Everybody remembers the infamous live stream of Stephon Marbury eating vaseline. Many people speculated that the struggling basketball star had completely lost his mind. It turns out that a culmination of things left Marbury severely depressed and suicidal.
Marbury discusses it in an upcoming HBO Real Sports, as reported by Ben Golliver at Sports Illustrated.
“When everything went on with the Knicks, and, you know, my father passed on, the [Starbury] brand was — it was basically losing life slowly,” Marbury tells HBO Real Sports’ Carlos Quintanilla. “And I was watching it. And I think that was hurting me more than seeing my basketball career going in the direction that it was going. … I was trapped in my thoughts. I was trapped in how I felt about how I felt I was treated. I was trapped with decisions that I made.”
Marbury admits now that he was “definitely” clinically depressed and “suicidal” at that point in his life.
“I wanted to die,” he remembers. “I wanted to kill myself some days. I did. … It wasn’t about basketball. It started to become about me. Because I was that depressed and I was that sick.”
Fortunately things turned around for Marbury as he’s found great success in China including two national championships and a statue in his honor.
