Little big man Allen Iverson carries the Sixers and his family and his friends and his sneaker company It is the dawn of the new NBA season, and Allen's World has gathered in San Antonio. There is Gary Moore, Allen Iverson's personal assistant, who was his boyhood football coach and mentor but now books his limousines. There is Ann Iverson, his mother, and George "Jack" Jackson, his mother's boyfriend. And there is the star's hairstylist, a New Jersey woman who flies nearly everywhere the 76ers play and does his cornrows two or three times a week. On this day in the first week of November, Ann Iverson has given her son his daily Bible verse, something about the parent's words and counsel living within the child. She thinks it's from the Old Testament but isn't sure - "my old man provided it," she says, referring to Jackson.  And Allen Iverson, 24, has given his mother a gift, a platinum pendant in the shape of a 3, his uniform number. The pendant has 63 diamonds embedded on it and is about the size of a frozen waffle. In her courtside seat at the Alamodome, home of the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs, Ann Iverson wears her new trinket on a gold chain over her customized Sixers jersey, which announces her in big block letters as "Iverson's Mom." As the Spurs are introduced, they trot to center court to receive their championship rings from NBA commissioner David Stern. Most of the Sixers watch from their bench, but Allen Iverson - the smallest man ever to lead the NBA in scoring - sits cross-legged on the floor, slithering ever closer until he's nearly in the middle of the celebration. He pounds his hands enthusiastically for each person who gets a ring, from the assistant trainer and equipment manager to superstars Tim Duncan and David Robinson.  By the end of the ceremony, he is on his feet applauding with the home crowd. He's drinking this scene in, letting it penetrate. So this is how it feels to be an NBA champion. Iverson the player is a creative and kinetic genius. A centerpiece of the post-Jordan NBA. A certified national figure just named by Esquire magazine as one of the "21 Most Important People of the 21st Century" - right up there with a neurobiologist, a foreign policy visionary and a brain surgeon.  He is Philadelphia's most compelling athlete. Also its most confounding and exasperating. Who is Allen Iverson? One hundred sixty-five pounds of pure enigma, baby. The game begins and Iverson is all raw energy - cutting and juking by opponents. In a sport of extraordinarily fast human beings, no one is fast enough to keep up with him. Iverson starts fast and, even more so, he stops fast. He gets shots off while defenders are still moving in the direction they thought he was headed. He scores 9 points in the game's first four minutes, and the Sixers - undermanned and undersized, as they will be through the early season with their three best big men injured - get off to a surprising early lead. It won't last. (Iverson himself would break his right thumb on Nov. 22, knocking him out of the lineup. He had been averaging better than 30 points a game, best in the league.) The team and its star run out of gas in the fourth quarter. But Iverson, slumped on the bench, a towel over his head, is suddenly energized - although not by the game. He turns to shout back at a fan heckling him from behind the bench. Seven-foot, 300-pound Stanley Roberts, a veteran on the injured list, ambles over and puts himself in front of Iverson - a mountain of a man in a safari suit standing between the young star and trouble.  But it's not over. A man in an Iverson jersey, wearing his Sixers cap backward, rushes in to confront the heckler. They're nose-to-nose. The Iverson backer is black and the heckler, like nearly all of the Alamodome crowd, white.  This is an ugly little incident. One hundred percent avoidable. Just as it looks as if they're about to fight, a police officer arrives and leads the man in the Iverson jersey back to his original seat - which is right next to Ann Iverson. It is George Jackson, the fellow who provided the Bible verse. "The guy was messing with Allen," Jackson will explain later. "Mom was offended, so I had to go over there and defend her." Allen Iverson talks with the fatalism of someone still close to the streets. "My thing is I play every game like it's my last," he says one day after practice. "I owe that much to myself. I owe it to my family and friends and I owe it to the sport and to God, for giving me the talent. A lot of guys say that but don't mean it, but I'm someone who does because I know a lot of things can happen. You just never know." All his life Iverson has seen unexpected things happen, most of them bad. As a teenager in Hampton, Va., he was at a party in a hotel where someone was shot dead. A month later Iverson and his high school friends were caught up in a now infamous bowling alley brawl. Chairs were swung. Bones were broken. Only the black kids were charged. Iverson - the best high school basketball player and the best quarterback in the state of Virginia - spent four months of his senior year at Newport News City Farm. Convicted of maiming by mob (that's an actual charge).  