CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE STEPHON MARBURY, GEORGIA TECH'S HERALDED FRESHMAN GUARD, CARRIES A HEAVY BURDEN AS THE LAST, BEST HOPE OF A CONEY ISLAND HOOPS DYNASTY

Stephon Marbury pulls a Suzuki 4x4 into a parking lot in downtown
Atlanta. He pays the attendant in advance, Brooklyn-dodges his
way across the street, then ducks into Hasan's Atlanta's Finest
Barber Shop.

Hasan's is a hedge against Atlanta's atrium creep, an antidote
to all the Peachtree Thises and Perimeter Thats--an enclave in
this Brave New City of the South that's timid and old and
perfectly happy to be so. For Marbury, a Georgia Tech freshman
who has been called the best guard prospect ever to come out of
New York City, it's also a refuge from the indignity of the
night before, when Tech lost 71-69 at home to Mount St. Mary's.

Here is Hasan's on a December afternoon with Christmas coming:
An urchin in a green sweatsuit kneels in front of the barber
chair where Marbury is sitting and flips open a leather
briefcase jammed with videocassettes; Stephon chooses Bad Boys
and peels off a $10 from a fat wad of bills. Also sitting for a
cut is Atlanta Hawk forward Ken Norman, a living reminder that
for Marbury the NBA is the terminus of the road on which Tech is
a mere way station. A 10-year-old, left here by his mom while
she works in the beauty shop down the street, sits in one of
the chairs, facing a mirror, pantomiming shot after shot, his
hand and wrist describing a perfect cobra's head at the end of
each follow-through.

At this, Marbury allows a smile to break over his
face--cautiously, so as not to jeopardize the fade that Philly
Mike, his regular barber, is in the midst of crafting.

"How can you not like that?" Marbury says.

For someone who has been considered a prodigy for more than half
his 18 years, there could be no more serene and innocent scene.
Georgia Tech sank thousands of dollars and man-hours into
recruiting Marbury in the hope that, before he lights out for
the pros, he'll at least lead the Yellow Jackets into the NCAA
tournament that has spurned them the past two years. Meanwhile,
Marbury's family has its own interests: It's counting on Stephon
for deliverance from the Brooklyn housing project in which Jason
Sowell, a high school teammate of Stephon's, was gunned down
last summer. But here at Hasan's, in this hothouse of fellowship
and easy badinage, Marbury is no one's ticket in and no one's
ticket out.

"He got passes and he got shots and he got hops and he got
game," Hasan says, casting an admiring eye from the register.

"But if the head grows," says Philly Mike, "I'll know."

For more than a quarter century now, Don and Mabel Marbury's
five boys have been apprenticing for the NBA on the basketball
courts of the Coney Island Houses. Eric (Sky Dog) Marbury was a
6'2" inside scorer at Georgia between 1979 and '82, only to be
cut in camp by the San Diego Clippers in 1982. Six-foot-three
Donnie (Sky Pup) Marbury went undrafted, even though he was a
shooter of such unalloyed purity that he led the Southwest
Conference in scoring as a senior at Texas A&M in 1985-86. Don
Sr. calls his third child, 6'3" Norman (Jou-Jou) Marbury, "the
purest point guard you'd ever want to see," but Jou-Jou failed
to make the grade on the SAT, had a scholarship offer from
Tennessee withdrawn and got exiled to the junior colleges. He
played one season of Division I ball at St. Francis College in
Brooklyn (1993-94).

As each Marbury brother has failed to stick, his professional
aspirations have slid down to the next, until all have
accumulated in the catch basin that is Stephon. Family members
speak about the successive refinements in the Marbury game--of
how Eric's raw desire set a tone, and Donnie added the sweet
stroke and Norman the nose for the basket--and how these gifts
have coalesced in the fourth Marbury boy. There is a fifth
brother, Moses, a.k.a. Zack, who in the family tradition wears
number 3 for Lincoln High, where he's now a sophomore guard. But
Zack isn't the phenom that Stephon is, and that only serves to
send the family's hopes rebounding up the line.

