Allen Iverson is in trouble, they say. It is not a good or an easy thing to be banned from casinos in Atlantic City. This must be serious. I have a connection to Allen Iverson and I hope things get right.
This goes back a few years, to the first game of the 2001 NBA finals. I was drinking in a bar called Dougherty’s, the first and best place I drank in Baltimore. I was 21 and some change and drinking alone for the first time, or drinking alone in the presence of other men drinking alone, which is a compounded kind of loneliness. I was in a lull between the physical exhaustion of bike messenging and the emotional exhaustion of a long, bad relationship. I shouldn’t have been in Baltimore, but I was and I would be for at least another six weeks.
The first game of the Finals was on in the corner of the bar. I’d vaguely followed the NBA post-Jordan. The return of the Lakers, with both Shaq and Kobe plus some old dogs from the Bulls teams, seemed enough proof that something was rotten with basketball. The bar was listlessly cheering for the Sixers. They were Baltimore’s version of a local team. They hadn’t been good in my memory of watching sports. Now they had Iverson, the league MVP.
Iverson was sort of local, too. He came from Virginia, where he was a state champion quarterback, and went to Georgetown, down in DC. The rap on Iverson was that he was lazy and a thug, but my mind was open. The Sixers were completely outmatched, outclassed, outbodied by the Lakers that series. Their one advantage was Iverson, a six foot tall scarecrow of a guy. It was almost as if only this one game mattered to them – they would lose all the others. It was startling to watch Iverson risk his body driving to the hoop again and again. People at that bar were taller than him. There was a darkness about him that turned off America, but I don’t think I have seen anyone play a sport with such blinding desire.
The Sixers took the game to overtime, and eventually won. Iverson scored 48. Someone has cobbled together some of his best moments from that game. Only two things are worth watching. When he sizes up beside Shaq around 5 minutes in and the Ty Lue jump shot. I can still see it. Fake for the base lone, pull-back, dribble, jump shot from the corner, net. And then the literal step-over, over Lue’s prostrate self.
It was the last game of basketball I had anything but passing interest in. I was up in Jersey talking basketball with my dad afterwards.
“I hate Iverson,” he would say. Loads of people said this casually. It is something to be hated by white America. At the Puerto Rican Day parade that year, everyone had his jersey. It was only nine years ago.
Allen, get it together.
