From the start he crossed me over, closed my mind, made me look foolish. I kept stumbling backward into the kind of ignorance that has done so much damage to race relations in this country. I couldn’t see how this skinny little blur kept soaring and scoring, over and over. Maybe I got distracted by the tats and the cornrows and brazenly baggy shorts—no basketball star I could recall had ever worn any of those. When he was convicted (wrongfully, as it later became clear) of hitting a white woman with a chair during a bowling-alley brawl, I condemned him for the four months he spent in jail. From the moment he sauntered into the league, “The Answer,” as he was nicknamed, sparked nothing but stereotypical questions deep in my old-school, Oklahoma City–bred psyche. I misunderstood, misjudged, missed the point on Allen Iverson.
“Me, Myself, and Iverson” was the nickname I gave him early on. Here was a shoot-first (and -second and -third) point guard who was simply too little and too self-obsessed to live up to being the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft. Scouts I knew told me he was closer to 5’11” than 6 feet and weighed maybe 160 pounds. If only I’d known then that Allen Ezail Iverson has a heart nearly as big as he is—a sweet, sincere, generous, redemptive heart. But it would take me years to see that. Back then I concluded that you couldn’t trust or win with him. Neither of his Georgetown teams had made it to the Final Four.
Oh, what a blind hypocrite I was. Go ahead, accuse me of just being too white.
But wait, what poster dominated the wall of my high-school bedroom, alongside one of Joe Namath? Muhammad Ali. I loved Ali because he didn’t care what the white world thought of him. The white media tried to dismiss him as “The Louisville Lip,” and he just kept backing up his boasting and gloating with lightning fists. They tried to shrug him off as just another pretty face—he called himself “pretty”!—yet he proved to be as tough as any man who ever took a punch.
And who was my favorite baseball player when I was a kid? Bob Gibson of my beloved St. Louis Cardinals. The only piece of signed sports memorabilia I own is a baseball that St. Louis’s own Nelly got Gibby to sign for me. I loved Gibson because he dominated what long had been a white man’s game in ways no Black man ever had. The winner of World Series MVPs against the Yankees and Red Sox, he was simply the baddest man ever to throw a baseball. White hitter or Black, you show up Gibson and you’d get 95 in the ribs.
What drew me to my sports heroes? They shattered the mold, dared to be dangerously different. What did Allen Iverson have in common with my idols? Oh, just about everything.
So why couldn’t I see Iverson coming? In part because I grew up believing tattoos belonged only on sailors, bikers, and truckers. Iverson left Georgetown with only one tat, of the Hoya bulldog mascot. But soon he was addicted—and covered. Early on, the NBA airbrushed Iverson’s tattoos—likenesses of his mother, grandmother, and children—out of a cover shot for one of its publications. Iverson was outraged.
My FS1 colleague Chris Broussard covered the NBA for The New York Times and ESPN through Iverson’s career. For Broussard, Iverson’s breakthrough moment came at the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland, where he wore cornrows. “That was huge,” Broussard told me. “Nothing like that had ever been done in mainstream America. In the Black community, that was just a natural hairstyle. But the thought had always been, when you step into white America, you had to play the game, tone it down. Now it was like, ‘Wow, this dude is really being Black in mainstream America.’ Allen’s message was, ‘Be yourself.’ He was merging hip-hop and basketball. That was a first.”
Iverson, known for his “ankle-breaking” crossover dribble, had crossed the culture of the game he lived for with that of the music he lived by. Understand, Iverson wasn’t crusading. While he was proving to be a warrior on the court, he had no interest in being a social-justice warrior off it. He was no Kaepernick. No LeBron. Allen Iverson was simply being Allen Iverson, product of Newport News, Virginia—Newport “Bad” News, as it was called by residents of its projects.
Iverson did not want to be like Mike, either, as in Michael Jordan, whose attire was perfectly scripted Madison Avenue, as opposed to the Madison Avenue that was the main drag through Iverson’s Newport News neighborhood. As Iverson told Michael Eric Dyson, one of our pre-eminent authors on Black culture and oppression: “I was satisfied with my own.”
Meaning, with the way he and his friends had always dressed. Even the cornrows, he said, were no Black-and-proud statement. Iverson told Dyson he simply got tired of road barbers botching his cut. The cornrows were just easier to manage. “I didn’t get cornrows because of no thug shit,” Iverson told Dyson.
