On the second story of the strip mall, a few doors down from the Asian massage parlor and the bail bonds service, above the unisex salon and fashion boutique, Lourawls Nairn Jr. was shown where his American dream would begin.

Welcome to South Florida Preparatory Christian Academy, circa 2008.

Inside the classrooms -- a loose term, just like the American dream -- televisions worked as teachers and teachers served as onlookers. There was no instruction, unless watching a movie or learning music from a teacher with no instruments counts. Guitars and keyboards weren't the only things missing. For a faith-based school advertising an online education, there was a disturbing lack of computers. And for a school billed as a budding basketball power in Florida, the missing gym was tough to ignore.

Nairn, 13, had just arrived in America, leaving his family behind in the Bahamas. He was a blender of emotions. Hope. Confusion. Horror.

Then there was the house.

Nairn's new home was about a half mile from the strip mall. There were three bedrooms. There was one bathroom. There were 20 roommates -- his new South Florida Prep teammates.

The next two and half years would be spent falling asleep with tear-streaked cheeks and waking up at 4 a.m. to a booming voice in the night. Four-mile runs were expected before school. Those shouts continued through the day. The man who sold the dream to Nairn would turn out to be one-part school principal, one-part coach and all-parts dictator. He moved Nairn and his teammates out of the three-bedroom home, into a duplex and ultimately to a house even worse than the first.

Nairn saw his American dream dashed.

Then he made his own.

"I mean, I'm a kid from the ghetto," Lourawls "Tum Tum" Nairn Jr. says. "You're telling me you're giving me a chance to play basketball in America? C'mon now."

Michigan State freshman point guard Lourawls "Tum Tum" Nairn Jr.

Nairn, now 20, is sitting wearing $100 shoes, enjoying the fruits of a $22,000 college scholarship and looking out over a 14,000-seat arena. The Michigan State freshman -- a 5-foot-10 point guard who plays to the beat of a snare drum -- will take the floor in the Spartans' Final Four meeting with Duke on Saturday. A starter in the last 15 games, he's been a key figure in MSU's ascent from the NCAA tournament bubble to this moment, the grandest stage in the game, Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

Not bad for a guy who was knee-deep in the funk of poverty as a child in the Bahamas.

None of this would have happened, though, if history hadn't taken a hard left turn at the corner of Oakland Park Blvd. & 27th Ave. in Fort Lauderdale. That's where South Florida Prep -- a storefront of deceit -- sat overlooking a busy four-lane road.

"I remember it all," Nairn says, his voice sweet like chardonnay but crackling on emphasis. "It was bad. Just bad. I never liked one moment of being there."

At the same time ...

"There was a reason I went there. There was a reason God let me experience that."

The experience started with a chance meeting.

And a man named Julius Brown.

Early in 2008, while diploma-mill schools were popping up across the United States -- chasing athletics over academics and heavily reliant on government vouchers -- Nairn was transitioning from liking track to loving basketball.

He was in his hometown of Nassau, a capitol city of a quarter-million people, nearly three-quarters the population of the Bahamas.

Basketball culture on the island is that of wanting, but not knowing how. Kids like Nairn shot baskets in the street, hearing the thud of crates on poles instead of swishes through nets. American coaches who recruit young Bahamans will tell you that what the players lack in coaching and fine-tuning, they make up for in athleticism and will.

Nairn knew he was good and wanted to be discovered. A blur among teammates and opponents, his skills were catching up with his speed. Surely someone would notice.

American scouts and high school coaches aren't foreign on the island. Wherever there's talent, they'll find it. That's why Nairn would participate in showcase tournaments -- bonanzas for American basketball reps to eye talent in a singular marketplace.

It was at one of these showcases that Nairn heard an American coach pull a shifty point guard aside and offer advice on driving and dishing. He explained that an easy drop off pass to the open post would be available. Nairn listened from outside the conversation, tucking away the tip. The other player didn't. He ignored the suggestion and was subbed out.

In came Nairn.

First play ...

Drive.

Draw.

Dish.

Layup.

"Were you listening to me when I was talking?" the American later said to Nairn.

"Yeah."

Julius Brown found his point guard.

Back in Florida, Brown operated a two-year-old private high school bankrolled by a woefully unregulated state voucher program. In Nairn, he saw a future Division I player who could lead his program.

Right there -- right on the spot -- Brown asked Nairn if he'd like to play basketball at South Florida Preparatory Christian Academy.

Sold.

"I was a kid just looking to find a way out. I was like, 'Yeah, let's go. I'm ready," Nairn remembers. "I wanted to go right then and there."

It wasn't that easy.

Nairn cried and complained every night -- "Please, please let me go." -- before his parents, Lourawls Nairn Sr. and Monalisa McKinney, relented. It was a difficult call. Young Lourawls -- nicknamed "Tum Tum" based on a character in the 1992 film "3 Ninjas" -- would have to go by himself.

