Feature

Stephon Vs. the Curse

Years ago, when he was still playing, I wrote a magazine piece about the Doctor. We got on, and in exchange for a copy of Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, Erving had given me a pair of his size 16 shoes. I still have them. All three of my children have taken turns walking in Dr. J's shoes. So now there was nothing else to do but offer some small sympathy to a guy who had provided so much pleasure simply by playing ball. In light of all that had happened, it was an unavoidable thought -- if there really was a Curse of the Nets, even Julius Erving hadn't fully escaped it.

But the Doctor, always an uplifting presence, cut through that. "You know, man," he said suddenly, with a big smile. "In my heart, I'll always be a Net. The Nets will always be my team."

It was something to think about, driving out on Ocean Parkway to Lincoln High School, where one day in the late eighties, basketball coach Bob Hartstein first saw Stephon Marbury play a full-court game. Hartstein had coached Marbury's brothers Norman, Don, and Eric, all stars for the Lincoln Railsplitters; but Stephon was something else.

"I remember it like yesterday," Hartstein says, sitting in his office at Lincoln, the same school my mother (class of '38) attended. "Stephon was little then, 13 or 14, maybe five eight, 138 pounds. But you could tell this was a player like no other. Even now it kind of takes your breath away."

After winning three city titles (including one with Stephon in 1995), Hartstein no longer coaches, but still follows Marbury, watching "almost every game." Hartstein says it's rough seeing the Nets get crunched. Only a couple nights before, Marbury had scored 50, but the Nets had lost to the Lakers. "It's bad because Steph really, really hates to lose. When he was 10, he'd sit on the bench watching one of his brothers. If we lost, he'd be hysterical. It must kill him now."

At Hartstein's suggestion, I drove over to 31st Street between Surf and Mermaid, to "the Garden," which is what the Marburys called the courts near the project where Steph grew up. Out in Roosevelt, there's a similar court, with a sign: this is the place where julius erving learned to play the game of basketball. "The Garden," being the property of the NYCHA, also had a sign. It said: this park closes at dusk, violators subject to arrest and prosecution.

It was snowing a little, so there wasn't anyone around, the courts empty until a kid in his early teens trudged through, his sneaker treads disturbing the unbroken layer of white. This was where the Marburys played, all right, the kid said matter-of-factly. In fact, Stephon's cousin Sebastian Telfair, currently the Lincoln point guard, still lives upstairs at Surfside Gardens, Steph's old building. Telfair was something else, the kid said, "as good as Steph." Asked if Telfair would wind up on the Nets along with his famous relative, the kid said, "Hope not. One's enough."