Yet Iverson’s be-yourself courage changed everything. Now, it’s harder to find a professional athlete who doesn’t have a tattoo. Iverson was ahead of a landmark curve. As he told Dyson: “I had to take the ass whipping for them guys [other NBA players] to be themselves … to be able to look like they want and be accepted.”
You taught me a lesson, AI.
Yet it wasn’t until Jordan was gone that I finally gave in to Iverson the player.
I had the privilege of covering Michael Jordan as a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. To me, he remains by far the greatest and clutchest player ever in any sport. So I was offended in 1997 by the runaway perception that rookie Iverson somehow “exposed” Jordan by crossing him over on March 12th at the United Center. Iverson even compared it in impact to seeing Mike Tyson getting knocked out.
But once Jordan retired—with six rings and six Finals MVPs—I must admit I began circling the dates of Iverson’s visits to the House That Jordan Built. Finally, after a conversation I had with Isiah Thomas, the baddest of the Bad Boy Pistons, I blessed Iverson in a Tribune column that ran on January 19th, 2001. This was both an apology and love letter to a man even smaller than Isiah.
Until then, Isiah Thomas was pound for pound, inch for inch, the toughest player I’d ever seen. Yet Isiah was two inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than Iverson. In 2001, Isiah, then head coach of the Indiana Pacers, told me: “He’s truly great in terms of stamina and the ability to compete every night. What gets him over the top is he’s a great athlete who will never say die. He’s tough and fearless.”
Again and again Iverson launched himself up through the long, strong arms of 7-footers, which often resulted in a no-parachute plunge down to the hardwood. When I wrote that column, Iverson had just separated his shoulder. The Philadelphia 76ers trainer said the typical recovery time was four weeks. Iverson missed one game.
Allen Iverson was as tough as Isiah Thomas. And he was better.
In my lifetime, two athletes have made me say, “I’ve never seen anything like that.” Two humans moved with inhuman quickness and elusiveness. Two were mystically gifted. One was Allen Iverson. The other was Michael Vick, who grew up four blocks from Iverson but was five years younger. The odds against the two rarest athletes growing up blocks apart on a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay were obviously billions to one. Vick says his 16th Street block was a little more dangerous—more drug dealers. But Vick felt safe enough to ride his bike down Madison Avenue to 12th Street, Iverson’s block.
Hard to believe, but Iverson the high-school option quarterback was said to be even harder to catch and tackle than Vick was at that age. Michael Eric Dyson says Iverson was “Vick before Vick.”
Vick didn’t see Iverson play basketball until his first game at Georgetown. “I went down in the basement and watched on TV by myself,” Vick told me. “His quickness was just … different.” Vick had the same reaction when he watched tape of his own freshman football season at Virginia Tech: “I realized that what I was seeing was just … different.”
They met when Vick was a sophomore in college and Iverson invited him to a local club back home, Shadows. Vick, considered smallish for an NFL quarterback, was just a half inch taller than Iverson, but outweighed him by 50 or 60 pounds. “He started calling me ‘Linebacker,’’’ Vick says. “Still does.”
Vick and Iverson grew close. “He has a sweetness to him,” Vick told me. “I’ve never seen a man so quick to cry.” These days, Vick doesn’t go back to the old Newport News neighborhood nearly as much as Iverson does. As Vick put it to me: “He thinks he is Virginia.”
Perhaps to a fault. Iverson refused to let go of his neighborhood attire and style, and brought many of his hometown friends along for his NBA ride. Chris Broussard, while working on an Iverson story in 2007, says he found that Iverson was supporting as many as 40 family members and friends, and that he often put up large groups in five-star Philadelphia hotels for weeks at a time.
These were the people who stood by him through his trial and the ensuing four months he spent in a correctional facility. During the trial, a videotape had surfaced showing that Iverson had left the bowling alley before the brawl broke out and the woman was hit with the chair. But it was not allowed in court. Clearly this was an attempt to make an example of the Black high-school basketball star. This injustice became a national story, thanks in large part to newsman Tom Brokaw, and after free-Iverson marches and rallies, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder granted him clemency.
But Iverson’s insistence on supporting so many of his supporters—on bringing Newport News to Philadelphia—eventually caused him financial problems as well as far too many temptations and distractions.
Michael Eric Dyson says, “Look, Allen is complicated. He’s flawed like the rest of us … but he’s amazingly generous—he just has a big beautiful generous soul.”
