|
Allanfan20
Posts: 35947
Alba Posts: 50
Joined: 1/16/2004
Member: #542
USA
|
Posted by Nalod:
Marbury if courtside would stick his foot out and trip Q.
He really should not attend unless he can lay low in a box.
Sitting courtside is only trying to rub his ass in Dolans face.
Tuesday, December 16th 2008, 4:00 AM
Chernin/AP
New York Knicks' Stephon Marbury watches the Knicks' NBA basketball game against the Milwaukee Bucks from the bench at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Williams/News
Brooklyn basketball star, Stephon Marbury, has a bright future ahead of him - even if he doesn't play ball. 1995.
This is how the ball always bounces.
This time it's The Kid from Coney who grows up to become The Kid from Money.
Whenever I read or hear about Stephon Marbury these days, about his $20.9 million-a-year contract, charges of being a malcontent, his teammates bad-mouthing him, my mind boomerangs back to the Coney Island projects, circa 1995.
Ray Garvey, an ex-cop who used to run the Brooklyn PAL, and who'd coached Marbury in his early teens, introduced me to the quiet, respectful kid on an icy February morning two days before Marbury's 18th birthday.
Marbury bounded out of the Mermaid Houses, hands jammed in his Negro Leagues jacket, sporting a Spike Lee Joint hat, and led us into a fenced projects basketball court on W. 31st St. which Marbury called "The Garden."
He called it that because this is where The Kid from Coney spun his childhood dreams of one day playing for his hometown Knicks in legendary Madison Square Garden.
Here, in "The Garden," Marbury would arrive alone on the court every morning, shooting hoops from every inch of the court. Scenarios spun in his young head, many of them ending with him swishing a championship game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer in MSG, 20,000 adoring fans leaping to their feet, chanting his name.
"He was the nicest, most respectful, most talented kid I ever met in PAL," says Garvey. "I coached him for a few years starting when he was 13. I don't take any credit for his talent. I remember when the cops from the 61st Precinct played the under-16s from the Coney projects, Stephon was 13 and none of the adults could come close to covering the kid. He mesmerized us. He was also really well-mannered."
Hoops weren't the only things being shot in Coney in those days. Marbury had seen a lot of pals die by the daily gunfire of the Coney projects. "I was in grammar school when my first friend was shot to death here," he told me. "That makes you learn young that you aren't gonna live forever. Then friends just seemed to keep dropping around me. I would come out and shoot hoops from 8 a.m. to midnight sometimes. But the minute I heard a shot, even far off, I went inside."
Marbury told me he was lucky because he had a mother and father, brothers and sister, who made him focus on the positive.
"I have a negative attitude toward negativity," he said as we walked through the projects. "Thinking positive keeps you on the plus side."
Although a lot of his friends were dead or in jail, he talked about the ones who were in college, raising families as transit workers, barbers, one as a cop.
Then he said something that I remembered over the years: "I don't try to be someone I'm not. I'm just a kid from Coney who works real hard at exploiting the gift God gave me. But I'm still the kid from here, the one everybody calls X because my middle name is Xavier."
Marbury led me that day to a bench near 2940 W. 31st St., where he and pals with names like Slice, Shake, Duane, Josey, Stacey, Shawn, Corey and Kamel sat through grammar school and high school years, rapping to chicks, ducking crossfire and choosing up sides for hoop games in "The Garden."
"My mom is my role model," he said, sitting on that bench. "She taught me how to stop being a sore loser."
Recently, Marbury spent the first part of the Knicks season sitting on a different bench in Madison Square Garden, labeled a sore loser, selfish, a malcontent, bad-mouthed by teammates like Quentin Richardson and management alike, booed by fans, and finally banned from games, and you just wonder where it all went wrong.
In the middle of it all come reports that the kid from the last stop on the F line is dealing with all this by buying a $40 million private jet.
If true, nothing wrong with that.
But it brought to mind what Marbury told me back in 1995: "The only shoes I have to fill are Stephon Marbury's. I just hope they fit right, remember where they come from. If I remember who I am and where I'm from, if I don't let TV and the spotlight get in my way, I'll play my game and do okay. ... Whenever I get too big for my own good, I'm gonna come right back here to remind myself I'm one of those kids."
A few years ago I said hello to Marbury in the Knicks dressing room. I didn't expect him to remember me, but I found it odd that he also didn't remember Ray Garvey, the PAL cop who'd coached him for several years in "The Garden."
"I ran into him a few years ago," Garvey said. "He didn't have a clue who I was and I'm larger than life in personality and size. Maybe it was too much fame and fortune too young, but it's like he purposely erased a lot of memories. Especially the ones when he was that sweet Kid from Coney."
The 17-year-old kid who told me in February 1995, "I'm convinced that the only difference between being raised in a Park Ave. co-op and a Coney Island project is attitude. A negative attitude in either place will make you a loser."
Swish.
dhamill@nydailynews.com How sad. “Whenever I’m about to do something, I think ‘Would an idiot do that?’ and if they would, I do NOT do that thing.”- Dwight Schrute
|
12/16/2008 10:03 AM
.jpg)
