I am a Gemini, like Prince and Allen Iverson and Kanye West. I’m convinced our shared astrology means we’re pretty much the same folks, which causes me to roll my eyes any time an athlete is referred to as “mercurial” and to expect that tantrums will always seem minor and worthwhile, a small price to pay for creative brilliance. Oh, and that hubris ain’t hubris if it’s accurate.
Looking for The Answer
On the cusp of his 40th birthday, the newest Allen Iverson biography illustrates how hard it is to get to know the real A.I.
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Except ... not really. Prince is Prince. Kanye is KANYE. Rational people don’t look at those singular talents and go, “It me!” You hear Sign O’ The Times or MBDTF (or see them in assless pants or a leather kilt) and get checked; you’re not about that genius life. That’s the thing about A.I. Over the course of his 14-year lock-for-the-HOF career, we all watched him brutally slam into Shaq, throw up a circus shot that made the behemoth look like a doof and emerge hand cupped to his ear in expectation of adulation, and thought, “That’s how hard I’d play, too.” Iverson stirred up so much crap for the way he looked, but the jewelry and the cornrows and the tattoos and the shooting sleeve never obscured his heart. Because of his heart lots of people co-opted for their own lives whatever piece of him they could afford or intuit.
In assembling his unflinching look at Iverson, Not A Game, Kent Babb interviewed more than 100 people, poured through reams of court documents and earned himself a Twitter stalking by (maybe) Ann Iverson. Babb came away with what’s likely the most complete look at Iverson’s life out there, one which fixes on the indomitable AI, the man who threatened his wife’s life, regularly abandoned his kids for bars and signed over half his future earnings in a staggeringly one-sided contract. Babb lays bare the Jekyll and Hyde duality in Iverson that’s persisted all these years, an identity that has always seesawed between his best and worst traits -- and which has lately tilted toward ruin.
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Still, in his acknowledgements, Babb -- a white South Carolina native who grew up unrich and, like A.I., married his high school sweetheart and wrote his way to the top of a way less lucrative field -- admits he’s like the rest of us, seeing himself in Iverson’s flawed and defiant path. “Like Iverson I am also gruff/focused, impatient/determined, and stubborn/confident; I have my manner of doing things, and in my mind, that sometimes must be allowed to be that.”
Because of the contrarian art that Iverson rendered nightly during his playing days, looking for an explanation of how he was forged became part of our quest to identify with him. Love an underdog? To borrow from Charles Mingus, Iverson was beneath the underdog. His odds for surviving and succeeding have always been so far from realistic, both in terms of where and how he grew up, that they read like a script. You’ve heard details about the despairing poverty of other athletes so similar sounding that they seem rote, both tragic and repetitive because they apply to an entire class of people who live in the margins -- and who we only care about once they’ve triumphed.
As we inch up on the 40th birthday of the hip-hop generation’s Rocky, this cultural moment has triggered the nostalgia of everyone who lived through it. From antagonizing the shit out of David Stern and changing the NBA’s culture forever, clashing with Larry Brown and then stomping over Tyronn Lue in one of the GOAT all-heart performances of our era, Iverson did the impossible, then did it twice. So for us, hearing that A.I. is 40 is just like hearing that Mobb Deep remixed one of the darkest, most violent hip-hop classics for mass media consumption, a holy-shit-I’m-old moment of celebration. We made it.
It’s also occasion to realize that what we love isn’t holding up as well in the light as it should. “Survival of the Fittest” minus cursing is just dumb. Iverson’s appearances, looking ragged, bloated and wearing cornrows years after Melo and even J-Kwon gave them up makes him seem like a person who hasn’t quite adjusted to a new reality, like the time a friend of a friend got out of jail and asked me hopefully, “Tommy Hilfiger’s still hot in the streets, right?” We made it, now what?
★★★
We revisit Iverson’s iconic and empowering run all the time. There was 2003’s Only the Strong Survive. And the "30 for 30" doc about his high school trial, No Crossover. And Iverson, the documentary that premiered at Tribeca Film Festival last year and got picked up and aired on Showtime last month. In short succession the media has peered deeply into what made Iverson "A.I.," and as ever, the topic is too big to be broached in one sitting. The nuance required to tell the whole story can only be sustained for portions of it, and no look ever feels entirely complete.
But now we’re in that weird space -- the void since he finally, mercifully retired and the year or so before he’s eligible for the Naismith Hall of Fame* in 2016. And even with the voluminous Iverson canon out there and his willingness to talk about the glory days, we keep looking into Iverson. In trying to square the normal tragedy-to-triumph narrative with Iverson’s most recent public appearances, it’s becoming clearer that things aren’t that simple.
*That speech is gonna be lit.
That’s why Babb’s book is so effective. It bounces between stories of the endearingly perceptive Iverson and the thoughtlessly destructive one to show that no revelatory crossroads produced him. The two Iversons amount to a walking tautology. He is what he is.
As candid as Iverson’s always been -- the epic practice rant, joyful award presentations, etc. -- his own words are passionate enough for insight, but not perspective. Iverson talks and you think you feel the heart of him even though the syntax slips and slides around the truth. But ... you DIDN'T go to practice, tho. Conveying that passion, letting people feel close to him, has always been the biggest part of Iverson’s charm: some of his most impossible feats have been getting second chances from the most disciplined, rigid people on the planet.
