LEXINGTON, Ky. — If you think a front-office soap opera and the specter of LeBron James having him fired on a whim will rattle Frank Vogel, the improbable new head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, you’ve probably never heard his backstory.



All it took for Vogel to give up his playing career at Division III Juniata College, load everything he owned into a rickety Ford Fiesta and clickity-clack his way from Huntingdon, Pa., to the University of Kentucky in the summer of 1994 was a total rejection from Rick Pitino. Vogel wanted to become a coach, and the kid from South Jersey could not imagine a better cradle for that career than at the mecca of college basketball, studying under a man who’d previously been the coach of the New York Knicks. First, he wrote Pitino a pile of letters asking if he could walk on as a Wildcat or be a student manager or, hell, clean toilets if that’s what it took to be in the same gym with a future Hall of Famer. Pitino never...