Editor's note: This story first appeared in the April 4, 1999 editions of The Dallas Morning News

BROOKLYN, N.Y. - This night, as on all weeknights, the second-floor gym at Coney Island's Shirley Tanyhill School is bursting at the seams with boys and girls playing basketball on its six cramped courts.

On the sideline nearest the doors, men and women are debating the merits of the $70-million-plus contract that neighborhood icon and Tanyhill night-basketball alum Stephon Marbury would reportedly sign with the NBA's New Jersey Nets the next morning.

But while their jaws move and their arms rise for an occasional exclamatory high five, their eyes remain transfixed on one player in the sea of screeching sneakers before them. For they are watching, they are sure, what they refer to as "the next Marbury."

At any moment, they are certain, the heir to the hoop dream will show a flash to reward their faith.

The boy does not disappoint.

AP

Sebastian Telfair as a seventh-grader.

Now, he has dribbled the basketball into an unfriendly corner, where he appears to have been trapped by an opponent six inches taller and maybe 50 pounds heavier. To create space, the boy moves the ball in front of his body and then between his legs. Suddenly the ball is behind him. In a blink of an eye, he spins around 360 degrees, reclaims the ball, moves it up to his chest, jumps, raises the ball to eye level and shoots a straight line drive through the basket 20 feet away.

The defender, three years older, shrugs his shoulders and offers a sheepish grin. The high fives along the sideline come fast and furious.

But 13-year-old Sebastian Telfair doesn't even allow himself a smile as he reclaims the ball and plots his next moves.

Such shots have long been expected from the prodigy point guard. Even on Tuesday nights when the adults, many of whom played high school and college basketball, move into the gym for their no-holds barred games, Sebastian is invited to stay and perform.

As preposterous as it may sound, when Sebastian was 11 years old, Hoop Scoop, a respected college basketball recruiting service out of Louisville, Ky., anointed him the best fifth-grade basketball player in the country just as it once had tagged Stephon Marbury. Last year, Hoop Scoop heralded Sebastian as the top sixth-grader.

Now, he has graduated to the top of a seventh-grade list on which he has been officially christened the No. 1 college prospect for the high school Class of 2004.

Already, Sebastian has traveled around the country with an elite AAU team, Brooklyn USA, whose coach scours school yards and playgrounds for the borough's best. Sebastian has been invited to play in tournaments as far away as Hawaii. Other AAU teams are forever asking to borrow his services.

Not surprisingly, Game Ball, a scouting report that caters to those whose interest is New York's junior high school-aged players, ranks Sebastian the top seventh-grader in a city where high school recruiting often rivals college recruiting in intensity.

Tom Sicignano, the Brooklyn USA coach known on the streets simply as "Ziggy," says Sebastian could follow Stephon Marbury to Abraham Lincoln High School, which is just down the street from home and where his oldest brother is an assistant coach and another brother a player. Or Sebastian may be enticed away by Ziggy's alma mater, nearby William E. Grady High. Or Sebastian may go to one of New York's elite Catholic high school basketball programs which have long been courting him.

College brochures already have arrived to the third-floor public housing apartment that Sebastian shares with his mother, Erica, three of his five brothers, two of hisfour sisters and cousin. Sebastian's closet is filled with a dozen pairs of sneakers, gifts for playing in various state and national tournaments.

Danny Turner says they represent a fraction of the sneakers that his brother, Sebastian, has received over the years.

"He gives sneakers he gets to his friends," Turner says. "He says it helps remind them that there are other things besides the streets."

Already Sebastian has received scholarships to basketball camps at Providence College, the University of Rhode Island, Long Island University and the University of Massachusetts. Maybe this summer he'll accept the invitation to the Georgia Tech camp.

Because of Sebastian's age, the Telfairs don't like to send him far from home alone. Most often, he has been accompanied to camps by his friend, Bubba Barker, a 10th-grader.

"He gets to go for free, too," Sebastian says.

For now, Sebastian stretches to stand 5-7. But that will surely change. His basketball shoe size is a 9. His father, Sylvester Sr., is 6-5. Jamel Thomas, his brother who recently completed his senior year playing at Providence College, is 6-6. The 6-2 Stephon Marbury is a cousin. Turns out Sebastian's mother is Stephon's mother's niece. All such information is important in projecting how good a player he might become and duly noted by those who have taken interest in Sebastian's future.

"It's good to know that some people think I am the best," Sebastian says from beneath a New York Yankees cap over a lunch of chicken nuggets and French fries at a neighborhood McDonald's.

The boy speaks softly, his voice closer to soprano than tenor. His smile punctuates his sentences.

