Locker Room:  Who's next? The best part (other than the groupies, obviously) of having a job which provides a pulpit for prognostication and prediction about pro sports is the business of guessing who is next. Who's the next prodigy? Who's the next big thing?

This column is addicted, for instance, to those cheery bulletins which announce every spotty-faced, wispy-tashed young lad who goes to Arsenal as being "better than Brady at that age".

It's a little like that thrill you felt when you were young and in on the rise of one of those bands whom nobody else had ever heard of. It was a thrill always destined to end in mild resentment. The band either remained so steadfastly stuck in oblivion that you came to be seen as something of a sad anorak type when you spoke enthusiastically of their demo-tape work and their chances of getting a support gig in McGonagles or their following increased without a finder's fee of kudos ever being offered to you. Either way, nothing ever matched the thrill of discovery.

Spotting prodigies is a little like that but more depressing. Sport chews talented kids up even more relentlessly than the music business, and the sheer number of those who get spat back out should be more of a concern to Unicef than to those of us who skulk about on the back pages.

Then there are those who make it and have entire careers in front of your eyes, almost without you noticing. One day you pick up a paper and yesterday's prodigy is being described with mint originality as "a veteran" or "a stalwart" and you realise with some despair you are some 15 years older than you thought you were.

I read recently that Stephon Marbury is 30. In the early 90s myself and Stephon had a special relationship. As with many of my special relationships, Stephon wasn't actually aware of my existence, but in many other ways we were tight.

This newspaper, which at the time was going through that golden era when it had more money than sense, had sent me to New York on some hackly errand, and from New York I was to fly on to Atlanta, Georgia, where I would perform another such errand, and then I would come home to a hero's welcome and several weeks off. On the way to New York I reread a brilliant book called The Last Shot by a guy called Darcy Frey.

The Last Shot was about a group of kids growing up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. They were trying to escape the place by securing a ticket to the world of pro basketball.

There was a minor character in the book who sort of tagged along after everyone but was already burdened with expectations of greatness. He was Stephon Marbury and he was difficult and not too likeable and the most interesting character in the book.

At one stage, after Stephon's father has looked for money from Darcy Frey in exchange for further interviews, there is an odd exchange between the author and the boys he is writing about. Marbury is justifying his father's demand to the other boys, all of whom are older than him. He turns suddenly to Darcy Frey and says, "You're thinking, what a bunch of niggers. Right." It's a shocking moment.

Although the relationship between the writer and the three boys was on one level exploitative, on another it was based entirely on Frey's natural empathy with his subjects. The kid explains himself though: "You got to think like a black man. Got to learn to say "f*** it, f*** everybody, f*** the whole damn thing. Now that's life in the ghetto."

The exchange put an amazingly uncomfortable slant on the entire book, and I wondered whatever had happened to this feisty kid. A few days later I was on the plane from New York to Atlanta and just as we were shutting the doors a young man and his modest entourage got on the plane and occupied a few seats across the aisle. Stephon Marbury and co. He was going to sign for Georgia Tech, where he would play for one year before moving on to the NBA.

It was one of those coincidences which leave an indelible mark and I sort of followed his career ever since, making a point twice to get accredited to NBA games in which Marbury was playing so I could get press access afterwards to hear him talk. Usually he was surly and uncommunicative, traits which have marred his relations with every pro team he has joined. I never had the guts to ask him about the book but I read a couple of times that he hated it.

Marbury is 30 now. Sort of a misfit in the New York Knicks team he was bought to save. His cousin Sebastian Telfair has assumed the mantle of next great New York point guard.

Telfair leapt straight from Lincoln High School in Coney Island to the big leagues, the first point guard ever to do so. He plays for the hapless Boston Celtics right now and is studied intensely as an example of the dangers of leaping, as they say, from prom to pros. A documentary about his life is the most-watched sports documentary the ESPN channel has ever made.

Telfair and his cousin don't get on but they are linked always in the public mind. Marbury, despite his epic surliness, seems to have good instincts. Most famously he endorses and wears a line of sneakers, the Starbury, which retail for just under $15. More oddly he retains the services of seven barbers to give free haircuts to kids in his old neighbourhood.

A few years ago outside a New York nightclub, some opportunist thieves relieved him of a diamond-encrusted chain worth $150,000. Last October his cousin Telfair suffered a similar fate when a chain worth $50,000 was stolen from him outside a nightclub owned by P Diddy. For a while New York hummed with the rumour that the rapper Fabolous, who was shot the next day, had been involved in lifting the chain.

It seemed so far from the world the two cousins grew up in. When he was young(er) and making it, Telfair would work out every day and to finish he would run the 15 flights of stairs in his building, five times. (So would you.) A few months before he was drafted to the NBA Telfair featured as a school kid on the front of Sports Illustrated. A few weeks previously two of his friends had been shot dead in the elevator in his building.

"I've seen more friends killed than I can count," he told Sports Illustrated.

It seems only yesterday when I first came across Telfair's name on one of those Hoops newsletters you can dip into on the net. Now he's tabloid fodder like his cousin before him and the same little school in Coney Island, Lincoln High, the rough-hewn stage for The Last Shot, is looking to send another phenom out into the world.

Last summer Lance Stephenson got taken to school, as they say, by the nation's number one school prospect, OJ Mayo, at one of those summer camps sponsored by sneaker companies and set up to be nothing more than a cattle market for young talent.

Stephenson (or, as the 16-year-old is known in New York, Sir Lance-A-Lot ) has time on his side though and will recover from the very public chastening. OJ Mayo will dominate the sports pages for a few years until I look up and find he is pushing 30 and I have a foot in the grave.

It's compulsive watching them come through, following the dream. They take down more than anyone should for being good at putting a ball through a hoop but there's a theme running through all their lives. They never seem any happier than they did as kids playing games on the blacktop court on Surf Avenue.

Having dreams beats the hell out of having grey hair. Even Stephon is old enough to see that now but nobody cares. New York has moved on to worrying about who's next.