There was a time when Sebastian Telfair was the great teenage promise of basketball with LeBron James . Maybe not at the transcendent level of LeBron, but close enough to share covers as future dominators of the orange planet. Before finishing high school, he had already starred in a documentary , a book and signed a $ 10 million contract with Adidas. The toy broke down the road. This week Telfair has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison for possession of a semi-automatic rifle, ammunition and drugs.

Telfair was arrested at a traffic control in January 2017 for a second-degree crime for possession of firearms. It was not the first time he had such problems: in 2007 he had already been sentenced to three years probation for possession of weapons and a year earlier the Portland Trail Blazers had fined him after discovering that he was carrying a loaded weapon on the plane of the equipment hidden in a pillowcase.

Sebastian Telfair's story was sweet. He was a cousin of Stephon Marbury , pure royalty of New York basketball when being a base raised in the Big Apple still meant something. He had broken Kenny Anderson's historic scoring record. He had eclipsed LeBron on the prestigious ABCD campus with one year less. Derek Jeter or Jay Z were seen by their matches. His name appeared in the ' New York Times' or the 'ESPN ' as one of those chosen. A decade later, when it was already obvious that the NBA door was closing, he acknowledged that he had not known how to assimilate all that.

In 2004, along with Shaun Livingston, he became the first baseman in history who made the jump to the NBA directly from the institute , but his career never took off. There it was no longer only with talent. " I didn't know how to play basketball. They hadn't taught me . [...] The NBA was a league for indoor players and I didn't know how to play with them, how to get them the ball. [...] I'm from New York. We dominated the game and I thought I was the only one who could do it. It took me a few years to understand it, "he would confess some time later.

Telfair was diluted. He went through seven different teams in nine seasons and before he turned 30 he was already in China , where his cousin Marbury had managed to redirect his career to become a legend in the Asian country. In 2014 he had one last chance in the NBA, but it didn't last a month. After another unsuccessful return to China, his career was already over when in a traffic control in 2017 the police found in his car a semi-automatic rifle, a bulletproof vest, ammunition and drugs. The toy was already broken .

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