USA TODAY International Edition
Nairn ‘greatest teammate ever’
Guard has key role for Michigan State
EAST LANSING, Mich. – Had he enjoyed celebrating by himself, Lourawls “Tum Tum” Nairn would have have been a track athlete.
Initially, Nairn figured he’d train for the Olympics and use his athletic prowess to climb out of poverty. But the first time the Nassau, Bahamas, native broke the tape in a sprint, he looked around and realized that winning big is no fun when you’re doing it alone.
Then he turned to basketball. “When I found out I could be part of a team, part of something bigger where I needed other people to succeed, when I understood what camaraderie was, I couldn’t wait,” says Nairn, who got his nickname from The Three Ninjas, a culthit movie from the early 1990s.
Now the three-time team captain is an integral piece to a Michigan State team favored to make the 2018 Final Four. The No. 2 Spartans, who meet No. 1 Duke on Tuesday in the first game of the Champions Classic in Chicago, will win big this season provided they get clutch play from sophomore sensation Miles Bridges and steady minutes from Nick Ward and Josh Langford.
But the key to another national title under Tom Izzo might be Nairn, a senior who started 30 games last season and led the Big Ten in assist-to-turnover ratio. Though he will never be an offensive threat in the way Bridges is — and he came off the bench in MSU’s first game behind sophomore guard Cassius Winston — Nairn is making a push to graduate as the best leader in the Izzo era, a distinction typically awarded to former All-Americans Mateen Cleaves and Draymond Green.
Green spent the summer before Nairn’s freshman season working out in East Lansing and was struck by how Nairn pushed his teammates from Day 1 — and how they respected him immediately.
“You saw that (leadership quality) all the time,” Green says. “You saw it in workouts in the gym when he was the one pushing everybody. He’s the one bringing all the energy to the workout ... then you also saw it in the weight room. It’s things like that that may seem so small, but those things go a long way. Those things are the difference between being good and great . ... It was special to watch.”
Kyle Lindsted, a Wichita State assistant who coached Nairn at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kan., says Nairn’s magnetic personality and obvious passion make him the ultimate point guard: Everyone wants to play hard for him.
Says Bridges, Nairn’s best friend, “The first time I was around Tum, he was so loud and crazy, I thought he was pretty weird, honestly.”
Besides being “maybe the greatest teammate ever,” Izzo says Nairn’s value is found off the floor. Acknowledging that Nairn is “a good player, not a great player,” he most appreciates that because of Nairn, “Our locker room is always stable.”
A great leader, according to Nairn, is someone who’s extremely self-disciplined and self-motivated. “You have to be a servant first,” says Nairn, who plans to be a pastor whenever his basketball career is over. “And you have to meet people where they are — you can’t talk to different people with different skills the same way.”
This explains his light-handed touch with newcomers vs. his intense approach with upperclassmen.
But above all else, he believes it’s a leader’s job to show everyone that the key to success is just be yourself. It’s a lesson he learned at Sunrise Christian Academy as a sophomore.
Nairn struggled with consistency then. One day, he’d come into the weight room hyped, chatting and laughing with teammates, spreading his infectious enthusiasm. The next day he’d be quiet and keep to himself, sapping energy from the room. His play on the floor reflected whatever he was feeling that day until finally Lindsted pulled him aside.
“He was our leader, our alpha, our mouthpiece,” Lindsted says. “Some days he’d come in and be quiet because he was working so hard on his individual game. He wanted so badly to be great. But I told him, ‘You don’t have to be cool and get buckets — just be the guy we need.’ ”
That conversation, Nairn says, changed his life. He finally understood that he didn’t have to score 20 a night to be valuable. So as a freshman at Michigan State, when he was thrust into a starting role for the last 16 games of the season, he didn’t flinch.
“A lot of people don’t understand that you’re most valuable when you’re yourself,” Nairn says.
“My freshman year, I wasn’t trying to be anybody else because that wouldn’t have been valuable. Can you imagine if I had tried to shoot 15 times a game? That would not have been effective. I wasn’t intimidated because I understood who I was.”
One thing is missing from Nairn’s résumé: a national championship. When Nairn called Izzo to commit, he told the Hall of Fame coach he planned to leave East Lansing with a national title. To do that this season, he’ll have to continue to be comfortable using what he says is the greatest lesson Nairn has learned under Izzo: how to lead your best friends.
Calling out your best friends when their work ethic isn’t up to snuff is no picnic, Nairn says. But it’s worth it, because that leads to group celebrations instead of individual achievement.
And that’s all Nairn ever wanted.