"There isn't a lot of pressure," he says, "but there could be a lot of pressure if you let it get to you. Everybody is always looking to see me do something on the court. ..."

He pauses to take a sip of his soft drink as older well-wishers stream by the table offering greetings and pats on the back.

"Sometimes," he says, "I think, they expect too much."

"I saw right away the kid had it."

It is Ziggy, the Brooklyn USA coach, who takes credit for discovering Sebastian. Word had trickled from Coney Island to the Flatbush section of the borough that the next Stephon Marbury had hit the playgrounds.

Sebastian Telfair was 9 years old.

Already Sebastian had been a regular for five years on the asphalt training ground along Surf Avenue, known as "The Garden." This blacktop produces not flowers or vegetables. Its crop is basketball players who dream of one day going up for a jump shot and landing on their feet in more comfortable surroundings.

Says Sebastian: "I've seen what Stephon has done for his family. They have houses and nice cars. I want to do for my mother what he did for his. She deserves more than what we have here."

A dozen city blocks east on Surf Avenue, Coney Island's once-renowned roller coaster, The Cyclone, and famed Ferris wheel, The Wonder Wheel, used to attract visitors from around the world. It was at Nathan's, in the shadow of the Astroland amusement park, that the hot dog became an American staple.

But times change. The subways that once shuttled visitors from New York's five boroughs to Coney Island's beaches lost favor to the cars that carried families to more spacious sand dunes along Long Island's tonier south shore.

Today, the storefronts that dot Surf Avenue from The Garden to The Cyclone are boarded up or locked behind stern iron gates. The signs advertising "freak shows" are fading. Tourists have been left to find their thrills elsewhere in the city.

"Basketball is the primary attraction here now," says Dwayne Morton, who once played the game and now coaches it at Lincoln High. "If you are not playing basketball here, you are not doing anything. The environment here is tough. To survive here, you have to stay focused."

It was Sebastian's oldest brother, Danny Turner, who helps Morton with the Lincoln High basketball program, who introduced Sebastian to The Garden at age 4.

"We'd go out there for an hour every day," says Turner, 27. "I'd make him take 100 shots, then we'd do layups and practice dribbling."

They'd battle the winter winds whipping off the Atlantic Ocean two blocks away. "We'd shovel snow off the courts in winter and sweat in the summer," Turner says. "When he got to be 7 years old, practice time doubled and we got really intense. The idea was to make Sebastian a basketball player."

It didn't take long.

Ziggy remembers the day that he first picked up Sebastian and brought him to a Brooklyn USA practice across the borough in Bedford Stuyvestant.

"I saw right away the kid had it," says Ziggy, his thick Brooklyn accent unaffected by time spent commuting to Atlanta, where he helps manage one of the New South's most exclusive gentlemen's clubs. "I saw Stephon at that age, and I was immediately reminded of him. My 9-year-old team hadn't fared well in the winter league. We added Sebastian, and we won the Brooklyn-Queens division that next summer. The kid makes everybody he plays with better."

For four years, Ziggy, who has nine traveling teams from ages 8 through high school, has coached Sebastian in games and tournaments around New York and across the country. He has introduced him to college coaches and at least one former NBA coach John Calipari.

Ziggy's scouting report: "Sebastian has excellent ball handling skills. He is a great passer who sees the floor and has no problem giving the ball up. He is an excellent shooter and great penetrator. He'll pass teammates the ball even though he knows they might miss a shot that he could have taken and made. But when the game is on the line and there is less than three minutes to go, he'll take the shot and he'll make the shot."

Sebastian, Ziggy says, is far more advanced than Brooklyn USA's most recent star point guards - Shammgod Wells, who played at Providence College and evolved into God Shammgod before he was drafted by the Washington Wizards, and the University of North Carolina's Ed Cota.

"Sebastian plays on a seventh-grade all-star team that has to be the best in the country," says Ziggy, who admits he his biased. "Without question, he puts them on another level."

It was Ziggy who first mentioned Sebastian Telfair's name to fellow youth basketball entrepreneur Ron Naclerio.

Naclerio is the coach at Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens. The Judges last month won the New York City high school championship. Naclerio is also an associate editor of Louisville-based Hoop Scoop.

"I'm in a different gym in the city every day," Naclerio says. "You had a kid down in Dallas with the Mavericks, Khalid Reeves. I saw him when he was 13 playing in Queens and told people, "You gotta see him play.' I saw Rafer Alston, who went to Fresno State before he got into trouble, when he was 9 years old and I was blown away. I saw Stephon when he was a sixth-grader and knew that no way could a kid anywhere be better than him. Then I saw Sebastian."

It was love at first sight.

"Telfair is tough," Naclerio says, barely pausing for a breath.