The Atlanta Falcons’ Vick, another No. 1 overall pick, also stayed in close touch with some of his Newport News hometown crew as “The Michael Vick Experience” became the most electrifying sports entertainment in Atlanta history. Vick wound up doing 21 months in federal prison. I’m a dog lover. I can’t forget what Vick did to those dogs. But I have forgiven him. I have also worked closely with him at FS1 and believe with all my heart and soul he’s a changed man—a decent man who did an evil thing. When Michael Vick thinks back on those 21 brutal months, he says his idol Allen Iverson was always there for him.
Allen Iverson’s “Practice Rant” is either the most famous or infamous soliloquy ever delivered by a professional athlete. If, in May of 2002, you viewed Iverson the player as godlike—as operating without the gravitational pull of other mortals—you believed the “Rant’s” lyrics and delivery rivaled Jay-Z’s. And if you thought Iverson represented everything that was wrong with professional sports, this episode was all you needed to say, “Told you.”
One way or the other, Iverson’s “Practice Rant” defined him.
In fairness, Iverson (and his family) had just suffered through a long season of trade rumors, fueled by speculation that Larry Brown had finally concluded Iverson was uncoachable. This was the season after Iverson had won the NBA MVP and carried an all-time ordinary Sixers team to the NBA Finals. Brown had even mentioned to reporters that Iverson had missed a practice. Yet when that troubled 2002 season ended (badly, upset by the Celtics in the first round), Iverson was assured by Brown and Sixers management he would not be traded. So, relieved, Iverson wanted to do a clear-the-air press conference.
During that media session, he was repeatedly asked about missing that practice, and about his practice habits in general, and he finally got exasperated and went Shakespearian.
At various points in the five-minute rant, you can hear several in the media audience laughing, which probably fueled and prolonged his performance. Iverson could be egocentrically naïve, even gullible, and was occasionally taken advantage of by reporters he knew and mistakenly trusted.
But many fans who watched and/or listened to that one flashpoint soundbite did not laugh.
Iverson said that fateful day: “I mean listen, we’re sitting here talking about practice. Not a game. Not a game. Not a game. But we’re talking about practice. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last. But we’re talking about practice, man. How silly is that?”
If only Iverson had said, “We’re just talking about one practice”—no harm no foul. If he’d given a reason why he missed just that one practice—injury, family issue, whatever—no big deal. But Iverson always had one irresistibly redeeming trait: He was honest to a fault.
Chris Broussard said: “When he talked to the media, he was always thoughtful and totally sincere and transparent.”
He did not back off his “practice” remarks or try to clarify and defuse them. No, the more Iverson spoke in the minutes after his “Practice Rant,” the more he made it clear he did not value practice. Or weight-training. Or cardio conditioning. Or nutrition. Or anything other than actually playing basketball.
Iverson said: “If I come in here looking like the biggest, baddest bodybuilder in the world … ya’ll going to give me MVP? I won it bony as hell.”
This was where my belief in Iverson again teetered. My man Michael Jordan believed practice was crucial for the team and for himself: for perfecting coach Phil Jackson’s Triangle offense, for working on defensive rotations to be used against the next opponent, and even for fire-testing his clutchness by shooting jump shots and free throws in post-practice gambling games against teammates. Those Bulls practices often took more out of the players than the games—which obviously got them even readier for the toughest playoff games.
What finally gave Jordan the edge to overcome the “Bad Boy” Pistons? An extreme commitment to weight-lifting. The older Jordan got, the harder he hit the weights.
No, AI, no. Don’t close the case for the closed minds out there (see: me) who saw you as little more than a stat-obsessed solo act—the original Russell Westbrook. Had Iverson been drinking? A 2015 book, Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson, made a strong case that he got drunk in the hours before the press conference—an accusation that Iverson strongly denied.
I was raised by two alcoholics. I know drunk. To me, from a distance, Iverson did not come off as intoxicated. It’s certainly possible he’d had a couple of drinks. But drunk? Hard to believe.
Yet, after that classic “practice” soundbite, the media session escalated into an emotion-packed, soul-baring tug-a-war—somewhere between Iverson on the couch and Iverson on trial. At points he was defiantly delusional, yet in the end, he was just so amazingly hard-to-hate vulnerable.
He seemed to be asking, if not begging, those who covered him to accept him as flawed, as human, but to love and appreciate him for giving every last ounce every second he was playing for the Sixers.
