Starbury Changes the Game
Courtesy of popbitch:
Will the Starbury change the world?
Kids only want to buy trainers if they are super-expensive and exclusive, and top sportsmen can’t be blamed for endorsing top-priced goods. Well, this conventional wisdom is being turned on its head by New York Knicks’ Stephon Marbury. Kobe, Lebron and Michael Jordan have all put their name to $150 Nike shoes, but Marbury has made it his mission to bring out a line of shoes for poor kids. The cost of the new Starbury shoe? $15. And it’s not just a piece of tat. Marbury is wearing the shoe on court himself. Sold only in US discount store Steve & Barry’s (which prides itself on enabling a family to be clothed for a year for $100) the shoe has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Queues run outside the stores, with a two-item per person limit now enforced on the Starbury range. Marbury’s aim is to show people just how little it really costs to make high quality sneakers. “Two hundred to buy a pair of sneakers? That’s groceries for the week,” he says. “History is going to say Stephon Marbury changed the game.” More: http://www.starbury.comÂ
You can probably read through the Britishisms (trainers are sneakers, etc.). And this story is awesome, and I’m a Stephon Marbury fan-for-life (despite being a DC native and a by-virtue-of-birth Wizards fan) because he is, in the parlance of American sports writing, “a real class act, a top-notch individual.” From his wikipedia entry:
He has been named to The Sporting News list of “Good guys in Sports†three times. He was one of the highest donors to the NBA Player Associations Katrina Relief effort, donating 1 million dollars to the effort. He currently has 7 barbers on hire in Coney Island giving free haircuts to neighborhood children.
I don’t think he’d begrudge me my support for DC’s beleaguered basketball franchise, considering he’s a hometown boy himself—he was born in Brooklyn, and has been a lifelong Knicks fan despite playing for a slew of other teams.
His performance has never lived up to his own expectations—he’s considered a competent player more than a star-quality playmaker by most critics—and he has made some notably regrettable comments (his claim to be the best point guard in the NBA was followed by a season that saw the Knicks finish in last place in their division), so it may not be through his on-court performance that he “changes the game.” But if the $15 shoe thing catches on, he’ll have made a better, bigger kind of history than most athletes, and the kind of contribution to celebrity sports culture that’s sorely needed.