It was a bum deal. He was released after Virginia's governor commuted the five-year sentence. After Iverson had gone off to Georgetown University, an appeals court threw out the conviction. He spent two years in college before jumping to the NBA. His friends now are his friends from back home. Same cast. Andre "Arnie" Steel. Marlon Moore. Rahshaan "Rah" Langford. Eric Jackson. Lamont "Gold" Melvin.  They've been called his "posse," and there's been a constant murmur about them since his rookie year in 1996. Will they pull him down? Get him into trouble? Well, check out Iverson's newest tattoo. (He has lots and is getting Rodmanesque.) The new one is on his neck and in Chinese characters spells out loyalty, his credo.  "My friends made me," he says. "They're the ones who had something to do with keeping me alive on the streets before all of this. So you want to tell me that once I do something positive, they can't take a positive ride with me? That's ludicrous." Iverson has two children, Tiaura, 5, and Allen 2d, 2, called Deuce. He lives with their mother, his longtime fiancee, Tawanna Turner.  Deuce has cornrows like his daddy, and he's a crowd favorite. One night Iverson emerges from the Sixers' locker room, holding Deuce in the crook of his right arm and Tiaura in the other. Friends and family members chant "Deuce . . . Deuce . . . Deuce," and Iverson beams. "Being a father," he says, "is the best thing. It just weakens your heart." When he gets up in the morning or the afternoon - like most pro athletes, Iverson's a late sleeper - the first thing he wants to see is his kids. After that, he'll often call his mom.  His friends are around constantly. On days when there's no basketball, they watch videos together, play cards, shoot pool, go fishing. They go to clubs and stay out late. And they rap. Iverson despises the spotlight focused on his personal life, but he doesn't mind rapping about it. He and his buddies have cut a rap album that Universal may release as early as summer. Iverson, whose rap name is Jewelz, is the lyricist. The cuts have titles like "Hard," "Paper Chase" and "Love and Hate." "I write whatever's on my mind," he says. "It's not hard, because my life's so real." By which he means it's no picnic. Even now. As an NBA player, Allen Iverson is among the most coddled business travelers in America. Nothing but chartered flights and five-star hotels. Meal money is $85 a day. After the San Antonio game, the Sixers jet to Phoenix and check into the Scottsdale Princess resort and spa in the desert north of the city, where the amenities include two championship golf courses and a polo field. Across the road is Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Taliesin West complex. When Iverson's personal assistant, his mother and her boyfriend catch up with the team, he installs them in their own sumptuous suites.  This Iverson traveling party is only midsize; at times his road entourage is a half-dozen or more. (At home games, his friends and family fill a block of up to 50 seats. A few stay at his home; the rest he puts up in hotels.) Iverson's six-year, $70.8 million contract with the Sixers averages out to a staggering $11.8 million annually. He pulls down an additional $5 million a year from Reebok, his sneaker company.  All this money buys a lifestyle not only for him, but also for lots of others who want to go along on the positive ride. "I'm going to let you in on a secret," George Jackson tells me the next evening from his courtside seat. "We're starting a Web site. It's going to be MomIverson.com. She wants to chat before and after games." The Iversons are a study of celebrity in America. He's a basketball player who also has to be a rap star. She's the mother of a basketball player who needs her own Web site. At this moment, Ann Iverson is signing autographs for a long line of fans attracted by her "Iverson's Mom" jersey. She was 15 when she gave birth to Allen. She has a 21-year-old daughter in college and an 8-year-old daughter back in Virginia. Her youngest stays with baby-sitters when Ann Iverson is traveling to Sixers' games or at her other residences in Philadelphia and Dallas. When her son scores a basket, Ann Iverson holds up a sign that says "That's My Boy!" She's got other signs, too, which George Jackson dutifully carries from arena to arena in a canvas satchel.  Until not that many years ago, the life Ann Iverson and her children lived in Hampton was chaotic and sometimes hellish. There were apartments with no electricity or water and sometimes no food. Coaches, teachers and a school secretary quietly gave the high school hero money to eat. Ann Iverson's former longtime live-in boyfriend was convicted and jailed in 1991 and again in 1994 on cocaine charges. Iverson's high school coach frequently had to pick the athlete up in the morning to make sure he would attend school. Sometimes the coach had to travel to several addresses to find him. "More than once, I found out that he hadn't spent the night at home because he didn't approve of what was going on," Mike Bailey said in 1996.  