Near the end of the session, he jarred me by saying: “I don’t have a selfish bone in my body. I just want to win.”
False and true.
Here’s the irony that escaped Iverson. He actually had been blessed to wind up on a team without anything remotely close to a second star. This was no super-team with Dwyane Wade having to sacrifice for LeBron James or Steph Curry having to be astoundingly unselfish to make it work with Kevin Durant. No, in 2000-2001, Iverson averaged a league-leading 31.1 points, which helped win him MVP. Next on that team was Theo Ratliff at 12.4. Then came Dikembe Mutombo (11.7), Aaron McKie (11.6), and Eric Snow (9.8). So, yes, AI could be All In to Win … with nothing but selfish bones in his body. He won selfishly, without sacrifice, because the only way those Sixers were going to win was if Iverson shot till his arm fell off.
No doubt he played his heart out. No doubt he deserved MVP. As Kobe Bryant once said: “We all should be fortunate Allen Iverson wasn’t 6’5”.”
Kobe saw it up close and personal in the 2001 Finals, which began in Los Angeles. Yes, that little bag of bones Iverson lifted that Sixers team to a Finals against the Kobe-Shaq Lakers. Yes, Shaquille O’Neal had tattoos bigger than Iverson—who scored 48 in Game 1 at Staples Center as the Sixers stunned the Lakers in overtime. In that OT, Iverson famously stepped over Ty Lue after making a step-back jumper over him.
Legend born.
Not surprisingly, the Lakers proceeded to win the next four games and the Finals. But what an achievement that was for Iverson to even win a game at Staples. I didn’t think he had it in him. Standing ovation.
Iverson never even got back to a conference finals. But he did step over Ty Lue—and the Lakers—in a Game 1 at Staples.
Then again, in a way “The Rant” was the beginning of the end for Iverson. He was only 26, but his disdain for practice and fitness foreshadowed an early end to his career. He would play four more seasons in Philly and lead the league in scoring again (for a fourth and final time) in 2005. But once he was traded to Denver, at age 31, he began to age quickly. He could no longer play his way into shape. He began to look a little pudgy and lost a razor’s edge of quickness.
On ESPN, I made a point of saying what I was seeing in Iverson. He fired back at me in an interview.
But I believe he knew deep down I was right, and it hurt him. My larger point was that I did not want to see Iverson’s career end badly and sadly … which it basically did with forgettable stops in Detroit and Memphis and a ceremonial swan song back in Philly, looking like a shadow of himself at only 34.
One recent evening, I looked up at my TV, and there, to my amazement, was Allen Iverson in a TikTok commercial. Yes, the once notorious AI was one of many everyday people in this ad getting into the hottest new social media platform. Allen Iverson, graying at 46.
He’s ironically standing next to some elliptical machines in a fitness center. He’s wearing a headband, as if maybe he’s going to (ha ha) work out. One machine over, exercising in street clothes, is … Ty Lue? Yes, it’s Lue, currently the Los Angeles Clippers’ coach. Inside joke, perhaps lost on many viewers. A call-back to that iconic “step over” moment in Game 1 of the ’01 Finals.
Allen Iverson is now so beloved he can promote TikTok. Most of us have forgiven if not forgotten. He has somehow aged into an NBA ambassador, often showing up at Sixers games to root like crazy for the home team, sometimes giving interviewers his most sincere thoughts on what’s right and wrong with today’s NBA. He’s now viewed as more lovably crazy uncle than “uncoachable” man-child talkin’ bout practice.
In the end, Allen Iverson won respect and even love because he did it his way, for better or worse. He lived his way, dressed his way, played his way. Take it or leave it. He owned every last dribble of his life with an honesty—and, dare I say, a *humility—*that even the most hateful of his haters could not deny.
Or maybe even resist. Allen Iverson ultimately redeemed himself because a man who could play basketball superhumanly was so openly human. A final salvo from Iverson to reporters near the end of the “Practice Rant” tribunal: “I bleed just like you do.”
Did he ever. Such heart this man has.
Recently, while doing a podcast, Iverson spoke of a media member he despises but would not name him. When Iverson sensed his interviewers thought he meant me, he said, no, no, “I’ve got love for Skip.”
The feeling is mutual.
A former sports columnist for The Chicago Tribune, Skip Bayless is an acclaimed television commentator and the co-host of Skip and Shannon: Undisputed, which airs weekdays on FS1.