Stephon, who's 6'2", embellishes this legacy with skills
entirely his own: dial-8 range on his jump shot; a predator's
appetite for on-the-ball defense; and an aura, a New York ease
with his station that in other precincts might be called
cockiness. In November, Marbury suggested to the New York Daily
News that he would leave for the NBA after this season, a
comment that touched off much hand-wringing in Atlanta, where
Georgia Tech likes to think of itself as more than a trade
school for aspiring pro basketball players. But Marbury now says
that there was much more nuance in his remark, and that he had
simply addressed a hypothetical. "If I'm guaranteed to be in the
lottery?" he says still. "I wouldn't even hesitate. I'm leaving.
In fact, I would hope the people at Georgia Tech would tell me
to leave. Because if not, they wouldn't be thinking about
anything but themselves.

"I don't feel I'm totally ready. The NBA and college are two
totally different games. The NBA is just pick-and-roll, and if
the pick-and-roll's not there, throw it to Hakeem and he scores.
How hard can that be? It's just physical strength. Being ready
means adjusting to being around older players. Right now I don't
have anything in common with those guys."

As Marbury ruminates over the differences between college and
the pros, his coaches at Georgia Tech think there's still much
for him to learn about the differences between high school and
college. Mount St. Mary's senior Chris McGuthrie, a 5'9" guard,
lit up the Yellow Jackets, and often Marbury, for 37 points--a
reminder that even the best on-the-ball defender is of little
use if he can't fight through the picks a well-coached college
team will set to spring a shooter. So far this season the
Jackets have run a gantlet of a schedule, over which Marbury has
been reliably inconsistent: horrid against Georgia and splendid
against Louisville; a first-half terror at Kentucky (he went for
17 as Tech forged a halftime lead) and a second-half bust (he
failed to score as the team collapsed over the final 20
minutes); and just the reverse at Duke (he followed a four-point
first half with 23 in the second of a 86-81 victory). With
exhilarating wins over Maryland and North Carolina, and
excruciating losses to Bradley and Santa Clara, the Jackets
(10-7 after a 91-78 defeat of Western Carolina on Saturday) have
been every bit as mercurial as their freshman point guard.

The NBA does not make lottery picks of floor leaders whose
teams lose to Mount St. Mary's at home. With Tech up a point
and a minute and a half to play, Marbury threw away a blind
wraparound pass. "We don't need to be forcing it in a close game
like that," says Drew Barry, Marbury's fifth-year senior
backcourt mate. "Stephon's a great talent. He's going to be a
great player. But right now he has a lot to learn."

With Barry and forwards Michael Maddox and Matt Harpring, Yellow
Jacket coach Bobby Cremins has the nucleus of a pretty good
team, and he wants to let Marbury, who was averaging 19.3 points
and 4.4 assists at week's end, grow naturally into the role of
leading it. "Why is he not there yet?" Cremins says. "He's
stubborn. And there's the pressure to perform. The expectations
are ridiculous. All this pressure. All this hype. It really
pisses me off. He's had his mind on other things."

Cremins and his staff have sat Marbury down on several occasions
for what Cremins calls "long, heavy talks," sessions referred to
around the Tech basketball offices as "de-recruiting." The
coaches tell Marbury that the word is out on him: Apply the
man-to-man screws--that's what Kentucky and Georgia did--and he
panics. Reverts to his roots. Just tries to break everyone down
one-on-one. Stephon, they say, you've got to play with their
minds. Give the ball up, get it back, then make them pay.
"Stephon should never shoot under 50 percent in a game," says
Tech associate head coach Kevin Cantwell. "If he does, he's
taking shots he shouldn't."

In the aftermath of the Mount St. Mary's debacle, Marbury was
the lone Yellow Jacket to ask a manager for a copy of the game
tape that night. He watched it in all its horror until 3:30 a.m.
But he also spent an hour on the phone with Donnie back in
Coney Island. Donnie hadn't seen the game, but his advice
distilled to this: Got to play like Stephon. Got to go through
the middle, got to get to the basket.