On some occasions when he did find Iverson at home, Bailey said, he could see that there had been a party the night before. "After one of those times, I remember Allen saying to me, `This isn't the way it's supposed to be, but it's the way it is.' " Now Ann Iverson is the perky high school basketball mom she never was. After the Phoenix game, another Sixers loss, she waits outside the locker room. When mammoth rookie center Todd MacCulloch emerges, she says, "Hey, I know what I'm going to call you. Big Dude!" "That'd be all right, Mrs. Iverson," he says. Allen Iverson is the last one out. His mother plants a big kiss on his cheek, and they walk, hand in hand, through the dingy basement level of America West Arena until they reach the loading dock and the Sixers' idling team bus.  He climbs aboard. She's heading back to her limo and then to the Princess for the night. He is in no hurry to be a grown-up. His experience with grown-ups is they've never been too damn good to him. He's not enamored of their world, and why would he be? Sure, he's rich and privileged, but that's a recent phenomenon in the quarter-century history of Allen Iverson. The other thing is, grown-ups make judgments, and when they've judged him, it's been harsh and unfair. "Adults, man, they want to make a judgment about you on little things like how you dress and talk and who your friends are, yet they have their own crazy ways and crazy things they do," he reasons. "Look at this world. Babies in microwaves. People killing their own kids. Child abuse and racism. "And people are worried about me? Come on, man, that's amazing, isn't it? So I don't even worry about these people. I just concentrate on the kids. They relate to me a lot better. They don't care about nothing that's going on off the court. Adults, they want you to be perfect, and it's not going to be that way." Iverson utters the occasional four-letter word, but the worst one in his vocabulary is suit. It's an emblem of someone else's culture. Michael Jordan wore suits, $2,000 numbers that any corporate box holder at Chicago's United Center would have died to look as good in. Iverson thinks maybe one day he'll wear suits, but not now. (Just five games into the season, he was at war with a team dress code that ordained jackets and ties in certain settings. He vowed to accept fines rather than comply.) He wears baggy cargo pants, jangling gold jewelry, diamond earrings and usually a bandana or a do-rag. Some people glean from this hip-hop gear that he's some kind of gangsta, the type who might hurt someone.  But to be around Iverson at close range is to know immediately how vulnerable he is. Allen's not going to hurt anyone. It's far more likely that it will be as it always has been: He will be the one hurt, the one to pay the price.  Off the court, there's a swirl around him that he does not fully control, the intoxicating scent of cash and fame; a combustible mix of late nights, luxury autos, and too many people with too little at stake playing with the star's money.  There have been incidents, most falling into the general category of car trouble: Iverson lends out his cars, and bad things happen in them. In 1996, shots were fired at a Mercedes Iverson had lent out.  In 1997, Iverson was a passenger in a car stopped for speeding near Richmond, Va. When the state trooper smelled marijuana and conducted a search, he found a .45-caliber pistol on the floorboard. Iverson pleaded no contest to a gun charge, and a marijuana-possession charge was dropped. The league suspended him for one game. In 1998, two of his friends were arrested on drug charges while riding in his $138,000 Mercedes.  Iverson doesn't expect any more of these incidents, but in his world you don't put out guarantees. Life's too tricky. "When I first came to the league, I carried that little baggage of having been incarcerated, and people were always throwing daggers at me for that. And then there was the stuff with the cars, and all of it started adding up.  "But I was 20 years old, and people wanted me to be 30. Now that I'm 24, I'm still doing everything that I want to do but at my own pace. I'm getting smarter in every way, on and off the court. But I'm not rushing myself or going too slow. I'm just getting better as a person." There is a sadness about Iverson that no amount of money, jewelry and tattoos can obscure. Every female teacher at Bethel High School wanted to bundle him up and protect him. Nearly everyone he's ever come into contact with likes him, teammates, coaches, opposing players. Billy Payne, the warden at Newport News City Farm, was deeply fond of him.  Everyone likes him, but everyone worries about him.  Iverson feels the worry and doesn't like it. He translates it as something else: pressure to be not as real. Not as loyal. Not as black. "I don't want to be no crossover figure just to please some people," he says. "I'm from the inner city and that's who I am and that's what I'm gonna be." He feels like some NBA players cross over? "Hell, yeah! I mean, for whatever reason, for marketing purposes or to keep the media off their back. But it's different with me. At the end of the day when my career's over, I'll be able to look back at my kids and my friends and my moms and say I did it my own way. I didn't turn my back on nobody and become some phony type of person." Henry "Que" Gaskins walks into Buddakan, a trendy Old City restaurant, wearing baggy pants, a loose-fitting sweatshirt and a black do-rag over his cornrows. He has been mistaken for part of