The Shoe May Just Make the Man

It looks as if the big winner of the NBA off-season was the captain of the dysfunctional New York Knicks, who wasn’t even invited to play for Team USA in the World Championships.

Yes, Stephon Marbury, whose Knicks were eliminated from playoff consideration sometime around Christmas, who last was seen wearing an American basketball uniform at the disastrous 2004 Olympics, spent the summer scoring image points and making fans while hawking shoes.

It’s all because of a number.

We’ve seen threes on Marbury’s chest ever since we first saw him in a Georgia Tech jersey 11 years ago, but now he’s associated with four digits: 14.98.

That’s the retail price, in U.S. dollars, of his new shoe line, the Starbury One. For a change, cost isn’t an issue -- it’s a cause.

“Get with the movement,” Marbury says.

A sneaker revolution? Sole power? Not quite. There will always be those who prefer their Air Jordans and Answers, who want to wear certain models specifically because they’re expensive. People who immerse themselves in the Cristal Culture, where pricier automatically means better, don’t always get it. Does a $4,000 Breitling watch really tell time that much better than a $50 Timex?

“The way I see it, if you knew better, you’d do better,” Marbury said by telephone. “If you know that a shoe costs a certain amount of money and it’s being marked up 200%, if you’re fine with paying that, it’s cool.”

If not, there are alternatives. It’s not a completely new idea. Shaquille O’Neal introduced a $40 shoe at Payless two years ago (Now Shaq has moved on to selling shoes in China). Marbury and the retail chain of Steve and Barry’s have taken it one step further.

The standard procedure is for shoe companies to use a player’s street cred to sell expensive sneakers. Now some cheap shoes could build a player’s standing back up.

Check this: Some people are buying the shoes just to support Marbury.

“I usually go for the Jordans that are so much more,” Josh Samuel said after he grabbed a pair of Starbury Ones on Wednesday. “For 15 bucks, what he’s doing, I think it’s great.”

Mostly, the shoes are going to people who are jumping at the chance for lower prices. Shoppers lined up at the stores when the Starbury Ones came out in August.

“It was like an Xbox 360 thing,” a staffer at the Steve and Barry’s at the Block in Orange said.

Shoppers filled their carts with the shoes, so now there’s a limit of two pairs a customer at the store. The high-tops are the quickest to go.

And Marbury, in the midst of a 24-city promotional tour, has discovered something else comes from the buying public: tears.

“The kids, they’re just letting it go,” Marbury said. “They can’t hold it back.

“Just not being able to do something for so long. You’ve held back for so long. Now you get the opportunity. It’s not just for themselves. You’ve got parents saying, ‘For my son, to be able to go buy him something, and it’s nice.... ‘ “

I remember wanting the Nike Air Force I’s when they first came out -- priced at $70 and up -- and my mom explaining they were too expensive. I got the canvas shoes, or the leather low-tops if I was lucky. Marbury said he never even bothered to ask his mom “because I already knew it wasn’t going to happen. We were on food stamps. I don’t have to say no more. We were in the welfare line.”

This season the kid from the Coney Island projects will make $17 million to play basketball -- and he’ll lace up a pair of $14.98 sneakers before each game.

The shoes are solid. Not flashy, no Velcro straps or air cushioning, but solid.

Marbury isn’t making any money to endorse them. All of his reimbursement is based on sales. Sure, there’s money to be made. There always is. But I wonder whether this is a rare time when pitching products can actually help an athlete’s image.

Marbury’s has been in steady decline since he was one of the faces of the 2004 national team, the first composed of NBA players to lose a game in Olympic competition. Then he was reunited with the coach of that team, Larry Brown, on the Knicks, and their feuding was at the core of a 23-59 season that led to Brown’s ouster.

Marbury said this campaign wasn’t a reaction to last year and that the shoe project was in motion last fall.

He recalled meeting with Steven Shore and Barry Prevor, who run a chain of stores selling clothing for under $10. He was skeptical that anything so low-cost could be quality.

“As soon as you see it and touch it, you know it’s real,” Marbury said. “You know from wearing sports apparel. They convinced me of the clothing aspect.

“Then I was like, ‘OK, if the shoe is anywhere near this, it’s on.’

“Then at a different meeting, when I saw the shoes I was like, ‘All right, game over with.’ ”

The game’s just starting, really. You can’t change a culture in one summer. But sometimes that’s all it takes for an image.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com. To read more by Adande, go to latimes.com/adandeblog.