Fathers & Sons & Sports (33 page)

“Stephon, why don’t you start acting like a freshman, which is what you are.”

“I ain’t heard Coach say that yet,” comes Stephon’s swift reply.

It’s no secret around Lincoln where Stephon gets his head for business. Last summer, when I was at the B/C camp in Gettysburg, I ran into Stephon’s father, Donald Marbury. “You the guy writing about Lincoln?” he asked me one day. “And you haven’t even interviewed Mr. Lincoln Basketball himself?” He shook my hand warmly, and when I told him how much I
wanted to speak with him, a sly smile began to play across his creased and handsome face. “Well, in that case I expect there will be some gratuities for me and my family.” I must have looked surprised, because the smile disappeared and Mr. Marbury snapped angrily, “Oh, come on now! Bobby Hartstein didn’t have a winning season until the Marburys started going there. If it weren’t for me and my boys, Lincoln wouldn’t have any notoriety. It wouldn’t even be worth writing about!”

I had been warned that dealing with Mr. Marbury might have its complications. Years ago, when he first began showing up at Lincoln to watch his son Eric play, he would stand at the sidelines yelling at Hartstein, “Put my son in! That’s why you’re losing!” So the school’s athletic director soon assigned a teacher to sit next to Mr. Marbury in the bleachers in order to prevent him from cursing at the ref. He was sometimes one obscenity shy of drawing a technical foul. Whatever predisposition Mr. Marbury showed for angry outbursts, however, has only grown over the years, as Eric, then Donnie, and finally Norman tried to make it—if not to the NBA, then at least through graduation day at a four-year school—only to fall short of those aspirations. Now Mr. Marbury was down to his last basketball-playing son, and whether it came from his belief in Stephon’s marketability or his fear of being haunted by yet another set of abandoned dreams, Mr. Marbury seemed ready to cash in. “Unfortunately, my first three boys didn’t reach the ultimate plateau, but now I got a chance with Stephon,” he said to me in Pennsylvania. “He might
be the first Lincoln player to go high Division One, you know. And if you want information about that, I expect that you will have the money to pay for it.”

Warned or not, I didn’t actually expect Mr. Marbury to ask me for hard cash, and all I could think to say at the time was that most journalists considered it unethical to pay people for information; that it could cast doubt on the credibility of their reporting. Mr. Marbury shrugged dismissively. “I’m not like all them other Coney Island guys—too stupid to know the value of what they’re sitting on.” He tapped his brow, “This is a business—ain’t nothing but. And if I don’t receive satisfaction, I will take my business somewhere else. I always say, a wise man has his wisdom to protect him. A fool has his God.” A hostile silence fell between us, and we quickly parted company.

Toward the end of the summer, I ran into Mr. Marbury again. Once more I asked to interview him, and again he stated his terms: I was free to write about Stephon, but if I wanted the Marburys’ exclusive story, I was going to have to make him an offer. “You think Patrick Ewing or Michael Jordan gave away their stories for nothing?” He scoffed. “Maybe I should get a ghostwriter and tell my own story. That’s my share of the glory, you know.” Again I raised my concern about paying people for their cooperation. This time Mr. Marbury started laughing at me. “Is that right!” he said, smirking and folding his arms across his chest. “I guess that’s why I saw you buying all that stuff for Corey and Russell.” I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was
talking about. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said, his eyes enlarging. “At the 7-Eleven in Gettysburg: I saw you buying them slushies!” He leaned toward me, his voice bitterly sarcastic. “And now I suppose you want me to think you did it because you’re just a nice guy.
Oh, come on!”

So that was it: Mr. Marbury had confused me with a college coach and the occasional snacks I bought the players with those under-the-table deals he had read about.

The coaches who recruited the Marbury boys over the years, have said that Donald Marbury “just won’t stop dining out on his sons’ talent;” that he “thinks he knows the game better than he does;” and if he keeps it up he will “get himself into trouble with the NCAA.” As for Stephon, the coaches are starting to complain that he’s just like his father—a player looking to “get over,” to take advantage of any situation. In certain circles, the Marburys are considered the avatars of all that is corrupt about high school basketball. “They’ve been taught that you rape ’em, you get whatever you can,” lamented one summer league coach (who tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit Stephon for his own team), “Everybody wants a deal. No one plays for the love of the game anymore.” At the time Mr. Marbury and I had our confrontation about the slushies, I couldn’t have agreed more.

