Can Marbury Save Himself and 'Game?'
What has happened to the kid with the
sparkle in his eyes and the quick, engaging
smile? Where is the 14-year-old Coney
Island prodigy who sat on the floor outside the
Lincoln High School gymnasium eight years ago
and told a reporter that his life's calling was so
obvious to anyone who watched him play?
"I'm a point guard," Stephon Marbury said. "That's
what I was born to play."
His older brothers had elevated the family name in the Brooklyn pantheon
of guys with "game" but had not been blessed with the intrinsic vision, the
instinctive goods. From even before he was the freshman leader of a city
champion, Stephon Marbury was more than a total talent. He was a team
player, a guy who delivered. All he needed then, all he would ever need,
were the complementary players to make him look good.
This was reinforced whenever the
playmaker-in-motion was ready to make his
next move: at Junior's Restaurant on Flatbush
Avenue, upon acceptance of a basketball
scholarship to Georgia Tech. After his first
college season and last amateur game, when
he confided that "I'm ready to run a pro
team." And, finally, when -- on draft night in
the very arena he now, sadly, calls home --
he landed with Minnesota to play with Kevin
Garnett, who was then his good friend.
That night, Marbury smartly contrasted
himself with that year's No. 1 pick, Allen
Iverson. "He's a scorer in a point guard's
body," he said. "I make everyone else
better."
To where has that mind-set, that player,
disappeared? The Marbury who sat at his
dressing stall inside Continental Arena last Saturday night after another
distressing Nets defeat was a sullen young man with evasive, untrusting
eyes. He was dressed in black, except for the logo of the sportswear
company he represents, on his sweatshirt and pants. A large silver crucifix
dangled from his neck.
His team seemed without hope or prayer, headed west for a trip that
begins in Sacramento Tuesday night. "I never lost this much in my life,"
Marbury said.
He sat there, all of 22, certainly young enough to be getting career
counseling, but probably realizing -- subliminally, at least -- that it was too
late. When Marbury needed someone in Minneapolis to advise him to get
over his Garnett-contract envy, he got David Falk offering visions of
grandeur by the turnpike.
Superagent, power broker, Falk was serving three clients at once,
Marbury, Kerry Kittles and Keith Van Horn. Falk wasn't about to tell
Marbury that somewhere along the road to riches he had forgotten whom
he had set out to be. He wasn't going to caution him that he wouldn't find
anyone in New Jersey nearly as good as Garnett. He wasn't going to spell
out the risks of a chaotic franchise in a suburban market that often feels a
thousand miles from New York.
Where were the voices of reason to help Marbury better deal with the
pervasive forces of self-interest? The point guard's mother initially opposed
the trade, but by late Saturday night, Mabel Marbury was loudly giving
people an idea of how Marbury may have veered off track in the first
place. "You are a winner," she said, deliberately within earshot of
reporters. "The other guys on this team don't care."
Marbury apparently did not need the maternal lecture. He was already
distancing himself from this injury-depleted team when the season was
only two games old, the only Net of note who didn't show up to meet
President Clinton at a high school in Newark. In berating his teammates to
the point of alienation, he has too often confused talent with effort. He has
played hard but only to the tune he alone is whistling.
He reportedly lit into his coaches Saturday night, forgetting his own dismal
and distracted performance, in being outclassed by Iverson. The
organization, heavily invested in him, makes excuse after excuse for these
eruptions, hoping for temporary relief to avoid the unfortunate round of
firings to come.
If this unfolding drama sounds chillingly familiar, it is because we already
know of a mercurial but relentlessly unhappy player who was cut so much
slack that he finally snapped and went too far in taking retaliatory matters
into his own hands. Sad but true: Latrell Sprewell's Golden State Warriors
have much in common with Stephon Marbury's New Jersey Nets.
It is one thing to direct one's team, and quite another to run everyone's life.
Marbury forced this trade, and now he acts like a victim of it. Here is the
point the Nets better make to Marbury, and soon: He is as much a victim in
New Jersey as Sprewell was out West. |
