Wedding Book Insider info on Iverson nuptials It had become the multimillion-dollar question around Philadelphia: What’s going on with Allen Iverson’s wedding? Well, “The Answer” is getting married tomorrow at the Mansion in Voorhees, N.J., an elegant catering facility, according to Daily News sources. Buses will pick guests up from their hotels — the Ritz-Carlton, the Cherry Hill Hilton and the Holiday Inn in Center City — and transport them to New Jersey for the affair. The star-studded guest list includes a number of music industry players and NBA stars such as Laker Shaquille O’Neal and the Orlando Magic’s Patrick Ewing. Following the wedding, Iverson and his bride, longtime fiancee Tawanna Turner, will be transported back to Philadelphia to the Four Seasons hotel. Ever since details of the once-delayed event began to emerge, the affair has been shrouded in more secrecy than a Sixers’ playbook. A worker at the Mansion said yesterday that the facility was available for bookings tomorrow and that the Iverson wedding would not be held there.  The Mansion is something of a Philadelphia-area institution when it comes to upscale weddings and banquets. Developers built it 1988 as part of the Main Street complex, a residential-retail-commercial center on Evesham and Kresson roads. Designed to look like a European manor, it is set back on a beautiful manicured lawn and boasts a lake stocked with swans. Turner told a Daily News reporter earlier this week that she considered her wedding “private” and declined to reveal any details. Even many of the relatives and friends of the man many refer to as “Bubba Chuck” said they didn’t don’t know the wedding location. Robert O’Neale, a cousin of Ann Iverson’s, Allen Iverson’s mother, plans to leave Hampton, Va., Iverson and Turner’s hometown, at 4 a.m. for the five-hour drive to Philadelphia. Once he arrives, he — along with his brother and son — will check into the Holiday Inn, where a block of $139-a-night rooms has been reserved in Turner’s name. He’s not quite sure what will happen next. “I’m invited, but I just don’t know where it’s going to be yet,” O’Neale said of the nuptials, adding, “I’m excited. It’s going to be off the hooook!” The invitations have surfaced in the media, but they haven’t been much help. Instead of a location for the wedding, they merely list a telephone number for invitees to call for instructions. One definite no-show at the wedding will be none other than former Sixers President Pat Croce. “I never got an invitation,” he told the Daily News yesterday. Sixers Coach Larry Brown was invited. And so were such Sixers front-office folks as general manager Billy King and communications director Karen Frascona. “We’re getting calls right and left,” Frascona said. “It’s a private affair... If they want to keep it private, it’s up to them.” Frascona said she had asked Turner, mother of Iverson’s 3-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, about releasing a photo of the couple in their wedding finery, but Turner hasn’t given the go-ahead yet. Larry Platt, a Philadelphia-based writer who knows Iverson and who hopes to write a book with him, said the secrecy was in keeping with what he knows about the NBA’s Most Valuable Player. Platt said Iverson became leery of the press after a well-documented bowling-alley brawl as a teen-ager in Virginia. “He felt victimized,” Platt said. “The first couple of years when he came to Philly, he was in a total shell. He’s very private and protective of Tawanna and the kids. There are all kinds of crazy people who want to know where he is at every moment.” Turner, too, has a retiring nature, Platt said. “She’s really quiet, really sweet,” he said. “At the games, she doesn’t have a really big presence. She goes to the games, but the kids sit with Ann [Iverson, Allen’s mother], who has a big presence. Tawanna sits at the other end with one of Allen’s friends.” Meanwhile, many of Iverson’s guests are trying to figure out just what to give a multimillionaire who loves Bentleys and rap music. O’Neal said he planned to head out to a mall last night.  Staff writers Stu Bykofsky and April Adamson contributed to this report.		Author Jenice Armstrong   Source Daily News   Return to Articles