The road was long and filled with potholes, bumps and detours, but never recrimination. You either accepted Allen Iverson for who he was or he simply moved onto the next possession, the next crossover dribble, the next game.
It was a long run from a Newport News, Va. to prison to a saving stop at Georgetown University to the NBA as the top pick in the 1996 draft by the 76ers and now this. A contentious climb to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame would be a long trek for anyone, but for Iverson, and for all those who remained loyal, it covered difficult miles that can’t be measured by an odometer.
“I used to say my biggest accomplishment was just getting drafted, whether it was the first pick or the 100th or whatever,” Iverson said. “But this is the best feeling because it’s a tribute to everybody who helped me and stood by me, regardless. My actions, right or wrong, there were people who supported me through this long, hard journey.”
Iverson forced you to make the choice, because he wasn’t going to sand down the sharp edges of his personality or his lifestyle. You accepted the entire package of the good and the bad and the contradictions in between or you went someplace else to find your raw basketball kicks.
“I don’t regret nothing in my life,” Iverson said, before turning right around and saying he’d like a do-over with his old coach in Philly, Larry Brown.
“If I could have a wish as an athlete, I wish I had bought into what he was trying to give me all along,” Iverson said. “I was just being defiant, being a certified ass for nothing, when all he wanted was the best for me. I didn’t take constructive criticism the way I should have. When I finally caught up to that, that’s when I went to being the MVP.”
Impact made doing it his way
The mind flashes to a long ago scene when Iverson stood at midcourt gripping the Most Valuable Player trophy and the transformation was complete.
It wasn’t quite a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, because Iverson never would be described as something so light and delicate.
But just as dramatic and, maybe, just as natural.
It was as jarring a sight that night at the 2001 NBA All-Star Game in Washington, D.C., perhaps, as seeing Mike Tyson in a set of tights with the Bolshoi Ballet or having the chiseled visage of Richard Nixon join the great ones high up on Mt. Rushmore.
Yet this was the way it had to be if his game, his league, his sport was to have continued hope to grow and flourish.
For 14 NBA seasons, people said Iverson was the changing face of the league and that was not always meant in a good way.
But tattoos are only skin deep. Hairstyles change and grow, just like people.
The mere announcement that Iverson been voted into the Hall of Fame brought back a sudden rush of so many memories of the will-o’-the-wisp guard who broke ankles, broke protocol and broke the mold of what a little man could do.
He was Rookie of the Year (1997), MVP (2001), a four-time scoring champion, three-time steals leader, three-time All-NBA First Team member and twice was given the top prize at the All-Star Game, the first time for his performance in the nation’s capital when Iverson showed that behind the hip-hop face of a modern player was an old-fashioned pro who simply lived and loved to compete.
The player whose reputation would a year later become eternally stamped by a rant about practice was the ultimate gamer who brought the Eastern Conference from 21 points down in the fourth quarter of an All-Star exhibition game because, well, if you’re gonna play, you might as well try to win.
Iverson’s style was always far less an artistic display and much more a competitive exercise, as if there was something to prove. And there was.
The guy who had been called “Me-Myself-and-Iverson” spent much of his career, as he’s spent most of his troubled life, listening to people doubt not only his motives, but what’s inside his heart.
“I had to learn that some people are just not going to like you. I had to have thick skin, when I would see what people would say or write about me,” Iverson said. “Now, I just concentrate on the people who say, ‘I love you, A.I.’ It took until this old-ass age of mine to realize that. I feel so good for everybody who helped me. I’m talking about the true fan who from Day One was like, ‘OK, I’m an Allen Iverson fan.’ I want them to sit back and feel like they accomplished this. Because you can’t do nothing by yourself. You need somebody with you when you’re down to pick you back up. I want everybody who rooted for me to feel good about today.”
Small in stature, but unbreakable
He was the perilously skinny, little guard who thrived in the big man’s game because he was absolutely fearless with the ball in his hands. Iverson could have pulled up for even more of those off-balance jumpers from way outside, but he enjoyed too much the macho challenge of going into the paint and taking it all the way to the hoop, even if it meant all those dented fenders from getting knocked down painfully to the hardwood floor time after time after time. And keep getting up.