Cremins fears counsel like that only interferes with the message
he's trying to get across. The next morning Marbury pronounced
his diagnosis: "I've been so focused on what Coach wants me to
do--be a leader, get everybody involved--that I haven't been
Stephon."

Hooo, boy.

"There's a lot of talk about Stephon's making it to the NBA for
his family," Cremins says, "but his mother once told me, 'We're
a family, and we're going to be a family whether he makes it to
the NBA or not.' And they're a happy family. They could live
there the rest of their lives and be happy."

Cremins is a devotee of Pat Conroy's novels--he loves the
stripped-down honesty of those dysfunctional-family sagas--and he
considers himself something of an expert on sprawling hoop
dynasties. But he says he knows no family like the Marburys. Not
the Prices, who raised former Yellow Jacket and current NBA star
Mark; not the Barrys, who produced Drew and former Tech guard,
Jon, now a Golden State Warrior. Cremins says he had "heard a
lot of stories, a lot of war stories" about the Marburys, but
none quite prepared him for what he came upon when he visited
the family's four-room apartment in Coney Island, on West 31st
Street between Surf and Mermaid. The unlocked door. The people
everywhere. The comings, the goings. "They're extremely close,"
Cremins says. "It's amazing. Go see. I don't know what the hell
makes it work."

What makes it work may be that Don, an out-of-work laborer, and
Mabel, a day-care worker, know no other way. He's one of six
kids, she's one of nine. You could start at 17th Street and go
20 blocks north and find kin, covering five generations, in
every high-rise along the way. One of those comers-and-goers,
Stephon's cousin Jamel Thomas, is an orphan whom the Marburys
essentially raised. Thomas is now a freshman forward at
Providence.

Despite appearances, Stephon didn't spring from chaos. From age
three he has followed plans carefully laid by his older
brothers, beginning with Eric, who would urge Stephon to run up
and down the 15 stories of their building--three times per
workout--and then run some more on the beach near the projects.
"The whole object was to teach the brothers under you to be
better than you," says Eric, "to take this oath and accept this
challenge."

As a nine-year-old, Stephon would stage shooting exhibitions at
halftimes of Lincoln High games. In 1988 Hoop Scoop, a
recruiting newsletter, anointed him the best sixth-grader in the
nation. As an eighth-grader he sneaked into a local camp for
high-schoolers and played so well that the organizers pardoned
his audacity. Up to that point, Marbury says, "I wasn't a very
nice kid. I thought I was it. It was, y'all supposed to talk to
me, I'm not supposed to talk to y'all. I'd just come out on the
court, just talk junk, with this walk and this look."

Adults weren't spared this treatment. In CYO ball he woofed at
opposing coaches: I'm just killing your guards. Get someone out
here who can stop me.

But he had changed his demeanor by the time he entered his
sophomore year at Lincoln. By then he had the tattoo of a
panther etched into his right arm. "A panther is quick and smart
and always alert to everything," Marbury says. "He's sitting on
top of a mountain, with the sun and the clouds. That's where I
want to see myself." And he had replaced his badass street act
with self-discipline. "I learned to treat everybody with
respect," he says. "I've learned to be focused, be a
professional person, the kind who is always an honor to be
around. When you're a good person, good things happen to you.
The guy in the shop? With the tapes? He thought I was a star
from the way I carried myself."

Scouts, he says, are always watching. "If you're on the bench,
they're watching to see if you're picking your nose or playing
with yourself. They want to know if you're into the game, what
your attitude is when you're 20 down. Before they give out a
million, they're gonna ask, Can we trust this kid?"

Marbury has so sanitized his attitude that he doesn't even talk
smack anymore. According to McGuthrie, the guard from Mount St.
Mary's, the only thing Marbury said to him was, "Damn, you're
hot."

