On refusing to play: "I refused to play? After y'all said to the whole world y'all not playing me and embarrass me on opening night? Have me sitting there in front of my hometown? They exiled me!"
On YouTube-inspired reports of his insanity: "I was just having a good time, playing, yelling, screaming, enjoying my- self, and people took from that, 'Marbury's crazy. He's losing his mind.'"
On the Vaseline-eating thing, specifically: "I had a sore throat. My friend's grandmother said to take Vaseline. I did, and it went away."
Crucified is the word Marbury uses to describe his treatment. And you have to wonder how you could possibly resist developing a Christ complex if you were born to a family who had, for decades, been waiting in faith for a magical child to come along and work miracles from way outside the three-point line, to make more money than God, and to shepherd his loved ones out of Coney Island and into comfortable homes in the suburbs.
Marbury, a recently born-again Christian, saw his resurrection as imminent in China, from which his name and brand would spread across the globe, to India, then through unspecified African nations, then possibly, back to the United States. When I asked him what anyone would do with so much money, he described a corporate vision inspired by the Rapture, not the Robb Report.
"I want to build my own city," he said. The settlement, he explained, would be built on a 4,000-acre cotton farm in South Carolina he had his eye on. The citizens would be "all my family members. They gonna have their own businesses, companies that will feed off of my company. I want to build my own Walmart-style store. I want to build my own hospital and school system. I'll take all the people where I'm from in Coney Island and tell them to leave everything they got inside their homes and move into our new homes. We'll have all the people sign up to be Starbury employees before they move. This is my vision of what I want to do if this thing really pops off the way I think it will if we continue to stay on the path."
···
And yet, so far, Marbury's days in Taiyuan seemed curiously devoid of the meetings and factory tours you might expect of someone building a billion-dollar empire. Save a single one-on-one workout and a few treadmill sessions, Marbury didn't seem all that concerned with getting in shape. So while the Chinese members of the Brave Dragons were off playing exhibition matches and training twice a day, the preseason stretch in Marbury's entourage was a purgatorial study in petit-opulent torpor: usually emerging from quarters near the two o'clock hour for a meal at McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Subway, or Kentucky Fried Chicken; then to the World Trade Hotel for another bruising massage; then dinner at said American franchises.
The only break in the monotony came one evening when the American members of the Brave Dragons coaching staff mounted a plan to go out on the town. In the lobby, I waited for the others with a young guy named Wes, a former player for Oregon State, who was picking up a few bucks as a freelance assistant coach of the Brave Dragons junior squad.
I asked him how the team was looking. "They got this one kid who's good," he said. "You don't understand. They keep these motherfuckers in a dorm and make them lift weights three, four hours a day."
If the Chinese were such rigorous cultivators of talent, I asked him, why had China produced only one international basketball star, the pituitary marvel Yao Ming?
"This next generation, they'll probably have a few more. You don't know. They're probably breeding the motherfuckers from petri dishes."
We were soon joined by Patrick Sellers, a former UConn coach who'd come to Taiyuan after being implicated in a recruiting scandal. "I got thrown under the bus, and here I am. It's weird here and everything, but man, I think it's a gold mine."
At last Marbury came down, and--by coincidence--we ran into one of the Brave Dragons' chief sponsors, "Brother Wong," an elfin man in Gucci loafers. Brother Wong, who had supposedly amassed a fortune as a builder of local roads, was very pleased to see Marbury. He kept laying hands on Marbury's arms and shoulders and seemed to want very badly to climb into the point guard's lap. He insisted we go immediately to his favorite karaoke bar.
Marbury and I caught a lift in Brother Wong's chauffeur-driven Audi SUV. "You starting to see the Starbury movement," Marbury said. "Brother Wong's like Mark Cuban without being the owner. He wants to buy the team." Wong, said Marbury, was well connected with China's Communist Party, pointing out large yellow O's in the corners of the Audi's windshield, evidently emblems of officialdom. Then, at Marbury's prompting, Brother Wong hit a switch on the Audi's dashboard and a siren on the roof blared and wailed. "Police! Police!" cried Brother Wong, laughing madly. Traffic scurried from our path, and the Audi made for the karaoke bar at a desperate speed.
No one sang at the karaoke bar, a place the term bar is inadequate to describe. It was a fantastic labyrinth of mirrored hallways, astrobe with neon accents and red and blue LEDs, generally creating the effect of inhabiting a giant article of robot lingerie. In a room twice the size of my New York apartment, a rotund older woman dressed in a plaid field-hockey skirt led in a cadre of young women and briskly directed them, singly and in pairs, to sit beside us on the couch. The girls wore an unhookerly mufti of jeans or miniskirts or T-shirts or Annie Hall - style sweaters and, as far as I could tell, were not quite prostitutes but merely young women who drew a paycheck to ply lonely men with beer and grapes, and pinch them on the knee. The only hitch in the distribution came when the field-hockey lady ushered in a girl resembling an Asian Julia Child whose eyes happened to be crossed. There was no immediate clamor for her company. She stood before the room for a painful length of time. Finally, Marbury, who'd been obliviously drinking Sprite and BlackBerrying through the whole escort-disbursement procedure, looked up and invited the big girl to his area of the sectional, a quiet act of valor that put the rest of us to shame.
I was partnered with a girl in an ivory body sock who knew enough English to claim her name was Apple. Further attempts at conversation foundered. Apple, who seemed to have mistaken me for a basketball pro from the American mean streets, periodically flashed what looked like gang signs at me and put her mouth to my ear to murmur, "I love basketball." At one point, Brother Wong grew concerned that things between Apple and me were not progressing at a proper clip. He crossed the room and reached out, as though for a handshake. Then he pulled the old grade-school stunt of clapping my palm to the girl's breast and shrieking with laughter.
