Dick Versace recruited Carl Maniscalco as a 13-year-old eighth-grader to play basketball for him at Gordon Tech, then recruited him again to join him at Jackson Community College in Michigan and finally once more to finish his college career at Bradley University in Peoria when Versace landed the head coaching job there.
It started a 50-year bond between the two men, a player and coach a generation apart who battled sometimes in those early years but, in the process, forged a friendship that endured even as Versace’s career led him to the NBA and Maniscalco’s to the trading floors of LaSalle Street.