New York City can be unforgiving toward its phenoms. The
starmakers ballyhooed former playground legend Dwayne (Pearl)
Washington, who never lived up to his precious nickname while
playing at Syracuse, and struggling St. John's sophomore guard
Felipe Lopez, who sat for Richard Avedon's camera while still in
high school, only to turn their backs on both when they turned
out to be anything short of great. But about Stephon the older
Marbury brothers are irrepressible. Even if Eric's example
couldn't see Donnie or Norman safely through, Stephon is on
course. He made his college boards, didn't he? And he won a
public school city title with Lincoln, a first for a Marbury.
Did it wearing that number 3 on his back.

"Eric picked that number out," Stephon says. "Says it's for a
third eye or something. I don't know what that means. I gotta
ask him that."

Ask Eric, and he won't tell you. "Stephon will see what it
means" is all he says.

In The Last Shot, Darcy Frey's 1994 book chronicling basketball
in Coney Island, Don Sr. is depicted as a cackling opportunist
trying to shake down Frey for cash in exchange for the Marbury
family story. Stephon is not much more flatteringly portrayed.
He angles for meals and rides, boasts of putting himself up for
bid to warring New York City AAU teams, and names the make of
car he'll get from the college of his choice. With withering
understatement, Frey calls Stephon, then a ninth-grader, someone
with "an attitude that needs some adjustment."

The Marburys despise the book. "It tries to make my family look
like a bunch of niggers trying to get out of the ghetto and not
anything else," Stephon says. But it's a portrait that, rightly
or wrongly, has taken hold. Adidas powerbroker Sonny Vaccaro has
persuaded the Marburys that with another year or two of
forbearance their payoff will come and that a more developed
sense of public relations is called for in the meantime.

Lou D'Almeida (SI, Nov. 6, 1995), to whose Gauchos AAU team
Stephon ultimately became loyal, keeps him flush with pocket
money, in apparent accordance with NCAA rules, while the Marbury
patriarch, who over the years had picked up a reputation among
recruiters as someone unafraid to assert his prerogatives, is
gracious and charming with the press. He'll discourse on Nixon,
jazz and New York City politics, and cry honest tears in his
living room while recounting the sweep of his and his five boys'
lives. "We have a working agreement, my wife and I," says Don
Sr., whose progeny have earned him the nickname the Creator in
the neighborhood. "If there's something positive, that's hers.
If there's something difficult--a problem--I take care of it."

Stephon had verbally committed to Tech last January but had
failed to return his letter of intent well into the April
signing period. Early that month Jerry Tarkanian happened to
take over as coach at Fresno State. Reports indicated that Tark,
in discussions with the Marburys, employed the perfectly
permissible recruiting tactic of dangling an offer of an
assistant coaching job to someone close to his quarry--in this
case, brother Donnie. As word of these negotiations filtered
out, Cremins couldn't get his prospective signee on the phone.
Panicked, he flew to New York. Stephon then reassured the coach
he would sign with Tech and on April 28 did. "Why don't people
believe a kid's word?" Stephon says now. "I don't even know
where Fresno is."

Last year D'Almeida gave Stephon a used Acura--because "he
deserves it," D'Almeida has said--but after the arrangement hit
the papers over the summer, Marbury gave up the car amid fears
that his eligibility had been compromised. (The Suzuki that
Marbury drove to Hasan's belongs to Tech teammate Maddox.) "I'm
doing without some things that are essential to me," Marbury
says. "It's hard without a car here. But I'm doing without one."

A lightbulb seems to appear over his head. "It's good for me not
to have a car," he says. "I have no choice but to watch film.
Just makes me watch film a little bit more."

That the Marbury men are thick with one another is common
knowledge throughout Brooklyn. "Stephon looks up to his little
brother," says Tech freshman guard Gary Saunders, a Gaucho
teammate. It's the Marbury women few know about. "The father
will charm you one minute, then go off on a tirade the next,"
says someone close to the family. "Give him $1,000 and he'll
want $5,000. But Stephon and his mother and sisters, that's a
beautiful story. The innocence is there."