Iverson's entourage, which he finds half-flattering. He's also been called Iverson's baby-sitter, which he hates. A person who has observed him over the years describes him, admiringly, as a chameleon. He can be whatever he has to be. Gaskins, 33, grew up in a tough part of D.C., and has an M.B.A. from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. His background is fashion. He was a buyer for Saks Fifth Avenue and the department store chain Dayton Hudson. His job now is managing the "Iverson brand" for Reebok - a company once best-known for its line of women's aerobics shoes. A lot of people think the NBA, like other big-time sports, is all about money. That's wrong. It's really about sneakers. That three-headed synergistic monster of Nike, Michael Jordan and the NBA was bound together by the mighty Air Jordan. The first money NBA rookies see, sometimes their best money, is from their shoe deal. Iverson's doing fabulously on the sneaker front. Just this month he was on the cover of Kicks, a magazine devoted entirely to NBA players and the sneakers they wear.  Gaskins had been at Reebok six years as manager of basketball and urban marketing when he sold Iverson on the company. A basketball shoe called The Question was created for him, followed by The Answer, which is sort of Iverson's marketing nickname. (Nobody really calls him that.) Gaskins, his wife and three children moved to the Philadelphia suburbs as Iverson began his rookie season. Gaskins considers himself like a stock fund manager. "If you had a $40 or $50 million portfolio, you wouldn't just leave it alone and not watch it, would you? I look at myself as the portfolio manager of the Allen Iverson business, which is shoes, apparel, accessories and tie-ins like computer games for Sega.  "The Iverson portfolio can be anything that fits with his style, which is not street per se, but hip-hop. The cultural references would be Puff Daddy, Tupac, FUBU, Phat Farm, Tommy Hilfiger." Some of what causes concern about Iverson in the paneled offices of team and league officials - his defiant nature, the hint of danger - is actually good for Reebok. When in 1996 he was perceived to have disrespected Michael Jordan (which he really didn't), "that gave him street credibility to the nth degree," Gaskins says.  Iverson the Product does not toe the line, he challenges the establishment, just the way he attacks the hoop against bigger opponents.  But no one knows better than the canny Gaskins that there has to be a clear distinction between the mythological Iverson and the person who actually laces up the sneakers and plays. What sells best is winning. And you can't win if you mess up off the court and can't play.  Gaskins no longer goes on all the Sixers' road trips, as he once did. "Allen is starting to realize his role in society and understand he has to do certain things," he says. "In the beginning we had a lot of conversations where I would say, `I told you 10 times. . . .' But we don't have too many of those any more." Gaskins plays several roles with Iverson, big brother, mentor, financial adviser. Iverson fired agent David Falk last year, replacing him with a committee of Gaskins and the two Virginia lawyers who represented him in the bowling alley fiasco. For Reebok, Gaskins' job is to infuse Iverson's spirit into each Iverson-branded product. He travels the country to see what inner-city kids wear and shows them stuff Reebok might produce to see if they would wear it. This is a role the retail and fashion industries sometimes job out to so-called "cool hunters." But Gaskins says, "I don't need a cool hunter. I feel like I am a cool hunter. And I'm with the coolest guy in the league." In Iverson's second season with the Sixers, coach Larry Brown removed him from a game for not running the designed play. When he motioned for him to go back in, Iverson wouldn't budge from the bench. In a coach-player relationship, that's a serious fissure.  Brown seethed. When the team entered the locker room at halftime, guard Aaron McKie approached the coach before he could get to Iverson. McKie and Iverson are tight - "a case of opposites attracting," says McKie, a John Chaney protege from Temple whose game and off-court demeanor are devoid of flash.  As Brown remembers, McKie said to him, "I know this is affecting you, but let us handle it. We have a chance to be a good team, and we don't want this to get worse between you and Allen and have it affect everyone." Brown responded, "I know with the things that Allen's gone through that it hasn't been easy for him his whole life. . . . "  McKie cut him off right there. "Coach," he said, "there's 12 guys in that room who have had it just as tough, so we don't need to get into that." That, in fact, was probably not true. In any NBA locker room there are many hard stories, but few can claim Iverson's life. The message, though, was clear: Iverson's teammates, who care for him deeply and also recognize him as their best chance for success, would help raise him up.  