But now, having spent several months with Stephon, I begin to wonder how he and his father are supposed to act. The entire basketball establishment has been trying to buy Stephon for years: summer league teams like the Gauchos pay his way to
tournaments around the country (last summer found him as far away as Arizona); street agents take Stephon into the Knicks’ and Nets’ locker rooms for chats with the pros; basketball camps give him a bountiful supply of T-shirts, trophies, sneakers, bags, and caps; and coaches on every level constantly lay on hands, hoping to win his affection. (This, of course, is just a reprise of how the coaches treated Stephon’s three older brothers—until they encountered academic difficulties, at which point the coaches abruptly withdrew their affection and largess.) And lately, in the coaches’ efforts to appropriate Stephon, they have been trying to buy his father. Last year a summer coach for whom Stephon occasionally played apparently found Mr. Marbury some part-time work; and the reason I ran into him at the B/C camp last summer is that administrators, hoping to enroll Stephon, had given his father a summer coaching job. So when Stephon tells Russell that coaches “take care of the players and their families,” he knows whereof he speaks.

Mr. Marbury thinks that Stephon and I are playing the same game; and in the paradigm in which we are operation, I suppose we are. When I first met Stephon, he asked me for seventy-five cents for the school’s juice machine. When he found out I planned to write a book about the Lincoln team, he announced. “Every day I’m hitting you up. I’m just warning you.” Hartstein shuddered whenever he overheard his young star making such demands and muttered to himself about how difficult it was to deal with the Marbury clan, but Stephon operated
as his father did—without apology. He would stand in front of me, blocking my path, waiting for me to fork it over. And I would. At the time it didn’t seem like much—seventy-five cents; big deal. But now, having watched the recruiters at work—“Twenty dollars, Christmas money” Jim Boeheim would say. “Big dear”—I’m beginning to feel not unlike a college coach myself. At any rate, Mr. Marbury is holding out for a deal. I can see why he thinks I’m getting over on him. And now, as I drive down Mermaid Avenue with the players in my car and watch in my rearview mirror as Stephon puts away the second Big Mac I just bought him, I wonder whether there isn’t some way I can meet his father’s demands after all.

he first game our oldest son played was for the Greenwich Village Little League T-ball division. I offered to coach Bo, then five, and we were assigned to a team called the Aphrodisia Royals. (Aphrodisia was the name of a spice shop in the Village; the Royals was the name of a team in decline in the AL Central.) Even at that early age, Bo was a fanatic. He used to run around his tiny bedroom, playing imaginary baseball
games while providing some unique color commentary: “Now batting, Jim Rice. Jim likes to drink water.”

Now it was time for his first real game. We played on the asphalt playground off Carmine Street. I placed Bo in the spot occupied by the pitcher, and because this was T-ball, he didn’t actually pitch. The first batter grounded the ball back to Bo, who—not trusting the first baseman—ran to first to get the force. Then Bo proceeded to run around the bases with a slight limp, pumping his right fist, just as Kirk Gibson had done after homering off Dennis Eckersley in Game One of the 1988 World Series, two and a half years before.

When Bo finished his trip around the bases, I gently explained that he couldn’t do that for every out, and that he might want to wait for a more appropriate time to be so demonstrative. He seemed disappointed, but he understood. He even made a few more plays without imitating his heroes.

Eventually, we moved from New York City to the suburbs. Bo grew up to be quite a good ballplayer—a pitcher and an infielder with power. Even better, he never showboated again. Coaches liked him because he understood the code of the game; if a pitcher hit one of his teammates, he would buzz the pitcher the next time he came up. Umpires liked him because he didn’t argue over balls and strikes. Every once in a while, he would ask me to tell him the story of how he imitated Kirk Gibson in T-ball.

Toward the end of his senior season in high school, he was co-captain of the team, and an ace, and he was facing his
archrivals in the opening round of the postseason playoffs. He didn’t have great stuff, but he battled, and the game went into extra innings.