"He's a winner and a legitimate seventh-grader. That's important. He won't be a 21-year-old freshman in college. I pay attention to these things. You have to in this business. It's the little things like that which are important."

Naclerio is proud of his track record. Proudest that he "first got Stephon Marbury's name out there."

Marbury would become arguably the most sought-after point guard in New York City high school history. He went to Georgia Tech, stayed one season and was the fourth player selected in the 1996 NBA draft. He played for the Minnesota Timberwolves before forcing a trade to New Jersey in March.

"Look, there are some guys on Wall Street who see a stock and know that it will go through the roof. So they get on it right away," Naclerio says. "With me, my game is I got an eye for basketball players."

On the other end of the telephone, Clark Francis, the editor and publisher of Hoop Scoop, does not sound comfortable talking about Sebastian Telfair, despite having lent to the seventh-grader's legend.

That Francis has never seen Telfair play is of minor concern. Telfair is Naclerio's discovery. That's good enough for Francis, who sells his service to subscribers, including hoop junkies, boosters, media and NCAA Division I college basketball coaches.

"It's neat to watch a kid like him develop," Francis says. "It's one of the fun things in this business."

It is when Francis begins to discuss the morality of ranking 12- and 13-year-olds who are six years removed from college that the answers come even more haltingly.

"We do it because," Francis finally says, "college coaches want to know who they are. The seventh and eighth grades are very important."

NCAA rules define a "prospective student-athlete" as someone who has started classes for the ninth grade. There are very strict rules prohibiting coaches from contacting high school athletes.

SMU basketball coach Mike Dement says coaches are not shackled by rules regarding junior high school athletes.

"It's a loophole, a sad loophole," Dement says. "A lot of college coaches can bump into seventh and eighth-graders. ... I think it is a little out of hand."

Morton, the Lincoln coach who may have to stage an aggressive recruiting campaign simply to keep Sebastian at his neighborhood high school, says college coaches have already been asking about the young player.

"They say, "Is it true what they say about the kid?' " Morton says. "I tell them he is a great seventh-grade player. As far as being the best seventh-grade player, I couldn't say."

Naclerio, who rated Sebastian No. 1, admits it is really impossible to rank seventh- and eighth-graders from around the country. "How do I compare New York kids to California kids? There is no common ground."

He does it, he says, because Hoop Scoop asks him to. "Clark Francis says you gotta find guys in the sixth grade, so I find guys in the sixth grade."

The system has its critics.

East Coast recruiting guru Tom Konchalski, who sells his HSVI Report to more than 200 colleges, calls the ranking of seventh-graders child abuse.

"I don't want to say anything bad because Clark Francis is a friend of mine. But rating kids gives kids a false sense of their own self importance.

"I've seen too many kids whose heads swell. They forget about school. They forget about their game.

"Clark says he does it because the college coaches want the information," Konchalski says. "Pedophiles want child pornography. Does that mean we should cater to them?. ...

"No one in the world except God knows who the best seventh-grader is."

Bobby Hartstein, who coached Stephon Marbury at Lincoln High School, won three New York City championships in 15 seasons before retiring. He calls the national ranking of seventh-graders "insane, insane, insane."

"There are adults somewhere along the line who have to say this is enough," Hartstein says.

Hartstein also coached Stephon's older brother, Eric, who led the University of Georgia to the Final Four in 1983, and Don, who played at Texas A&M in the mid-1980s. He says he has never seen Sebastian Telfair play. But he has met him and like most interested in Brooklyn basketball, has heard of his heroics.

"He may be terrific for his age, I'll give him that, but I can't have an intelligent discussion with anyone if they want to take it beyond that," Hartstein says.

"Sebastian happens to be a wonderful kid, but who could blame him if his ego gets out of control? Let's let him be a seventh-grader, let's let him be a kid. ... People look at NBA players and wonder why some of them act the way they do. Well, it starts back in high school and before. Now, imagine the kids who are the victims of such insanity and don't go to the NBA.

"Their lives could be ruined."

For the moment, Sebastian Telfair is on a mission. He remembers reading the latest edition of Slam magazine, which happened to include a mention of his name. Almost.

And now he wants to share the passage with a visitor.

But the magazine is off the shelves at the neighborhood drug store and the video rental store as well.

So it is up to Sebastian Telfair to recount the article's highlight.

"There is a kid in Miami who told the magazine he thinks he is better than me," Sebastian says. "But he didn't remember my name. All he said was that he is better than Stephon Marbury's cousin. That's what he called me."

The boy pauses as he thumbs through another magazine - Sports Illustrated For Kids.

"Someday he'll know my name," says the seventh-grader at Junior High School 238, whose favorite subject is math. "A lot of people will know my name."