“A.I. was the type of guy you couldn’t break,” said Shaquille O’Neal, the mammoth center who joins the 6-foot Iverson — the smallest player ever taken with the No. 1 pick in the draft — in the Hall of Fame Class of 2016. “I tried to break him a couple times. A lot of little guys when they tried to come in there with all that fancy stuff, I tried to put them on their back. But he just kept coming back. He hated to lose. That’s the type of guy you want to have in a back alley with you. The type of guy you want to have on your team. He was a joy to watch.”
But his hard-charging style did have some effect, but did not keep him off of the court.
“There were a lot of mornings where I was walking around like Fred Sanford, and my wife would say, ‘I know you’re not playing basketball tonight,’ ” Iverson remembers with a twinkle in his eye. “I’d say, ‘Oh, yes, I am. Because there might be that one person there who will never go to another game, and maybe I can give them something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.’ “
Not every night was memorable, but it was always interesting with Iverson, who had a career and led a life that is raw and unscripted.
The famous rant about practice just happened in one of those emotional moments and still follows him around today.
“My best friend had just got killed,” he said. “I thought the press conference was for me to come in and put to rest all the talk about me getting traded from Philadelphia.
“I was ecstatic and happy that I could go into that press conference and tell the whole city of Philadelphia and the rest of the world, ‘Don’t worry about trade rumors, I ain’t going nowhere.’
“But with the emotional state I was in, if you would have said something about lasagna, I would have kept saying lasagna. I was already on edge. I was happy. I was the thinking press conference was going to be positive…Then the media start talking about practice.
“Yeah, that’s something I wish I could take back, but I can’t. My kids tease me about it. I’m a Hall of Famer and I can go outside today and go to a restaurant and somebody will come up to me and say ‘Practice? You talkin’ ’bout practice?’ That’s all you can think about? It is what it is.”
Staying true himself
Iverson was as far removed image-wise as one could get and still live on the same planet as two of the three players who preceded him in winning his first All-Star MVP trophy — the quietly purposeful Tim Duncan and the nearly regal Michael Jordan.
He was the foam on the front of the new wave.
“I’m one of them,” Iverson said, “but I’m also me.”
For just over a decade that’s who the demanding, discriminating Philadelphia fans got to see, the fearless competitor, the tough nut that wouldn’t crack, the lump of coal that used the intense pressure to transform himself into a diamond.
A few months later, Iverson would willfully, sometimes it seemed singlehandedly, drag the Sixers to the NBA Finals and earn his due respect from the public at large. However, it was that game amid other All-Stars when he demonstrated to the masses what, behind the perception, was his reality.
In those flashing, brilliant final minutes when Iverson was everywhere on the floor, making steals, setting up fast breaks, scoring on twisting, jackknifing drives, he could have been a player from any era, no different from Bob Cousy, Bob Pettit, Julius Erving, Willis Reed, Walt Frazier and the other greats who had been introduced to the crowd at halftime.
He looked and acted different, this new kid, like new kids always have. But what it was about that day was showing maturity, growing up.
Sometimes the torch is passed and sometimes it is a wild spark that burns down the forest to make room for new growth.
He was never going to be Jordan, Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain or Larry Bird. You were asking too much to replace that. They laid the foundation, established the game in the consciousness of a worldwide audience. While he followed them all down the road, Iverson’s more winding path was lined by trees that were unforgiving when he crashed head-first into them.
“The ride definitely wasn’t perfect,” Iverson said. “I made a whole bunch of mistakes just like people make. But people look at us like we are not human and don’t understand that we bleed just like them and we have feelings just like everybody. So it’s like I want so much for the people that stuck with me the whole time. I want them to feel good about it. I want them to feel like they are Hall of Famers.
“I know God blessed me, but I wanted to be everybody. I wanted to be Michael. I wanted to jump like him. I wanted to pass like Magic (Johnson). I wanted to play like Isiah (Thomas). I wanted to rebound like (Charles) Barkley. I wanted to shoot like (Larry) Bird. I added every aspect of everybody that I looked up to and I put it all in one game at 6 feet, 165.”
Playing so much larger than life, in part because the playing was his life, an indefinable blur, a tiny spark that could ignite and burn the house down.
“I never thought about life after basketball,” Iverson said. “To be honest, I didn’t want the Hall of Fame to ever come. That’s because I wanted to play forever.”
