Marbury’s Fall; Ma Bu Li’s Redemption

We – and I mean we basketball fans, critics, writers, observers, and the rest who judge basketball without professionally playing basketball – all too often take the liberty to determining what counts as ‘success’ for others.

We say that a basketball player is successful if he is good enough to make the NBA. We say a player is successful if he secures a starting role. We say that he has made it when he becomes an All Star. Some of us say that he is successful when he wins MVP awards and scoring titles. Others say that they aren’t successful unless they win championships.

But in the end, it’s about ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘We’ – who stand from afar and tell them what they should consider success and what they should or should not celebrate – and ‘They’ – who set their own standards for themselves and ultimately have the right to aim as high (or as low) as they themselves wish.

It is the curse that comes with being a talented, well-paid, and popular athlete, as it makes their success and failure a public property. Some of us say Jeremy Lin is successful because he secured a starting role in the NBA, while some say that LeBron James – for all his talents – his unsuccessful because he hasn’t won a championship yet. Success if relative, and even though we (especially me) like to believe that our opinion matters on what makes a successful athlete, it really shouldn’t, since all that matters is the opinion of the athlete himself.

Earlier this week, a talented player mostly remembered as a ‘failure’ in the NBA finally reached redemption in his topsy-turvy basketball career by finally winning his first championship at the age of 35… in China. He was away from the glitz and glamour of the NBA, far from competing every night against the world’s best basketball players, and far from the ultimate glories that basketball players dream of: the Olympic Gold, the World Championship, the NBA trophy. He instead won a championship in a league that has only existed for 17 years, where the talent is still miles behind that of the NBA, and in a foreign country far from the Coney Island courts in New York where his legend began.

But when he celebrated this victory as his greatest ever on any level, when he broke down crying like Michael Jordan did after his first NBA championship, none of ‘us’ should have the right to tell Stephon Marbury that what he achieved wasn’t success. All competitors want to win. While this mercurial, gifted talent who could never quite reach the NBA glories that he once seemed destined for, ‘we’ can’t tell him that his victory in China wasn’t enough. We can’t tell him that he wasn’t successful.

Understand this: Stephon Marbury really was one of the most talented point guards in the NBA. He was a poor man’s Derrick Rose before Derrick Rose became MVP. He averaged 20 and 8 for the majority of his career, had a killer crossover, a steady outside jumpshot, the ability and will to regularly attack the basket, and the ‘clutch gene’ to hit game-winning shots.

But that is exactly where the flattering Rose comparison ends, because there was almost as much bad in Marbury’s attitude as there was good in his game. Despite his numbers and exciting plays, he will mostly be remembered in the NBA as a team-cancer, as a player who made every team he joined a little worse than they were before him, a player who never quite figured out how to fully conform to the spirit of a team, a player who many will remembered as going straight bonkers as his talents regressed when he went on live internet to east Vaseline and sing along to ‘Barbie Girl’. Not to mention a whole lotta other crazy.

He will be remembered mostly as the man who didn’t win.

For all his pedigree – the High School legend, the fourth pick in the NBA draft, the two All Star Teams and All NBA Third Teams, the appearance in US National colours in the 2004 Olympics, the 19.6 and 7.3 career averages – Marbury remained justifiably ‘unsuccessful’ in our eyes because he never won much. He made the playoffs five times in his 13-year NBA career but only got past the first round once, and that too as a scarcely-used backup for the Boston Celtics in 2009, his last season in the league. His teams were all better off without him than with him: Timberwolves did better building around Garnett when he left, Nets traded him for Jason Kidd and went twice to the NBA Finals, Suns traded him away and brought in Steve Nash, who gave them their best years in a decade, and the Knicks… Oh well the Knicks were bad with or without him, but without him they were just ‘awful’, while with him, they were ‘awful and crazy’.

And so he left the NBA in 2009, or should I rephrase it, the NBA left him. No team wanted to deal with the attitude problems, especially in a now-32 year old with fading skills. The man once-gifted enough to be one of the best point guards in the NBA was now unwanted by any NBA team. This was his fall.

And then came the unexpected rise.

As we began to ignore him, Stephon Marbury ignored us, too. He ignored what we thought great players should do to be successful and did whatever he felt was good for him. He went to the other side of the globe, to China, and was reborn as Ma Bu Li, the name given to him in this strange new world.

And with the change of him came a drastic, unbelievable change in attitude. Ma Bu Li became everything that Marbury wasn’t. He committed himself to a future in China, and Chinese Basketball fans embraced him happily as one of their own. He expanded his shoe line, gave hints of a long-term, post-retirement tryst with the country, and travelled amongst the people as a commoner. He became China’s biggest foreign basketball star – or perhaps their biggest basketball star, period – and at the same time he became a man of the people. Amongst lesser stars, he became an All Star again.

He still didn’t win, though. A familiar horror repeated before his eyes as Ma Bu Li had stellar stats, made All Star teams, and still failed to be ‘successful’. In his first two years in China, both the teams he played for – Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons and Forshan Dralions – failed to make the playoffs of the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA).

But in his third year, now playing for the Beijing Ducks in the capital of the world’s most populous nation (and a nation that is now as crazy for hoops as any other), Ma Bu Li finally earned his moment of redemption. He led the underdog Ducks – a team which hadn’t tasted CBA success before – all the way into the Finals against 7-time champs Guangdong Southern Tigers after sweeping through the previous two series. The Ducks upset the Southern Tigers in the Finals to win 4 games to 1, with Marbury as by far the best player of the series, which included a 41-point, 7-assist performance in the close-out game.

And here he was, finally, a winner, a champion. After failing to fit in with so many different cities and teams in the NBA, who knew that Marbury – or Ma Bu Li – would truly be at home nearly 11,000 kilometers away from where he grew up? Who knew that it is this environment that would finally embrace him, and it was here where he would reinvent himself as a winner again?

“I am retiring here in China,” Marbury said to The China Post, “I am not going to stop playing basketball, I have a lot of basketball left inside of me.”

‘We’ observes can criticise all want, say that his feat was cheapened, that it is far too easy to win in China than it is in America. And you know what? We would be right.

But we wouldn’t be able to tell him that he wasn’t successful. Now, finally, Stephon Marbury seems comfortable with where he is, with his success. The redemption is complete.