He had never been on an airplane, never left the island, never been away from his family.

Tum Tum boarded a flight to Miami, 180 miles north-northeast from Nassau. It was a short flight and, in his mind, a shorter leap of faith.

The gory details of South Florida Preparatory Christian Academy are gone, deleted thanks to a mandate that all complaints against Florida state schools, along with their inspection records, have a retention date of three years, according to a Florida Department of Education spokesperson. Then they're destroyed.

Among the scraps left in the DOE's database is an Oct. 28, 2009 letter informing Julius Brown of complaints filed against his school. Among them: Not meeting state and local health, safety and welfare laws, along with codes and rules of building safety. Failed food service inspections were also among the complaints.

South Florida Prep filed a change of address with the DOE in November 2012. The school has not filed its required annual survey this year, according to a DOE spokesperson, who added, "We're not sure if they're still in business." A call to the only known phone number for the school was said to be a wrong number.

Calls to two attorneys who represented Brown in past civil cases filed in Broward County, the home of South Florida Prep, went unreturned.

Brown's most recent whereabouts were unable to be located for this story.

One of Brown's few public comments on record came in July 2011 to WFTV, a TV news station in Florida. Asked about his school being deemed ineligible for state money because of a failed a safety inspection, Brown dismissed the question, saying the ineligibility stemmed from disgruntled employees.

As far as athletics go, for its brief existence, South Florida Prep operated as a non-approved member of the Florida High School Athletic Association. The status allowed for new schools seeking membership to play approved state high schools. Under FHSAA rules, a school hoping to join could compete for two years before the association would visit the campus and check its progress toward compliance requirements, according to a spokesperson.

Visiting South Florida Prep one day, FHSAA membership specialist Seth Polansky recalls watching from his car as children and teenagers shuffled from one storefront to another, walking a school hallway that was actually the second floor terrace of a strip mall.

"No indications of an actual school," Polansky remembers.

Between the investigation of the school, South Florida Prep's inability to keep up with its proof of insurance and, most importantly, its continued lack of accreditation by any recognized state agency, the FHSAA suspended the school from competing against other Florida high schools.

That was the least of the problems.

Gus Garcia-Roberts, now an investigative reporter for Newsday, reported on pop-up, voucher-fed Florida schools over six months in 2011 for the Miami New Times. Among his findings related to South Florida Prep were complaints filed with the DOE -- those since destroyed -- of physical abuse by Brown, including paddling of younger students, and the total lack of a curriculum.

Looking back on his coverage of numerous sham schools during the period, Garcia-Roberts remembers Brown as a "huckster" and a "hustler" and says South Florida Prep "led the path as far dysfunction" among the schools taking advantage of state vouchers.

Nairn has told the story of how, during Miami's warm summer months, Brown would take him and some of the other boys to NFL games at Dolphin Stadium. Their tickets were for the parking lot. There, Nairn hawked unlicensed T-shirts to fans passing by. After the games, once the parking lot cleared, he and his teammates handed their billfolds over to Brown, not knowing where the money would go.

The same could be said for the over $2 million in DOE vouchers and $236,000 in state-run tax-credit scholarships that flowed into South Florida Prep, according to Garcia-Roberts' reporting.

That money didn't translate to the basketball court. South Florida Prep didn't have one. Brown's team played all road games. Practices were held outside -- in a park, under the sun, every day. Locals sometimes rode bikes across the concrete court, through the middle of practice, guns in-hand.

Then there were the games.

Michigan State guard Lourawls Nairn Jr. and the Spartans will face Duke in the national semifinals on Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

"If I'd play bad, (Brown would) yell at me, cuss me out, make me feel like I wasn't worth s---," Nairn says.

He stares at the court at Michigan State's Breslin Center. The shoes, the scholarship and the sprawling arena disappear.

Just like that, Nairn is back in Fort Lauderdale.

"All I wanted to do was leave, go home, but I didn't know what to do," he says. "I didn't know if I was good enough that, if I went back to the Bahamas, I'd get another opportunity to come back. I wanted to stay until I could make sure enough people seen me -- then I could get another chance."

Nairn never told. Back in the Bahamas, mom and dad gladly believed Tum Tum was living out his dream. In a sense, he was. By his second year at South Florida Prep, the pinball point guard was gaining attention for his hiccup-quick speed and ball control. He was a player -- a real prospect. That was only inside the 94 feet of the basketball court, though. Outside the lines, he was in hell.

The breaking point came at Christmas 2010. Nairn packed a small bag of belongings and went to Nassau for the holiday.

After December 25 came and went, he sat clutching his bag in one hand and a plane ticket in the other. His mother, Monalisa, called to him.

"Tum Tum, your ride to the airport is almost here. Get in the shower."

Red-eyed and trembling, the 16-year-old emerged to tell mom and dad he wasn't returning to Florida.

