PARADISE ISLAND NASSAU, Bahamas -- Michigan State point guard Tum Tum Nairn grew up in a single-room house with plywood floors and no running water in a section of Nassau that inspires little hope and even less dreaming. He left that life almost a decade ago.
He traveled from south Florida to Kansas and finally to East Lansing before he finally found a home. On Wednesday night, he was back in the thicket of his early childhood, surrounded by his father, his great-grandmother, a cocoon of friends, and a mass of fans.
All of them squeezed into the carpeted hallway in a swanky convention center that adjoins one of the Western Hemisphere’s most iconic blue-water, white-beach locales – Atlantis Resort.