, in New York,” David Halberstam wrote in The New York Times in 1999. “But it was a bad time for the college sport in New York. The point-fixing scandals of the early ’50s had destroyed the sport locally.”McGuire developed a North Carolina team that thrived in a largely Protestant region with a lineup that featured Rosenbluth, who was Jewish, and four Catholic teammates: Tommy Kearns, who had played high school ball at St. Ann’s, in Brooklyn; Pete Brennan, from St. Augustine, also in Brooklyn; Joe Quigg, from St. Francis Prep, in Queens; and Bobby Cunningham, from All Hallows, in the Bronx.Members of the 1957 North Carolina Tar Heels championship team, including Lennie Rosenbluth, center, during a game against the Michigan Wolverines on November 29, 2017.Photo by Peyton Williams/UNC/Getty ImagesRosenbluth averaged 28 points and 8.6 rebounds a game in the Tar Heels’ 1956-57 regular season. His 2,047 career points are the most ever by a North Carolina player who appeared in only three seasons.He was named a second-team All-American by The Associated Press and United Press International for the 1955-56 season, when he was a junior, and a “consensus” All-American for the 1956-57 championship season, meaning that a host of outlets agreed that he was among the top five players in college basketball.He was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors as the sixth player chosen in the 1957 N.B.A. draft. But the Warriors already had the high-scoring Paul Arizin at small forward. Rosenbluth, his backup, averaged only 4.2 points a game in his two pro seasons.Leonard Robert Rosenbluth was born on Jan. 22, 1933, a son of Jack and Rose Rosenbluth. His father worked in the television manufacturing business.After graduating from North Carolina and playing for the Warriors, Rosenbluth taught American history and coached basketball at a high school in Wilson, N.C., east of Raleigh. In a comparison of sorts to his Tar Heel national championship team, he once quipped how “my first year, we had a perfect season again, except we lost every game.”Rosenbluth again taught history and coached high school basketball in Florida for some 35 years. When his first wife, Helen (Oliver) Rosenbluth, known as Pat, was found to have cancer, they returned to Chapel Hill so that she could be treated in the University 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 list of survivors was not immediately available.He was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel and the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in Commack, N.Y., on Long Island.In 2002, the Atlantic Coast Conference selected Rosenbluth for its 50th-anniversary basketball team and named him one of the 50 greatest athletes in the history of the conference. North Carolina retired his No. 10.During the 2006-2007 college basketball season, Michael Jordan and James Worthy, who played on the Tar Heel championship team of 1982, attended an event for North Carolina title teams. They thanked the players who brought North Carolina to national basketball prominence in 1957.As Rosenbluth told it to The New York Times, “They were saying things like, ‘You guys got it all going.’” More

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      Bob Lanier, a Dominant Center of the 1970s and ’80s, Dies at 73

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      Playing for the Detroit Pistons and the Milwaukee Bucks, he held his own against titans of the era like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Willis Reed.Bob Lanier, who as a center for the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks in the 1970s and ’80s parlayed a deft left-handed hook shot, a soft midrange jumper and robust rebounding skills into a Hall of Fame career, died on Tuesday in Phoenix. He was 73.The N.B.A. said he died after a short illness but provided no other details.Lanier, who stood 6-foot-11 and weighed about 250 pounds, excelled in an era of dominant centers like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Nate Thurmond and Wes Unseld.“Guys didn’t change teams as much, so when you were facing the Bulls or the Bucks or New York, you had all these rivalries,” he told NBA.com in 2018. “Lanier against Jabbar! Jabbar against Willis Reed! And then Chamberlain and Artis Gilmore and Bill Walton! You had all these great big men, and the game was played from inside out.”He added: “It was a rougher game, a much more physical game that we played in the ’70s. You could steer people with elbows. They started cutting down on the number of fights by fining people more. Oh, it was a rough ’n’ tumble game.”As a Pistons rookie in the 1970-71 season, Lanier shared time at center with Otto Moore. In his second season, as a full-time starter, he averaged 25.7 points and 14.2 rebounds a game, putting him in the league’s top 10 in both categories.“He understood the small nuances of the game,” Dave Bing, a Pistons teammate and fellow Hall of Famer, said in a video biography of Lanier shown on Fox Sports Detroit in 2012. “He could shoot the 18-to-20-footer as well as any guard. He had a hook shoot — nobody but Kareem had a hook shot like him. He could do anything he wanted to do.”Lanier wore what were believed to be size 22 sneakers. In 1989, however, a representative of Converse disputed that notion, saying that they were in fact size 18 ½. Whatever their actual size, a pair of Lanier’s sneakers, bronzed, is in the collection of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.During nine full seasons with the Pistons, Lanier played in seven All-Star Games. He was elected most valuable player of the 1974 All-Star Game, in which he led all scorers with 24 points.But the Pistons had only four winning seasons during his time with the team and never advanced very far in the playoffs. The roster was often in flux. Coaches came and went. Lanier dealt with knee injuries and other physical setbacks.“It was like a life unfulfilled,” he told Fox Sports Detroit.In early 1980, with the Pistons’ record at 14-40, the team traded Lanier to the Milwaukee Bucks for a younger center, Kent Benson, and a first-round 1980 draft pick. Frustrated by the Pistons’ lack of success, Lanier had asked to be sent to a playoff contender.“I’m kind of relieved, but I’m kind of sad, too,” he told The Detroit Free Press. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of Detroit.”Lanier averaged 22.7 points and 11.8 rebounds a game with the Pistons.Lanier in his college years at St. Bonaventure, resting during a game against Marquette in 1969. A pair of his exceptionally large sneakers is in the collection of the Basketball Hall of Fame.AP PhotoRobert Jerry Lanier Jr. was born on Sept. 10, 1948, in Buffalo to Robert and Nannie Lanier. Young Bob was 6-foot-5 by the time he was a sophomore in high school, and he played well enough there to be wooed by dozens of colleges. He chose St. Bonaventure University in upstate Allegany, N.Y.He was a sensation there, averaging 27.6 points and 15.7 rebounds over three seasons.In 1970, the Bonnies defeated Villanova to win the East Regional finals of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, sending them to the Final Four. But Lanier injured his knee during the game, forcing the Bonnies to face Jacksonville in the national semifinal game without him. St. Bonaventure lost, 91-83.“I didn’t even know at the time I tore my knee up,” Lanier told The Buffalo News in 2007. “But when I ran back down the court and tried to pivot, my leg collapsed. I didn’t know at the time I had torn my M.C.L.”Lanier was still recuperating from knee surgery when the Pistons chose him No. 1 overall in the N.B.A. draft; he was also chosen No. 1 by the New York (now Brooklyn) Nets of the American Basketball Association. He quickly signed with Detroit.Although he had statistically better years with the Pistons, Lanier enjoyed more team success with the Bucks (and also played in one more All-Star Game). Under Coach Don Nelson, the Bucks won 60 games during the 1980-81 season, and they advanced to the Eastern Conference finals in 1982-83 and 1983-84.Lanier was also president of the players’ union, the National Basketball Players Association, and helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement in 1983 that avoided a strike.Lanier at an N.B.A. roundtable discussion before Game 5 of the 2005 finals between the Pistons and the San Antonio Spurs. In retirement, he worked with the N.B.A. as a global ambassador and special assistant to the commissioner.Melissa Majchrzak/NBAE via Getty ImagesEarly in the 1983-84 season, his last as a player, Lanier became angry with Bill Laimbeer, the Pistons’ center, for riling him under the boards at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich. Lanier retaliated with a left hook that leveled Laimbeer and broke his nose.The act not only earned Lanier a $5,000 fine; it also delayed the retirement of his No. 16 jersey by the Pistons until 1993. The Bucks retired his number in late 1984.He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992.In retirement, he owned a marketing firm and worked extensively with the N.B.A. as a global ambassador and special assistant to David Stern, the league’s longtime commissioner, and Adam Silver, his successor. Lanier was also an assistant coach under Nelson with the Golden State Warriors during the 1994-95 season and replaced him as interim coach for the final 37 games of the season after Nelson’s resignation.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Lanier said that after he retired, he was less likely to be recognized by the public than when he was a player. After Shaquille O’Neal, one of the league’s most dominating centers, came along in the early 1990s, people figured he must have been O’Neal’s father, he told NBA.com in 2018.“‘You’re wearing them big shoes,’” he said people would tell him. “I just go along with it. ‘Yeah, I’m Shaq’s dad.’” More

