Young basketball players and their parents now have a difficult choice to make. Stephon Marbury’s much-publicized ‘Starbury One’ shoe is out. The cost is a very non-prohibitive $14.95, and hey, that’s awesome. Stephon Marbury’s doing a good thing here. The cost of basketball shoes is absurd, it has been for a long time, and it’s not cool if a kid gets made fun of on the playground because he’s got a pair of Payless specials on.

I don’t spend a lot of time on playgrounds, mingling with the young ballers, so I can’t really say how these are going to be received. But kids are going to know these are $15 shoes, and let’s be honest… I don’t think shoes are seen as cool or uncool because of what player endorses them. Let’s be honest, a big part of what makes shoes hot is the price tag. No one would be murdering people over Air Jordans if they were $9.99 at Target. It just wouldn’t happen.

Maybe I’m wrong about that. I’m speculating. Like I said, I don’t spend a lot of time at Rucker, hanging out with THE PROFESSA! THE PROFESSA! or HOT SAUCE! HOT SAUCE! OHHHH, HOT SAUCE! We just don’t chill together that often. So I could be wrong about this, and I hope I am. I hope the $15 shoes are as acceptable and as hip as any other shoe.

And even if the Starbury Ones were acceptable street wear… well, you know my thoughts on Stephon Marbury the basketball player. This is not a player to be emulated. If you find yourself at a playground picking teams for a run, identify the guys wearing Starbury Ones, and get as many of them as you can on the other team, and watch a fistfight erupt before either team gets to five points, because everyone on the other team wants to shoot.

If it was me, and I couldn’t afford the Jordans or the Iversons or the Kobes… I’d hold up a liquor store, just like Raymond in White Men Can’t Jump, before I put my foot into a shoe called the “Starbury.”. And if I went to jail and did a stretch of 5 to 7 in Rikers, including countless instances of prison rape, and I got out and I needed a new pair of kicks, and the choice was the same… I’d hold up that liquor store again.

When you dress like a woman, make bad pop music, and get caught with cocaine after reporting a false burglary to the police, you don’t get to talk to kids as part of your community service. Your ass will be cleaning up garbage in the streets of New York. And if that’s what the courts decided for Boy George, maybe they should’ve considered a similar approach for Ron Artest.

As part of his community service sentence resulting from the brawl in The Palace, Artest talked to a group of kids yesterday. And I’ll get into exactly what he said in a minute, but really, that’s enough right there, isn’t it? They wanted Ron Artest to talk to kids. Listen, I love Ron Artest. I feel like deep down in there somewhere, there’s a good guy, and I have no doubts that he wanted to help these kids. But he’s not the guy you want giving out life lessons, okay? I’d trust him to find a cure for cancer before I’d trust him to stand before a group of kids and not slip up and say something goofy at least once.

Here’s a list of suggestions I’d have for Ron’s community service:

– Beat confessions out of the guys they caught with liquid explosives getting on a London plane.
– Swimming off the coast of Florida, wrestling any sharks that threaten beachgoers
– Stealing the gold medal if the United States happens to not win it at the upcoming World Basketball Championships
– Writing new theme songs for the Carolina Panthers and Tony Kornheiser’s segments on Monday Night Football
– Collecting Michael Jordan’s gambling debts

And if you really want to take advantage of his celebrity by trying to reach people, have him do some public service announcements. Something in a controlled atmosphere, where you’ve got an edit button and a script. Limit it to “drugs are bad” and “stay in school,” and Ron might be fine. And again, I love the guy, but you can’t tell him to speak extemporaneously and expect something good to come of it. Whoever thought this was a good idea just hasn’t been paying attention.

Anyway, Artest got in front of the kids yesterday and said of the brawl, “someone started trouble, and I ended it.” If he wants to defend his actions, fine. He’s wrong, but fine. But you can’t do it at that place, at that time. That’s just not something he should say, even if it’s accurate, which it isn’t. The trouble did not end when Ron Artest went manically into the stands. Had he chose not to, he’d just have been laying on the scorer’s table with some beer on his jersey. But he chose to go into the stands and escalate this thing like gasoline on a fire, to the point where people were suspended, injured, and incarcerated. Wet Jersey vs. Suspension / Injury / Incarceration. At what point on that night did Ron Artest end anything, other than the Pacers hopes for an Eastern Conference crown?

I can’t be mad at Artest, because there’s really no point. He doesn’t see things quite like the rest of us, and he’s probably never going to. This doesn’t surprise me from him. But whoever’s in charge of who does what for their community service… well, they need to do a better job of staying on their toes, or soon, we’re going to have Jayson Williams teaching gun safety classes.