The Post-NBA Life of Tyrone Nesby

April 27th, 2009

I love to read when I’m on the toilet. Love it. Can barely go without it, in fact. Unfortunately, I don’t own many books. So I tend to read the same ones over and over again. True to form, I am currently mid-way through a repeat reading of “When Nothing Else Matters” by Michael Leahy, a exposé-type book about Michael Jordan’s comeback with the Wizards. It’s quite good fun, particularly if the Wizards-era Jordan was the only Jordan era that you were around to see, as was the case for me. I’m particularly enjoying reading about all the other characters in the story, like Doug Collins, Tim Grover, Jerry Stackhouse, Rip Hamilton, Tyronn Lue, Chris Whitney, Kwame Brown (who, it’s fair to say, struggles for good news throughout), Juan Dixon, Bobby Simmons, Courtney Alexander and others. But I am especially mindful of one name that I’d forgotten about, that of Tyrone Nesby, the former defensive specialist and hater of passing that had a few years of coming off NBA benches after picking up a surprisingly generous contract from the Clippers of all teams. Because of this, I decided to look up what T-Nes was doing these days. The last I had heard, he’d become a rapper, but that was about two years ago, now, so I looked again. After the Wizards’ 2001/02 season, Nesby’s $9 million contract had run out, and the Wizards looked elsewhere. No other NBA team seemed to want him, and Nesby hit the European trail, signing with Larisa in Greece and averaging 17.8 points per game. He then went to 2003 summer league with the New York Knicks, but didn’t get a full contract, and went back to Europe the following year visiting both Italy (13.4 ppg for Varese) and Serbia (21.1 ppg for Relfex Beograd). […]