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      Jack Newton, Golfer Whose Career Was Ended by an Accident, Dies at 72

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      He won several tournaments before losing an arm when he walked into the propeller of a small plane. After he recovered, he taught himself to play golf one-handed.Jack Newton, who lost to Tom Watson in a 1975 British Open playoff and tied for second behind Seve Ballesteros at the 1980 Masters before his professional golf career ended in a near-fatal aircraft propeller accident, died on Friday. He was 72.His family said in a statement that Newton, who had been living with Alzheimer’s disease, died from “health complications.” The statement did not say where he died.Newton won the Buick Open on the PGA Tour in 1978 and the Australian Open in 1979, as well as three tournaments in Europe, before his career — and nearly his life — ended when he walked into the propeller of a small plane he was about to board at Sydney airport on July 24, 1983.His right arm was severed, he lost sight in his right eye, and he sustained severe injuries to his abdomen. Doctors gave him only a 50-50 chance of surviving, and he spent nearly two months in intensive care before undergoing a long rehabilitation.Despite his near-death experience, Newton returned to public life, his jovial personality intact. He became a popular television, radio and newspaper golf commentator, a golf-course designer and the chairman of the Jack Newton Junior Golf Foundation, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for up-and-coming players in Australia.Newton with his wife, Jackie, and their children, Clint and Kristie, in 1984. A year earlier, he had lost an arm in an aircraft propeller accident.William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesThe foundation’s annual tournament attracted a who’s who of celebrities and pro golfers in Australia, most of whom dressed up in outlandish costumes as encouraged by Newton.He taught himself to play golf one-handed, swinging the club with his left hand in a right-handed stance. He regularly had scores in the mid-80s for 18 holes — which translates to a handicap of about 12 or 14, one that most able-bodied amateur players would aspire to.Newton turned professional in 1971 on the European Tour and won his first event, the Dutch Open, the next year. A week later, he won a tournament in Fulford, England; in 1974, he won the tour’s match play championship.His playoff loss in the 1975 British Open came after Watson had a few lucky shots. A wire fence kept Watson’s ball in bounds on the eighth hole, and he chipped for an eagle at the 14th to claim the Claret Jug by a shot over Newton.“I always felt that if I came into a major with some good form, then I could be dangerous,” Newton said. “That’s the way I played golf. Once I got my tail up I wasn’t afraid of anybody.”Newton in action during the 1980 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.Augusta National/Getty ImagesAt the 1980 Masters, he finished the tournament tied for second with the American Gibby Gilbert, four strokes behind the 21-year-old Ballesteros of Spain.Gavin Kirkman, the chief executive of PGA of Australia, said that Newton’s “contribution and legacy will live on for many decades to come,” adding that he “was as tough off the course as he was on it.”Newton is survived by his wife, Jackie; two children, Kristie and Clint; and six grandchildren. His daughter was a pro golfer, and his son played rugby in Australia and Britain. More