I know I've spent a lot of time in the last 7 years making fun of Stephon Marbury and enjoying his misfortunes, ever since he signed with David Falk. When he demanded that stupid trade to the Nets, who then imploded, I had a hard time dealing with the feelings of disappointment and betrayal. My disintegrating relationship with a girl who grew up right next to the Meadowlands didn't help. For six years I attributed my feelings of inadequacy and frustration from that time towards the New York Giants because they beat the Vikings 41-0 in a title game, but sometimes I wonder if that break-up might have had something to do with that too. Then I always stuff it all back in the Chest of Denial I keep at the foot of my bed and remind myself the Giants just suck.
But anyways, Marbury let then NBA super-agent David Falk convince him that if Marbury played in New York, Falk could make him a huge star, a major media figure, and land him scads of endorsement deals. There were reasons why this sounded like a good idea. Growing up in Coney Island, Marbury was a Brooklyn playground superstar, which is no small achievement playing on the courts that produced Earl the Goat and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Marbury even back in his rookie year was so unbelievably talented, and could pull off so many spectacular passes and had so much in his bag of tricks that he was an absolute treasure in a star-driven league. Point guards backed off at the start of games, respecting his ankle-breaking moves off the dribble, so he'd open every game with a three pointer like, "Fine, I'll beat you from back here." In the lane he had a whole collection of moves to get an unblockable shot over a 7 foot center, or he'd throw no look passes after breaking down the defense, or just curl mid-air passes around the guys who challenged him. It all came out of his Brooklyn playground style that made this Coney Island kid's nickname "Mr. Starbury". Actually the character of Jesus Shuttlesworth in Spike Lee's homage to basketball He Got Game is based on Stephon Marbury.
He was known for his incredible passing and the way he linked up with team-mates, especially the gentle, perfectly lofted alley-oops to Kevin Garnett, or when Tom Gugliotta started running back-door plays where Googs threw alley-oops for a cutting Marbury. His ad campaign with And 1 was fantastic, billboards of broken ankles set with pins blaming the challenge of defending Stephon Marbury, and a commercial of him dribbling through a crowded subway car when it stops at a station, until somebody flips him a quarter. It was totally street, and perfect for a kid from the projects who was all about the game, not a self-promoting egomaniac who gets out of a limo in a $1000 Italian suit.
Then Falk pushed through a trade to New Jersey, which screwed the Timberwolves forever, but that's another story. Marbury and the Nets never got it together, and then Marbury ended their center's career when he landed on him in a pile-up. Then their center shot his chauffeur, but that's another story. And in the middle of this turmoil the Nets discovered why Stephon Marbury's high school coach actually tried to talk him out of moving back to New York, and why his coach at Georgia Tech encouraged him to enter the draft after a year. His relatives all hover around him and they're all batshit crazy. His mother hanging around the locker room yelling at the other players that they play was letting her son down by playing like shit really didn't go over too well.
About this time, Marbury figured out he wasn't getting a lot of endorsement deals. This was supposed to be a big reason he wanted to play in the greater New York market, because in a big media market he'd be raking in the endorsement cash and be a big star. He specifically said nobody was beating down Kevin Garnett's door to play in a small market like Minnesota, but nobody was beating down his door in NYC either. Because unfortunately as it turned out Marbury had no charisma and was completely unintelligible when he spoke. Meanwhile Kevin Garnett's charisma and positive image got Nike to create the Fun Police ad campaign for him, which I still think was their best basketball ad besides the Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson ads during the lockout, and all were about putting love of the game over fame and money.
Then Marbury shipped out by the Nets, who were sick of his mother and his brothers, and of watching him score 35 points and lose in front of 4,000 fans. When he got to Phoenix, Stephon became the first to figure out David Falk's mystique was pretty much down to having Michael Jordan as a client, and once Jordan retired, his influence waned. Marbury canned him, played well with the ascendant Suns, but his bitchy personality and his attempts to start a feud in the media with his former best friend, Garnett, meant nobody liked him, and he wasn't the biggest star on his team, which was part of his stated reason for leaving Minnesota, specifically that Garnett made more money than him. He wasn't even getting into all-star games when he was the best point guard in the conference, his popularity was so unrepresentative of his talent.
So then got himself a trade back to New York with the Knicks. For a while, he was a superstar on a really horrid team. Then finally even he realized that the Knicks were hopeless, with huge amounts of money tied up against the salary cap in longterm contracts for mediocre players. They couldn't improve through free agency, had no trade-bait but him, and were drafting stiffs. Something finally seemed to click with him that after ten years, he'd gone from a 19-year old kid who looked like he and his best friend would be contending for championships and MVP trophies together (Garnett won the MVP award in 2004) to a 30-year old with a kid (raised by his ex-girlfriend he impregnated back in high school) about to hit her teenage years, looking at probably finishing out his career on a losing team. His attitude seems to have changed, and he identified himself as part of the cause of the Knicks' malaise.
So now he's done something I actually think is pretty interesting. He's promoting his own line of shoes (part of being an NBA superstar is to have your own shoe) but instead of $150 Nikes that people get shot over, the top model in his line sells for $15. He's putting his name on something that kids who grew up like him can actually wear without costing their parents a week's wages. This is the first sign since he left Minnesota of the Marbury who made me a rabid Timberwolves fan back in the fall of 1996, the guy who had some sense of the world around him, who cared more about the game than his image. It may be he's just carving out the last money-making niche he has left, but I'd rather believe there really was a decent guy underneath the head trip he went on when he signed with David Falk, even though it's sad to wonder what would have happened if he'd kept his head on straight back in '99 and the Wolves had kept a core of star players to build around, and Marbury had stayed away from the hangers-on he had back in New York.
And those are my brief thoughts on the case of Stephon Marbury. And seriously, He Got Game is a fantastic movie.
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