Babb talked to them, too. He got John Thompson to confess that he wished he’d given Iverson MORE free reign over the offense at Georgetown, after giving exactly none of it to point guards prior. Larry Brown lamented that he wished his only NBA title could’ve come in Philly, even after battling with Iverson about everything a coach and player could, AND admitted that he tried to get MJ to sign Iverson in Charlotte long after the ride was over. Iverson’s longtime sparring partner, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Phil Jasner, was an out-of-bounds target during Iverson’s Practice press conference, but when he died of cancer in 2010 while Iverson was playing in Turkey, A.I. dedicated that night’s game to him. Iverson has always respected worthy opponents.
Those people were smart enough not to get duped by A.I.‘s charm and talent. They look back on their A.I. eras and, despite having been burned repeatedly, are still protective of him because the closer people draw to Iverson, they see how tough it is to present him clearly in one note. After spending hours with youth coaches and mentors and former teammates and Que Gaskins, the Reebok marketing exec who honeymooned with the Iversons and shepherded his legendary sneaker deal, Babb still didn’t get Iverson himself on record. That’s probably for the best.
“He and his people like to say he’s misunderstood -- he’s been saying that for years and years and years -- and that’s not true. When he’s understood it’s uncomfortable, for him, for people who read it, for people who’ve watched him and he’s not a palatable person to understand. I wrote a shit-ton about him and it makes me sad because I wish that it would’ve ended differently for him and hopefully it will end up differently for him. But where he is right now is sad.”
Iverson, by all accounts, tiptoed on the edges of alcoholism throughout his career -- in the book Larry Brown says he thinks Iverson was drunk during the infamous Practice rant, which happened in the late afternoon. That addiction has swerved past functional in recent years, as anyone who’s watched Iverson has worried. And if you took more than a cursory look at Iverson’s 2011 divorce proceedings, with testimony about Iverson peeing on the floor in front of his kids, dragging his wife Tawanna by her hair and having signed over half of all his future earnings (including that famous Reebok trust that kicks in when he's 55) to her, then it’s been hard to keep holding on to the naive belief that Iverson has earned a trouble-free retirement, even if that’s what we'd wish for him.
★★★
I went to the Tribeca screening of “Iverson” last year. I was impressed by some of the footage, and baffled by how it glazed over some parts of the plot -- after establishing how much he cared about his family and was particularly concerned about an unnamed illness his young daughter suffered, Iverson took a spot playing in Turkey thousands of miles away from their Atlanta home rather than take a reduced role in the NBA.
The omission left viewers to assume he did it out of financial necessity and to speculate about what his ego had cost him, but never said so explicitly and glossed over the chaos he caused in his time in Memphis. Iverson showed up just as the screening ended, right on time for the Q&A. Neither the movie nor the interview really covered the divorce trial, but someone asked about Tawanna anyway. That’s when I was struck by an answer that seemed either endearing in its persistence or terrifying in its territorialism, that even in divorce, “That’s still my wife. That’s the way I look at it. She’ll always be my wife.”
Over the years, spanning the decline of his career and eventual retirement, media reports have hinted at trouble with alcohol and money and family, problems that cropped up before in his career but were forgotten after another 50-point game. Like former teammate Aaron McKie says in Not A Game, he always believed that A.I. -- who never slept, got stinking drunk on Coronas nightly and carb-loaded with a four-hot dog pregame meal -- had that Michael Jordan characteristic, that mythical thing that drives Guys Who Just Aren’t the Same As Everyone Else. Iverson always wins and personal demons are just another thing in the way of a miracle performance, one which McKie is just realizing is gonna be harder than he thought. We won't write him off because we’ve been dazzled before, and we want to be dazzled again. Please.
We won't write him off because we’ve been dazzled before, and we want to be dazzled again.
On both a moral and legal scale, lots of what Iverson has done is wrong with no room for obfuscation. And maybe that’s why so many people close to him, media included, have been reluctant to look closely at what Iverson’s been and what he’s become. It makes it harder to see him in totality and that would be too much of a shame.
The other reason, too, is that despite the brutal reality of who Iverson is -- the reckless spending, the allegations of alcoholism and domestic violence -- he’s harder to reject than a Floyd Mayweather because he’s given us the visceral, fully human joy that clinical, impersonal Mayweather never has. You can’t separate Iverson’s performance from who he is, the entirety of who Iverson is. He will always be the flawed underdog who never relents and then flexes on you for not believing. We all want a piece of that identity to live in us even if it mostly doesn’t. It’s also what makes it so easy to swallow stories about Iverson suddenly being dry, reunited with Tawanna, a family man spending most of his time fishing and shuttling kids to school. It could be true. Nothing’s impossible for Iverson, right?
But it doesn’t entirely fit with the what we know about Iverson, 40 years into his life. With so much against him already, Iverson has always pushed normalcy away for reasons that it doesn’t seem like he even understands. After this long with one of the most candid, passionate and well-covered athletes of our time, we still don’t know the Answer. But we keep looking.
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