Tyrone Nesby

"There was so much traveling, she never got a chance to settle down and strive after her dreams," Nesby says. It's true. After dominating the Western Athletic Conference as a power forward for the UNLV basketball team in the late '90s (averaging over 15 points and 5.5 rebounds per game in both of his years as a Runnin' Rebel), Nesby went on to Los Angeles, where he stepped foot in an NBA arena for the first time in his life, as part of the '98-'99 LA Clippers squad. In one game during his rookie year, Nesby put up 30 points on the Seattle Supersonics, a feat many NBA veterans cannot claim. Then he was off to Washington, D.C., where he played alongside Michael Jordan in the 2000-2001 season. There was more playing time offered to Nesby overseas, and so he went to Greece, Italy and then Lithuania, where his team won the Union League European Basketball Championships last year, thanks in large part to Nesby's 14 points and 3 rebounds per game. All the while his wife, Luanna, often followed Tyrone, supporting him as he pursued that dream which germinated as a young boy in Southern Illinois and then blossomed at UNLV, where he and Luanna met.

Now that he's lived his dream, and made some good money doing so, he's back in Las Vegas, where he and his wife, a labor and delivery nurse at UMC, can start focusing on her goals.

Which is not to say Nesby is done with basketball. Or dreams. He is now the co-owner of an incipient ABA (American Basketball Association) franchise, the Las Vegas Venom, which starts its inaugural season at 7 p.m. on November 11, against the Hollywood Fame, at Spring Valley High School. And he is also at work blooming a dream that began during his college days, which is to run an inclusive basketball center under his Tyrone Nesby Foundation. In his vision it will be a place where kids in this town can exhaust their energy in a safe, productive manner, and a place to ignite their own dreams.