“I was young, very young. We lived in Salt Lake City at the time. It was during the playoffs. The Lakers won the game and closed the series against the Jazz. I told my father that I wanted to meet Kobe Bryant. He suggested that I wait for him in the tunnel, where the players are coming out, because he would pass by there. He also said that Kobe could speak Italian and if I said something to him in Italian maybe I would get his attention. I did. He stopped for a few minutes and took me on his knees. We didn’t talk about basketball, but about life. He asked me how I was doing at school, if I had good grades, he asked me if I listened to my parents’ advice. It was small talk, but I will carry it with me forever.” Nico Mannion will never forget that conversation with one of his great heroes. From 2008 to 2010, the Lakers played three consecutive series against the Jazz and won them all. Nico was really young, he wasn’t a player yet, maybe he was starting to dream of being one. “I never had doubts about basketball, but as a child I tried everything, I tried football, baseball, soccer and of course, given my mother’s career, volleyball. But I chose basketball because it was more fun. When you’re a little kid you don’t think about becoming a professional, you just think about having fun. I had a lot of fun.”
There is no doubt that Nico Mannion has the right genes. His grandfather Terry Mannion was a well-regarded high school basketball coach in the Las Vegas area. Terry’s three sons all became athletes. John Mannion played football at Brigham Young University; Greg Mannion played baseball at Cal-State Fullerton and in the minor leagues. And then there is Pace Mannion, the thinnest of the three, but at the end of the development process, with his 201 centimeters also the tallest.
Pace Mannion attended Chaparral High School, in Las Vegas. He was a versatile guard, capable of handling the ball and shooting. He was so promising that he received 200 scholarship offers to play college ball. He chose Utah because it was closest to home, albeit in relative terms, and his father could go see him often. He moved to Salt Lake City, struggled during his first year, but in his second year he joined four seniors, including two future NBA players, Danny Vranes and Tom Chambers, who would become an All-Star in Seattle and Phoenix. Utah was ranked as high as 7th in the country. Vranes and Chambers went on to the NBA, Pace stayed. As a senior, Utah won the conference tournament and eliminated Illinois and UCLA in the NCAA Tournament and was stopped only by North Carolina State, which would go on to win the NCAA title.
In 1983, Pace Mannion was selected at number 43 by the Golden State Warriors (exactly what would happen to Nico almost forty years later). He lasted a year, then was signed by Utah, resulting in a return to Salt Lake City. He stayed two years with the Utah Jazz and then other experiences followed, in New Jersey, Milwaukee, Detroit. It was then, close to the age of 30, that he decided to finish his career in Europe. He stayed for 12 seasons: Cantù was the first stop, Treviso the second, then others followed, and he ended up in Siena and Cefalù. By then, he was an Italian by marriage, the one with the national volleyball team player, Gaia Bianchi. In 1991, Cantù won the Korac Cup by beating Real Madrid in the final series: they won by two in Spain, by two at the Pianella. Mannion scored 35 points. If they gave out MVP awards for that final, they would have awarded it to him. Alberto Tonut would later join him among his teammates in Cantù. In fact, Stefano Tonut was born in Cantù in 1993.
It was in 2001, when Pace was clearly at the end of his career, in Siena, that Nico Mannion was born. Little Nico would have inherited – they say – his mother’s strong will and his father’s basketball talent. Not the size, because he is smaller; not the speed, because he is way faster. Nico Mannion is a sprinter loaned to basketball. “I’m a high IQ point guard, that gets his teammates involved and can also score when needed,” he says. But he has never seen Pace play the game: “I know something, what the coaches, the fans told me; so, my perception of him is not complete. I’ve never seen him. Today he is my biggest critic and at the same time my biggest fan,” Nico says.
