Stephon Marbury eating Vaseline, with the world consuming the debacle over video, might end up defining his career, but it won’t define him as a person.
Unfortunately, it’s a tragic story lost to people preferring to hurl jokes on top of a messy situation instead of acknowledging the gravity of it all.
The former All-Everything talent, who spent the twilight of his NBA career in a free fall, live-streamed himself crying and eating Vaseline in the summer of 2009. At the time, it appeared to signal the end of everything Starbury-related.
It made the rounds on social media platforms at the time, also resulting in pundits using the odd video to make several unrelated points, but it’s hard to look back at the incident today and do nothing but cringe and feel a level of compassion for the artist known as Starbury.
Why compassion? Outside of the goodwill Stephon Marbury should receive for his affordable shoe lines, as well as other altruistic deeds he’s done throughout his career, the Vaseline moment he shared with the entire world was at the star’s most vulnerable time.
It took time for him to admit it, but Marbury was at such a bad place when the Vaseline video aired, he was clinically depressed and even contemplating suicide.
“When everything went on with the Knicks, and, you know, my father passed on, the [Starbury] brand was– it was basically losing life slowly,” Stephon Marbury told HBO Real Sports’ Carl Quintanilla. “And I was watching it. And I think that was hurting me more than seeing my basketball career going in the direction that it was going. … I was trapped in my thoughts. I was trapped in how I felt about how I felt I was treated. I was trapped with decisions that I made.”
“I wanted to die,” he remembers. “I wanted to kill myself some days. I did. … It wasn’t about basketball. It started to become about me. Because I was that depressed and I was that sick.”
It’s hard to make jokes about it now, right?
Oddly enough, if people are open-minded enough about it, the Vaseline video can be looked at as a pivotal turning point in both Marbury’s career and his life. Sure, his days being a relevant force in the NBA were over, but a better role was waiting for him in the most unlikely of places.
Likely taken for granted now, but Stephon Marbury burst through communist walls to become a legitimate household name in China. Not just on the hardwood, either, as literal plays about him have been produced, in which Marbury actually portrays himself.
He’s a sincere mega-star in China. He carved such a deep path in this rival country, that other American-born players have since followed Starbury to China, many of them making millions of dollars in the process.
Marbury, who is so big in China they built a statue of him, had one of the strangest, most star-crossed professional basketball careers of all-time. He started as Robin to Kevin Garnnett’s Batman in Minnesota, ‘came home’ to the Knicks and Nets without much success, then became a supposed cautionary tale when the Vaseline video aired… becoming a laughing stock in the process.
Still, somehow, through his own perseverance, the good outweighs the bad. Maybe people might gripe about him never actually living up to his NBA potential, but his impact on the sport is larger now than it ever would be if he just stayed within the comfy confines of the United States.
It’s hyperbolic for sure, but Stephon Marbury overcame an incident that would have buried many, while dealing with clinical depression on top of finding few allies in the process, to be a man who’s reach became so big, it overtook a communist country.
Stephon Marrbury may very well wind up in the Naismith Hall of Fame for his exploits in China, most likely getting the nod as a “basketball ambassador” as opposed to a basketball player. And I’m not too sure there’s a good argument against it.
Starbury as a Hall of Famer? Regardless of how he gets in, given his road to presumably reach that destination, that’s something to be proud of. We can, and probably should, actually revisist the iffy video as the turning point. Not a moment in time where a man went to into a free fall. After all, without that video happening, it’s hard to imagine all the excellence happening after it.
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