Bradley’s Versace Is Bringing Back Euphoria to Peoria

Bob Knight, John Thompson and other celebrity coaches did not proceed to the NCAA basketball tournament’s sweet little 16, but Dean Smith and Denny Crum did, as did Eddie Sutton, and Jimmy V from N.C. State, and Tark the Shark, and also the Brown boys, Dale and Larry, no relation.

Among the missing, alas, was the college game’s coach of the year, Dick Versace. The guy whose hairdo looks like George Washington’s powdered wig. The guy whose expansive vocabulary sometimes turns him into Dick Verbose. The guy whose Bradley Braves were 32-2 before Crum’s Louisville team bumped them off in the second round.

Before this tournament continues, what Dick Versace did should get proper due. Friends, he really had them playing in Peoria.

Bradley looked so good this season that one would not be completely astonished to hear the coach’s name mentioned when certain job openings come along, pro or college. Already this season Versace found himself denying that he was chatting with the University of Pittsburgh, and no doubt he will be rumored going elsewhere before summer’s through.

Publicly, Versace is giving no indication that he will spend the next winter anywhere but in the heart of Illinois. He likes Peoria. His children have been educated there. Peoria has given the world Richard Pryor and Big John Robinson’s barbecue joint and Bradley basketball, and for that alone it deserves heartfelt praise.

“It’s a nice little town,” Versace said. “The only people with a different image of it are adults who were alive in Nixonian days. He was the one who coined the ‘See if it’ll play in Peoria’ phrase. Some adults may have a negative connotation of Peoria because of that.”

After a season of national ranking and a rare unbeaten record in Missouri Valley Conference play, could Versace recruit players outside Illinois?

“No, probably not,” he said.

The man is nothing if not candid. It is too bad his team had to run into Louisville so soon, because the country’s basketball lovers probably would have gotten a kick out of the Bradley coach, had he stormed the Final Four.

Funny thing is, Versace this season was not the wild and crazy guy he used to be. Bradley opponents could tell stories in unison of how the coach with the curly white hair had provoked crowds with his colorful behavior on the sidelines. More than once, enemy fans wore Versace-style wigs while taunting him from the stands.

Rumor has had it for quite some time, rebutted on all sides, that Versace was told to tone down his act. There was much doubt as recently as a year ago how much longer the coach would be able to keep his job.

Success affects attitudes, though, and the only way Versace will not return to Bradley now is if he leaves by his own choice. The job he did this season just won him national coach-of-the-year honors from the United States Basketball Writers Assn., and Bradley suddenly looms as large in the collegiate hoop world as it did back in the Chet Walker days.

Versace said that there were problems to iron out when he arrived at Bradley. Chief among them was discipline.

“Shot selection was any good shot you could get off,” he said. “And they’d skip practice. Routinely skip practice.

“A guy’d be absent and I’d say: ‘You’re off this team.’ He’d say: ‘I just missed one.’ I’d say: ‘Hey, you don’t miss any. You’re not even late. ‘ “

Bradley, which used to bring home NIT championship flags regularly, had fallen on hard times in its favorite game. Then it turned to Versace, who had not played college basketball and whose coaching background was mostly in high school ball.

“When I got here, I wanted two things to happen,” Versace said. “No. 1, I wanted the country to know where we were. And No. 2, I wanted everybody to know who was in charge.

“I attacked our anonymity. I knew I wasn’t going to come here the first year and win, you know, 100 games. And I knew I wasn’t going to win the next year if I didn’t attract some players. If you go into a place, you’ve got to make sure they’ve at least heard of you. I mean, even if you’re a two-headed monster, they sometimes want to meet you, just to see what you’re like.

“So, I played that game. It’s a risky game. But I came in here with a three-year contract, and I looked at the mess and said, ‘Hey, I can’t straighten this mess out--you know, normally. ‘ I might have been the first non-Bradley graduate who ever coached here. So, they weren’t going to give me a 10-year contract. They weren’t going to give me all the time in the world to win.”

Versace went looking for good kids. He hit the Chicago schools and streets.

He also kept in touch with ex-prospects who went somewhere else, such as Jim Les, the superb play-making guard who spent some time at Cleveland State, and Massive Mike Williams, the strapping center who started off at the University of Cincinnati. Those two seniors supplied the leadership to this year’s squad.

Versace says he understands that young men often make decisions at age 18 that they regret by 20.

“I used to call it the contemplative period, but there’s less and less of that in America’s youth today, mostly because of the electronic tranquilizer. Instead of reading and talking and thinking, too many kids are glued to the TV.”

This comes from a guy whose mother wrote the book that the TV show “The Flying Nun” was based upon.

“You know, last summer our team went to Italy together, and it created a bond for us,” he said. “We’d sit around in outdoor cafes and talk to one another. Politics, religion, philosophy, sports--anything and everything. Whatever television they had over there was in Italian, so we talked and learned about each other instead of watching the damned tube.

“I used to have professors who would discuss mythology or Shakespeare or whatever and then we’d go have a glass of wine together and discuss it some more. Some other professor would grade you on a 100-point scale, give you a quiz that was worth 10 points and grade you down if you couldn’t prove your ability to memorize material.

“Hey, I didn’t go to college to get a gold star from some teacher who doesn’t care if you just found out your twin brother has cancer. I thought college was for learning, understanding, not for memorizing facts. I wanted people to talk to me, to know me. I still do.”

People learned a little more about Dick Versace this season. What he does next is something the world will have to learn later.