Nico Mannion 2️⃣2️⃣ 👀#APlayersProgram | #BearDown pic.twitter.com/zluuq2tdWT
— Arizona Basketball (@ArizonaMBB) November 11, 2019
As a player Nico Mannion was impressive straight away. “I liked Steve Nash, but not just him. I looked at all the players a bit. My father and I watched the games together and he pointed out to me what was happening on the court, why did somebody pass the ball, why did someone else shoot? If there is help then the right pass is this or that, and I was very young. I was seven, eight years old, I liked it, and we did it often,” he recalls. When the Mannions returned to the United States, Nico was three years old, they settled first in Salt Lake City, then in Arizona. And it was there, in Arizona, after meeting Kobe Bryant, that Nico became a player. “But every summer I returned to Italy. The relatives on my mother’s side didn’t know English so I spoke Italian with them for six weeks every summer. And my mother spoke to me in Italian so even in America I felt quite Italian. Italian culture has always been there in my house, my mother cooked Italian. For example, at dinner, in America everyone eats alone, separately. We don’t. We all ate together, as a family, as we do in Italy, no cellphones allowed. In Italy it is normal, but in America it is not. I have always been Italian,” he notes.
At Pinnacle High School, thanks to his videogame numbers, he became a star, recruited, just like Pace experienced before him, by all the colleges. He could go to Utah and revive the memory of his father. But he chose Arizona. “It was close to home but that’s not the reason why I chose Arizona, even if it was a favorable coincidence. But I always felt comfortable there. As soon as I took the official visit, I knew it was the right place to go to college. It was a wonderful year, in general, you live with your teammates, you go to classes with them, you are very connected with the environment, the staff, you feel part of a family and I am still in touch with my former teammates.” It was the year of Covid. The season didn’t end. Mannion played 32 games, scored the game-winning basket against Pepperdine, averaging 14.0 points and 5.3 assists per game. There were three other future NBA players with him: Zeke Nnaji (Denver), Josh Green (now in Charlotte) and Christian Koloko (Toronto). At the end of that season, Nico declared for the NBA draft. The Warriors chose him, at number 48, the team of the decade in the NBA. “Too soon? I try not to look back, I never do. I believe everything happens for a reason,” he says. And in any case that decision allowed him to play for one year alongside generational players in the Bay area.
“The best thing was seeing how certain players work every day. Everyone can watch the games, but seeing how they work every day from when they get to the gym to when they leave makes you understand why Steph Curry is one of the greatest players of all time; why Klay Thompson is one of the greatest shooters in the world; why Draymond Green is a champion,” he says. At the end of that season, Mannion wore the Azzurri jersey at the Belgrade Pre-Olympic tournament, helping the team achieve one of the greatest feats it ever achieved. They beat the mighty Serbia on the road and qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games. Nico was there, because years earlier he had chosen to play for Italy.
Nico Mannion (@niccolomannion) gets selected 48th overall by the @warriors!
— NBA (@NBA) November 19, 2020
2020 #NBADraft presented by State Farm on ESPN pic.twitter.com/rS7Y4MR3XW
“I had been called up to a training camp with the American Under-16 national team. I was one of the last two players cut. The following year Italy called me, and the Americans also called me again. But at that point I had decided: I would play for Italy. Shortly thereafter I also made my debut with the senior national team,” he recalls. Before that there was a 42-point explosive game against Russia, in Montenegro. Thanks to that cut and that decision, Mannion led the Azzurri to the win in Belgrade, a special memory for everybody involved. “It was one of the greatest moments that I experienced as a player. I didn’t think I would get so excited. Seeing the coaches, my teammates, the fans who were there, our families, I got emotional. Winning, together with them, was fantastic.”
After the Olympics, he landed to Italy, first stop Bologna: “In general I like playing in Europe. For me it’s not like a regular American player who maybe feel lost. I immediately felt at ease. Over these three years there have been many ups and downs, as is normal in life, but I think I have matured a lot and now I am happy to have this opportunity in Milan. In Bologna I had a tough time, especially the first year because of some physical problems that I had. In Baskonia, it was a “low” period in my career, but in Varese I found not so much shape and rhythm, but the joy of playing in that type of atmosphere, the coaching, the teammates, it was fun, and this gave me this great opportunity to come here, in Milan.”
For two years, in Bologna, he was Olimpia’s opponent in the championship series. “Olimpia is a club with a great history. You see it immediately as soon as you enter the team’s headquarters and pass through all the trophies Olimpia has won. They are always very competitive. I met them twice in the final and they always won. Then they repeated the following year too. It’s this winning culture that strikes me. Then obviously the organization is about seriousness, organized, everyone pays attention to details. Learning from a coach like Ettore Messina is what I want to do.”