Monalisa yelled back, "What do you mean you're not going back? Nah, I'm not letting you stay here. There's nothing here for you."

Finally, Tum Tum told his parents about Brown, about the verbal abuse, about the living conditions, about his reality in Fort Lauderdale.

Dad was furious. Mom was devastated.

"Man, that was hard," Nairn says. "I broke down. I just couldn't go back there."

So he didn't. Nairn unpacked.

Five months passed.

Both the dream and the nightmare were over.

Unlike the frolicking tourists who account for more than 60 percent of the Bahamas' GDP, Nairn didn't live under the cloudlessness of travel brochures. He stayed in a one-bedroom house on Fleming Street in Nassau with his parents, siblings, grandparents and cousins. There was no air conditioning, but there were rats.

As of 2011, Nairn figured that would be his home until it collapsed or was condemned.

Then a coach from Arlington Country Day School called Nairn and asked him to attend a showcase in Freeport, a city on the island of Grand Bahama. Arlington Country Day is a perennial power in Florida boy's prep basketball and the staff wondered what had become of that roadrunner from South Florida Prep. So Nairn took off for Freeport.

The coaches from Arlington Country Day never showed. Nairn was crushed.

He played anyway.

Kyle Lindsted, a head coach from Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kansas -- a real school with a real curriculum and a legitimate basketball program -- sat courtside watching the game. Half paying attention, the thump-thump-thump-thump of Tum Tum stole his focus.

"I'd never seen the ball go that fast up and down the floor in my entire life," he remembers. "I got right up and started walking around asking, 'Who is that kid's mother?'"

Monalisa instantly liked Lindsted. Tum Tum did, too, but both were leery of false prophets selling fake fantasies. Memories of South Florida Prep lingered like Bahaman humidity.

But there wasn't much place for reluctance. Tum Tum could either give it a shot or be another nameless face on Fleming Street.

A flight was booked to Kansas.

"Tum Tum has always been a really special kid," says Matt Suther, a longtime friend of Lindsted and founder of MOKAN Elite, the Kansas-based AAU team that landed Nairn when he enrolled at Sunrise Christian. "I have three young sons and I pray that one day they grew up and have -- not even from a basketball standpoint -- just his faith, his work ethic and his demeanor."

Suther and Lindsted speak of Nairn with a sort of awe-filled admiration.

Lourawls "Tum Tum" Nairn Jr., front right, spent 2012-2014 at Sunrise Christian Academy in Bel Aire, Kansas.

Linsted:

"We ended up as kindred spirits. Once we started talking, we didn't stop. We still haven't, four years later."

Suther: "Once you gain his trust, he's so open and caring and loving -- off the charts."

Joining the Sunrise team as a sophomore, Nairn averaged seven points and seven assists per game while taking his game from 100 mph to 70. Outside the gym, he had to pry his endearing personality back open after the experiences of Fort Lauderdale. He wondered who these Midwestern coaches were and what they wanted from him.

"Until that point, he had only been used for basketball," Lindsted says.

Then came the first dreadful performance of Nairn's first season. It came in a key tournament championship game in California. He looked as lost as, well, a Bahaman in Kansas. Slinging his head down, Nairn burst into tears in the locker room. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder.

"You played a bad game and that's OK," Lindsted said. "I love ya, man. I'm proud of you. Don't ever worry about that. It was just a bad game."

With that, Sunrise lived up to its name.

"That was the point where I was like, 'This is a different place, Tum,'" Nairn remembers.

He went on to average 9.4 point and 8.0 assists as a junior and 17.6 and 5.7 as a senior. In the classroom, he caught up from the back of the pack. Lindsted says he was "an academic wreck" when he arrived.

"I basically didn't do actual schoolwork until I was 16 years old," Nairn says. "It was work. So much work. Crazy work."

By his senior year, Nairn was taking trigonometry and pulling Bs.

"He probably closed that gap faster than most, if not faster than anybody would have," Suther says. "I don't know how. It's just, the light is never off for him. I don't know if the kid sleeps."

On Sept. 26, 2013, Lourawls "Tum Tum" Nairn Jr. accepted a scholarship offer to Michigan State University.

"I got put in a fire early," Tum Tum says.

Now walking on the embers, Nairn will lead his Spartans onto the floor against Duke on Saturday.

Having spent his childhood chasing tomorrows, he made it today.

His dream.

Postscript: According to Garcia-Roberts' reporting, in March 2011, Brown and partners incorporated Sunrise College Preparatory School, a new school in Orlando teaching grades kindergarten through 12. Sunrise College Preparatory School, not to be confused with Sunrise Christian Academy in Kansas, has never requested for a school code in order to submit an annual survey for registration with the Florida DOE. Two phone numbers listed online for Sunrise Prep go nowhere. One is disconnected. The other bounces off an automated recording.

Brendan F. Quinn covers college basketball for MLive Media Group. Follow him on Twitter or contact him at bquinn@mlive.com