America at Large: The putrefying stench which has been building up around Madison Square Garden got a bit more overpowering over the last few days, and one's initial inclination might be to simply shrug and say that Jim Dolan, Isiah Thomas, and Stephon Marbury all richly deserve one another.

You didn't need to be Nostradamus, after all, to see all of this coming as long as three summers ago at the Athens Olympics.

Wherever he is this morning, Larry Brown must be convulsing with laughter as he watches his former antagonists squirm.

Dolan presides over a sporting conglomerate that not only includes the world's most famous arena and its principal tenants, the NBA Knicks and the Rangers of the National Hockey League, but the mammoth Cablevision empire which telecasts their games.

James Dolan is the son of Cablevision founder Chuck Dolan, and since he was handed the keys to the family car a decade ago he has blundered his way through a number of dubious transactions. In a recent poll commissioned by Sports Illustrated to select the NBA's "worst owner," Dolan was the runaway winner.

Although Dolan was eventually smart enough to realize that he needed a more experienced basketball mind to oversee the organizational end of the NBA's most visible franchise, he was also dumb enough to appoint Isiah Thomas to the dual roles of team president and general manager.

As a star player for the Detroit Pistons in their 1988-90 championship reign, Thomas' basketball credentials were impeccable. His business acumen was another matter. In January of 2004 he attempted to put his stamp on the team by engineering a 10-player blockbuster trade with the Phoenix Suns that brought Marbury, a player who had already been traded three times in the previous eight years, to New York.

How strenuously Dolan and Thomas lobbied for the inclusion of Marbury on that summer's Olympic team is a matter of conjecture. Suffice it to say that Brown, who had been appointed the head coach of the American team, was not consulted in the make-up of his roster, and the collection that United States dispatched to Athens was clearly assembled with NBA marketing issues in mind. How the collection of All-Stars might perform together on the basketball court does not appear to have been a primary consideration.

That the talent-laden assemblage became the first US team not to win a gold medal in 16 years wasn't all Stephon Marbury's fault, but he was rather emblematic of all that was wrong with that team.

Once Jason Kidd declined to participate and Allen Iverson was miscast in the shooting guard's role, Marbury became by default the starting point guard on a "team" otherwise characterized by its paucity of accomplished ball-handlers and distributors, pure three-point shooters, and defence-minded players.

The US team suffered humiliating losses to Puerto Rico, Lithuania, and Argentina on the way to a bronze medal finish. The gold was won by Argentina, with the San Antonio Spurs' Manu Ginobili leading the way.

Despite the embarrassment in Athens, Larry Brown agreed to Dolan's entreaty to coach the Knicks - even though he realized that Stephon Marbury would be part of the deal. Relations between coach and player rapidly deteriorated to the point that after the 2005-06 season Dolan (with, no doubt, some encouragement from Thomas, who had by now become his personal Rasputin) felt obligated to fire the coach, buying out the remaining $28 million remaining his contract.

The choice of his successor was determined by a one-man search committee, and Isiah Thomas decided that the best choice for the job was himself. The president/general manager added a third hat to his portfolio and became the 27th coach of the New York Knickerbockers.

Last season, in Thomas' debut year as head coach, the Knicks lost 15 of their last 19 games to finish with the seventh-worst record in the NBA, and since then things have only gotten worse - for the team, for Thomas, and for Marbury.

Thomas spent much of the off-season as the subject of a sexual harassment suit brought by former team executive Anucha Browne Sanders. A jury determined that Dolan and Thomas were guilty of operating a workplace in which female employees were routinely called "bitches" and "hos," and socked the team with an $11.6 million award.

Salacious testimony during the trial also revealed that Marbury had engaged in sex with a young female Knicks intern in the back of an SUV parked outside a Mount Vernon strip club, and that he had called Browne Sanders a "black bitch". Marbury had further bolstered his public image during the period in question by announcing the marketing of an affordable (at $14.95) basketball shoe called the "Starbury".

In one television interview he described himself as "the best point guard in the NBA", although a recent evaluation on the league's own website ranked him 10th at the position.

And in a bizarre midsummer television interview, Marbury announced that he planned to play in Italy after the expiration of his current contract with the Knicks ("It's like a David Beckham thing," he explained). Last Sunday at the Garden, it was Marbury's meltdown that led to the Knicks blowing a five-point lead with two minutes to play as the Miami Heat scored the last eight points to win their first game of the season.

Starbury's contributions over the final critical minute included a ball heaved into the stands, a missed open shot, and a failure to defend on Jason Williams' shot that gave the Heat the lead.

Questioning his point guard's leadership qualities, Thomas announced his intention to bench him for Tuesday night's game in Phoenix.

Marbury's initial response was that he wouldn't dare. Thomas, he told team-mates, "has to start me. I've got so much shit on Isiah, and he knows it. He thinks he can get me, but I'll get him first". Marbury thereupon went AWOL, hopping on the next plane out of Phoenix.

He was back in New York by the time the Knicks fell to the Suns 113-102 for their third straight loss, and seemed likely to remain among the missing when the Knicks played the Clippers in Los Angeles last night. (He sent a text message to a New York Postreporter saying "I have no plans to be in LA as of now"). There is widespread speculation that the Knicks may now try to peddle Marbury to another team, but it remains dubious that there will be much interest in a mediocre 30-year-old point guard with $42 million remaining on the two years of his contract.

If Thomas finds himself in a bind, what about Dolan, who not only hired Thomas, but hired him twice - first as chief executive, then as coach? At whatever golf course he's playing this morning, Larry Brown has to be loving it.