The Marbury women--Mabel and her 30-year-old twin daughters,
Marcia, an education reporter with KFDM-TV in Beaumont, Texas,
and Stephanie, a special-ed teacher's aide in Brooklyn--account
for Stephon's soft side. Stephanie in particular deserves
credit. She was 12 when her little brother was born. Name him
after me, Stephanie pleaded, and I'll care for him--feed him,
wash him, dress him, scold him.

Within a few years Stephanie, already large for her age, was
regularly taken to be Stephon's mother. After Stephon fell off a
bike, she dressed the gash that's now a scar on his right leg.
When Stephon lost the city championship game as a junior, it was
Stephanie who consoled her sobbing brother, wrapping him up in
her arms at midcourt. When he wanted to go to Georgia Tech and
the Marbury men stood solidly for Syracuse, she dried his tears
and told him, "If you really want to go there, go there." In the
second half of the Kentucky game last month, bench-ridden with a
bloody nose, Stephon sneezed and more blood gushed forth.
Rushing from her seat behind the bench, Stephanie tended to her
brother, draping herself over his shoulders. There was no
question that Stephon's daughter, whom he calls "the light of my
eyes" and who was born last March to his girlfriend, Nicole
Thompson, would be named Stephanie.

"We are the stabilizers," Stephanie says of the Marbury women.
Then she adds, "Whether we have a house on the hill or in the
projects, whether we go to the NBA or not, this is already a
success story."

Still, every Marbury stands vigil, each in his or her own way:
Stephanie, calling Stephon's dorm room every day; Marcia,
monitoring the news wires and TV feeds at the station in
Beaumont; Mama, playing the good cop, Papa, the bad; Dog and Pup
and Jou-Jou, watching with their third eye. And Zack, taking
notes, just in case the dream must be deferred one more
time--passed on down to the last in the line.

It's rare that Stephon's parents and six siblings can all gather
to watch him play, but when Georgia Tech takes on UMass in the
Meadowlands just before Christmas, the family has a chance to
sound its urgency in chorus. Tech is struggling against a team
soon to be ranked No. 1 in the nation, and Stephon is on his way
to a 7-for-20 night.

"Shoot that, Steph! This is where you take over, Steph!" It's
Eric, in the second row, bellowing at his brother as the
Minutemen push their lead into double digits. To reach Stephon,
Eric's exhortations must wash dissonantly over the coaches and
players on the Georgia Tech bench.

Stephon shoots from the outside and misses.

There's a whoop as Stephon makes a steal and scores. "What I
tell you?" It's Donnie now, right behind Eric. "The steal! I
know my little brother!"

But soon the Jackets' 75-67 defeat is certain. The Marbury men
caucus. "Drew," says Don Sr., "he don't pass the ball to Stephon!"

Caught between Surf and Mermaid, between the pounding of reality
and an abiding, alluring fantasy, Coney Island's Original
Not-Quite-Famous Marburys shout as they hold their breath.

COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN The brothers Marbury (from left, Norman, Eric, Stephon, Zack and Donnie) sample the local fare. [Norman Marbury, Eric Marbury, Stephon Marbury, Zack Marbury, and Donnie Marbury eating hotdogs]

COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN In his third college game, Marbury was outscored 23-13 by the Hoyas' Allen Iverson, but he dished off eight assists. [Allen Iverson guarding Stephon Marbury]

B/W PHOTO: COURTESY of SAN JACINTO COLLEGE Each brother (clockwise, from top right: Donnie, Eric, Zack and Norman) has made it his duty to refine the skills of the next in line, keeping alive the family's NBA aspirations. [Donnie Marbury]

COLOR PHOTO: JOHN IACONO [See caption above--Norman Marbury]

COLOR PHOTO: TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY [See caption above--Eric Marbury]

COLOR PHOTO: PETER READ MILLER [See caption above--Zack Marbury]

COLOR PHOTO: JIM GUND Cremins fears the instruction Stephon gets from his kin interferes with his development as Tech's floor leader. [Stephon Marbury and Bobby Cremins]

COLOR PHOTO: MANNY MILLAN Stephon is no mama's boy, but Mabel can take credit for his being a soft touch. [Mabel Marbury and Stephon Marbury]