He led off in the bottom of the first extra frame. A right-handed hitter, he waited on an off-speed pitch, swung, and sent a towering drive over the head of the right fielder. Never the fastest runner, he plowed the basepaths between first and second, second and third, He slid into third—safe.

As he got up and brushed himself off, he glanced over at me in the stands. Then, ever so slightly, he pumped his right fist and smiled.

He scored the winning run when the next batter singled.

Acknowledgments

t took many fathers and sons—and daughters—to create this book, not just the ones who have immortalized their filial and parental relationships in these stories. We’d like to thank Chris Raymond for the original inspiration for this book and Bill Vourvoulias and Gueorgui Milkov for their tireless and successful hunt for the best, richest, and most varied expressions of the spirit of the universal story of fathers, sons, and sports. We’re indebted to Andy Omel for the cover design, Gabriel
Ruegg for the interior design, Sarah Parvis and Linda Ng for their photo research, Jaime Lowe and R. D. Rosen for their editorial direction, and John Glenn for his oversight of the entire production.

Finally, we’d like to express our gratitude to the following authors, publications, and publishers for their permission to print or reprint copyrighted material:

“Worlds Apart” by Tom Friend is reprinted here by permission of the author and
ESPN The Magazine
, copyright © 2005.

“A Father’s Small Hope” by Paul Solotaroff is reprinted here by permission of the author and originally appeared in
Men’s Journal
, copyright © 2006.

An excerpt from
Little League Confidential
by William Geist is reprinted here with the permission of Scribner, in imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. Copyright © 1992, 1997 by William Geist. All rights reserved.

An excerpt from
Senior Year: A Father, A Son, and High School Basketball
by Dan Shaughnessy is reprinted here by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 2007 by Dan Shaughnessy. All rights reserved.

An excerpt from
It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium
by John Ed Bradley is reprinted here by permission of the author and ESPN Books. Copyright © 2007 by John Ed Bradley.

An excerpt from
After Jackie
by Cal Fussman is reprinted here by permission of the author and ESPN Books. Copyright © 2007 by Cal Fussman.

An excerpt from
Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich
by Mark Kriegel is used with the permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2007 by Mark Kriegel. All rights reserved.

“Someone You Want to Play With” is printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 by Jeff Bradley.

“What Got You Where You Are” is printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 by Mike Golic.

“Flip Turn,” by Ron Reagan was originally published in
Esquire
as “My Father’s Memories,” copyright © 2003, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

“My Dad, the Bookie” by Michael J. Agovino is reprinted from
GQ
by permission of the author, copyright © 2002.

“Holy Ground” by Wright Thompson is reprinted here by permission of the author and
ESPN.com
, copyright © 2007.

“Sporting Chance” is printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 2009 by Lew Schneider.

“Dirty Moves” by James Brown is reprinted here by permission of the author and originally appeared in the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
, copyright © 2005.

“Mailer vs. Mailer” by John Buffalo Mailer originally appeared in
Stop Smiling
, copyright © 2005, was reprinted by Nation Books in
The Big Empty
, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

An excerpt from
A River Runs Through It
appears courtesy of the estate of Norman Maclean and by permission of the University of Chicago Press. Copyright © 1976 by Norman Maclean.

An excerpt from
Fathers Playing Catch With Sons
by Donald Hall is reprinted here by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Copyright © 1984 by Donald Hall.

“Tangled Up in Blue” by Peter Richmond was originally published in
GQ
and is reprinted here by permission of Condé Nast Publications. Copyright © 1992 by Condé Nast Publications.

An excerpt from
Friday Night Lights
by H. G. Bissinger is reprinted here by permission of the author and Da Capo Press. Copyright © 1990 by H. G. Bissinger.

An excerpt from
Blood Horses
by John Jeremiah Sullivan is reprinted here by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Copyright © 2004 by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

“A Father’s Gift” is reprinted here by permission of the author. Copyright © 2002 by Jeremy Schaap.

An excerpt from
Kings Gambit: A Son, a Father and the World’s Most Dangerous Game
by Paul Hoffman is reprinted here by permission of Hyperion. Copyright © 2007 by Paul Hoffman.

An excerpt from
The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams
by Darcy Frey is reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © 1994 by Darcy Frey. All rights reserved.

“Bo Knows” is printed by permission of the author. Copyright © 2008 by Steve Wulf.