It would be a hard enough sell trying to portray Reggie Theus as a guy who never had it easy if he hadn't picked this location: poolside at the Palms Hotel, with women strolling by in bikinis and hip-hop blaring from the speakers.
This is the image you probably already had of Theus, the pretty boy who always had things given to him, who glided from the basketball court to the television set and now has been handed an NBA coaching job after only two years as a college head coach (which is one season fewer than he spent playing Coach Fuller on "Hang Time").
He removes his shirt and leans back on a silver lounge chair to soak up the late afternoon sunlight on a fall afternoon, the day before the Kings play their final exhibition game in Las Vegas. Just to top it off, here comes the waitress, delivering an ahi wrap sandwich.
"People probably think that this is the way I've lived my whole life," Theus says. They don't know that his youth was spent cleaning floors, not sucking on a silver spoon. They don't know that he never got to share his success with his father, who died when Theus was in high school. They don't know even that even this latest remarkable turn in his life -- being named head coach of the Sacramento Kings -- was tempered, coming in the same summer he buried his brother, a Vietnam veteran who was never the same after he came back from the war...