Basketball is the most intimate of games. There are just 12 players on an NBA roster. Traveling parties are small, locker rooms cramped. On the court players "share" the ball and "help" on defense. No one has his own at-bat or blocking assignment. In football or baseball if your best player is a selfish jerk, it is still possible to be a championship team. But it is impossible in basketball. Iverson the teammate is still a work in progress. No one - not one man among more than 400 NBA players - is more of a warrior in a 48-minute NBA game. No one absorbs more punishment. (When he broke his thumb last month, he played the entire second half before getting it X-rayed.) "To watch what Allen does night after night at his size, it's just unbelievable," McKie says. "He takes a lot of shots, scores a lot of points, but we don't have egos about it. We come in every year and get everybody together and say, Look, we got one superstar, and everybody else should just play their roles." But Iverson doesn't love to practice. Few NBA players do during the grueling 82-game season, and stars can, if they choose, get away with sitting out. But if a team's stars practice, and practice right - with energy and focus - then the whole team will. Iverson is still sometimes late. Other times, he has begged off with injuries that look to coaches more like exhaustion from late partying. "When I first got the job, he never practiced the day after a game and he always said he was hurt. But it was because he was out to all hours," says Brown, who is among the most straight-talking of all people in pro sports, sometimes too much so for the Sixers' brass.  "The first half of that year, it was unbelievable. But it's getting continually better. It's lack of experience on his part. Allen doesn't have a malicious bone in his body.  "I know that if your best player doesn't practice, doesn't lift [weights] like everybody else, eventually you don't have a team. But he doesn't know that yet. When you see little changes, little steps forward, you better be excited about that. You can't expect giant leaps." After Iverson was late for a practice last season, McKie said to him, "Look, Allen, you gotta find a way to get here on time. It's not fair to everybody else that we have to be on time and you're gonna be late or whatever. It's not about you, it's about a commitment to your teammates." Iverson's response?  "He listened," McKie says. "He agreed. He's gotten more responsible every year." The thick crowd around Iverson is a more complicated issue, one largely off limits to coaches and team executives. Challenge Iverson on matters of family and loyalty, and you lose him. "I'm not going to lie to you. I'm always concerned about Allen when he's not in our cocoon," says Pat Croce, the team president. "When he's out on the town, he's the king. There's no one to tell him what to do. "But he's smart. He knows the streets. He'll learn from his mistakes. But you can't tell Allen what to expect. He has to learn in his own way." Brown, a basketball lifer who has coached six previous pro teams and an NCAA champion at Kansas, can talk about Iverson's relationships as strictly a basketball issue. He views the crowd that shadows him as a distraction, an intrusion. "I've never been through a situation where a player goes on the road and has all these people around," he says. "From a coach's standpoint, I have to respect the feeling he has for his mom and the people who are there. "But I see him before games, and we're trying to concentrate on what we're going to do, and he's worrying about last-minute tickets and how everybody's getting to the next city. Somewhere along the line it's got to kick in that `this is my job, this is my responsibility, and I have to prepare myself to play.' But it's not going to happen right now." Home opener, 1999: Iverson has his right hand cupped to his ear and he's looking toward the upper reaches of the First Union Center. Louder, he's signaling, and more than 19,000 fans oblige. There is a deep connection here - Allen Iverson and the Philadelphia sports fan.  Pro basketball in Philadelphia, comatose for a decade, was reawakened last season by the electrifying Iverson and his young teammates. They made a valiant run into the second round of the playoffs, until the veteran Indiana Pacers physically abused Iverson and took the Sixers out in four games straight. Iverson never whined, never complained. He just kept getting back up and getting slammed back down by more big bodies.  The home fans, needless to say, ate this up. Not the battering Iverson endured, but the effort he gave, the guts he showed. And so late last season something came into focus: Iverson was the athlete Philadelphia sports fans had been craving. Who gave a rat's tail if he came in an unfamiliar wrapping?  His game really wasn't that pretty. He just climbed in the foxhole and went to war. The little guy was gritty as hell. Now, moments after his two consecutive 3-point baskets have clinched the Sixers' first victory of the 1999-2000 season, he is renewing the bond with his fans. They love him - he loves them back.  Louder!  It gets even louder. You want to be a fan of Allen Iverson? That's something well worth being. He puts on a show. He gives every last ounce of sweat. He's a soaring spirit - a gifted survivor - who needs all the support he can muster. But if you want to take the positive ride with him, strap yourself in tight. There may still be bumps ahead		Author Michael Sokolove   Source ------   Return to Articles