Mercifully we departed, honor intact, well before dawn. I, for one, was glad to escape, though Wes had sipped a few beyond his limit and was bereft to be going home empty-handed. "Can't we get some bitches?" he kept saying. "Can't we? Can't we?"
The hired friends also seemed glum to see the last of us, or of Marbury, anyway. A few of them gathered by the exit. "Ma Bu Li, Ma Bu Li," they were moaning as we made our way into the benzene-scented night.
···
In the days after our night on the town, something odd happened: Marbury more or less dropped out of sight. He hardly stirred from his quarters. He canceled appointments or simply did not show up in the lobby at the times we'd planned to meet. I got the clear sense he was avoiding me.
Then, after two days of near invisibility, he e-mailed me, asking me to come to his room. When I entered, he was on the phone with a travel agent, booking a hotel room in Beijing for the following night. "Yeah, sure, the Marriott. I'm just looking for the cheapest thing," he said.
He hung up and gave me an unhappy look. "I'm leaving Taiyuan," he said. "I been compromised." Management, he told me, had informed him that his services as a player were no longer required for the regular season. "If they make the playoffs, then they'll use me, is what they said. Otherwise, they want me to help coach."
He was, in other words, being asked to recapitulate his humiliating final season riding the bench for the Knicks. It was hard to understand this "offer" as anything but a ploy to force Marbury to quit the Dragons, which, he told me, was what he had done.
The source of the trouble, said Marbury, was that the team had recently hired a new general manager named Zhang Aijun, who was cleaning shop. "He didn't like me from the beginning," Marbury said. He gazed out the window. A tatter of Hefty bag danced on the wind. "The Knicks tried to hold me hostage," he said, apropos of nothing. "They fined me 400 grand and said that I refused to play! Refused to play? D'Antoni said I wasn't playing! He said that to the world! What I refuse to do is compromise. I understand what's right and what's wrong."
The old outrage wore on for a time and then exhausted itself. Marbury leaned back in his chair.
"It's bullshit," he said. "But you know, the good thing about this situation, at least I know it wasn't anything I did. You know what I've learned in my trials and my errors in the last three years? You can't let anguish derail you. People are gonna say, 'Oh, Stephon went to China. He messed up, and look what happened.' But I know the truth. This is a time of growth right here. This will work out for the best. I'm just gonna go to Beijing and find another team."
But this seemed an impossible ambition. The season started in less than two weeks, and presumably all the contracts for foreign players had been settled months ago. Marbury's position was, I felt, sad. Surprisingly so. Or, rather, it was really surprising to find oneself suddenly sickened with sympathy for an international sports celebrity with more money to his name than many American small towns.
Then again, it's never pleasant to see anyone's dream collapse, and Marbury's dream of China was about the vastest, most ornately bespired cathedral of ambition I'd ever met anyone trying to build. It contained, so far, $10 million of his own personal cash, one year of his life, the adoration of some number of thousands of Chinese people, putative fame and wealth in India and unspecified countries throughout Africa, his own personal city in South Carolina, skyscrapers, and Marbury's left arm, indelibly inscribed ♥ CHINA.
When such an extraordinary volume of wishes comes abruptly to earth, you can't help but feel the ground quiver the tiniest little bit.
There was little left to say. We sat awhile in silence. Then Marbury said he had to call his wife, Tasha. He hadn't yet given her the news, and he wasn't going to now. Their 6-year-old son was sick with impetigo. Tasha was exhausted, and he didn't want to add to her burdens right now. He dialed. Through the receiver, I could hear the fatigue and anxiety in Tasha's voice. "I know it's hard, Boo. I know you're challenged, but it's gonna be all right, I promise," said Marbury, sounding oddly calm and assured for someone whose ultimate hope to redeem himself in the eyes of the world had almost certainly fallen apart.
···
The following day, a platoon of solemn well-wishers gathered at the Taiyuan airport to say good-bye. Marbury posed for a few last photos. He told his fans how sorry he was to leave Shanxi but said little else. In the meantime, the Brave Dragons' GM, Zhang Aijun, was handling the breakup with considerably less aplomb. Since the rupture had become final, Zhang made a spirited public effort to saddle Marbury with blame for the split. What helped poison the contract, Zhang said, was Marbury's insistence on a $30,000 health-insurance policy for himself and his family and, and, his request for a $14 upgrade to the World Trade Hotel.
Before Marbury's plane had touched down in Beijing, ecstasies of Schadenfreude at his failed Chinese experiment broke out on American sports sites: STEPHON MARBURY: WEARING OUT HIS WELCOME IN YET ANOTHER CONTINENT, one headline ran. "Hide yo Vaseline, hide yo webcams," a blogger warned. "Marbury is on his way back to the United States of America."
But as it happened, reports of Stephon Marbury's professional collapse were premature. Within days of his departure from Shanxi, he secured a spot with a fledgling team in Foshan, on China's southern coast. While not a stellar club, Foshan wasn't much worse than the Brave Dragons. With Marbury, who in March made headlines scoring fifty-five points in a single game, Foshan took down Shanxi in both their matchups, helping to scuttle Shanxi's hopes of a top-eight season finish.
Nor did the split with Shanxi deal a mortal blow to Starbury. To cover the $2.2 million promised by the owner of the Brave Dragons, Starbury Corp. briskly liquidated Marbury's $75 million real estate business. They recently engaged Apple's marketing firm to handle the build-out of their shops and, according to Bass, have already started churning out a Chinese line of shoes at a cautious volume of 5,000 pairs per month.
In Marbury's opinion, the shake-up in Taiyuan could not have worked out better. Shortly after I'd returned from my trip, he called from Foshan. His enthusiasm was so forceful, I had to turn down the volume on my phone. "Man, you wouldn't believe it!" he said. "It's like Florida here! Grass! Sun! Blue sky. Did you see what they said about me? How I got exiled out of China? How I lost a second home? Man, they were just waiting for it. But it shall be well. I'm here, and I'm happy. I've landed. Both feet.
Mercifully We Departed
