Allen Iverson is still here

The banner of Allen Iverson was always individuality. In a league of giants, he was bottled lightning. Following in the footsteps of Michael Jordan, a fortress of placid control, Iverson projected a belligerent self-confidence. Playing a team sport and under the direction of Larry Brown, a man who taught a shining and virtuous brand of selfless basketball, Iverson did most of his best work in isolation.

Iverson was always a prickly contradiction, pushing back against critics both real and imagined, waging a quiet war against expectations, assumptions, and responsibilities, determined to do it his way. At least that’s the Iverson, I remember.

On Thursday, at a press conference for his impending induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, Iverson appeared to have shed his armor. He slouched back in a chair that would have comfortably fit Shaquille O’Neal, wearing a flat-brimmed New York Yankees hat and his official pumpkin orange Hall of Fame blazer. His hands shook, not with the inherent hyper-twitchiness that characterized him on the court, but with the emotional weight of a moment he was still processing.

“I don’t know. I think the hardest part leading up to all of this is pressure put on me for no reason. Obviously, I’m an emotional guy anyway. I respect and honor all of the things that people helped me did for me. You got all those people you love [saying], ‘are you nervous, are you ready,’ this that and the third, they make it harder when they say that.”

On the court, emotion had always been an enormous part of Iverson’s identity — anger, fury, intensity, fueling his endless competitive drive. Emotion was both weapon and armor, empowering him and protecting him. It was easy to ascribe this emotive force to his individualism, to see it as a by-product of this basketball player who refused to be anything but himself.

In this moment, watching self-reflection being foisted upon Iverson by a pressing crowd of strangers with microphones, recorders, and cameras, any illusion of intentionality falls away. Watching Iverson get choked up answering a question about his teammates and his coaches, and what their support meant to him, is a stark illustration of just how much space there was between Iverson the icon and Iverson the person.

Being an individual, doing it his own way, pushing back against a racist, controlling, or condescending media and authoritative structure in the league was not a crusade. It was not driven by intellectual or moral values. Iverson was the way he was simply because he didn’t know any other way to be.

“It was hard for me because I was a puppy. All the mistakes I would make, I didn’t even realize I was making mistakes. I was put into a situation I been poor all my life, and then all of a sudden, you put your John Hancock down and suddenly you rich and famous and I didn’t know how to deal with [it]. I still don’t know how to deal with a lot of stuff that I deal with in the aftermath of being an NBA basketball player. I’m still learning as a father, I’m still learning as a boyfriend, as a brother, as a son, as a family member, as a friend, everything man.”

Iverson’s mistakes are well documented and, at times, frightening — reportedly threatening to kill his wife, repeated incidents of spousal abuse, abandoning his children for drunken nights out. Because of the sometimes grating nature of his on-court persona, they are easier to reconcile with Iverson the basketball player. If you think he represented the culture of out-of-control thugs on the court, it’s no surprise that he often acted like one off the court as well.

It’s a little more difficult to reconcile all of that with vulnerability he displayed on Thursday. As his career eroded, we saw Iverson get puffy, slow down, battle the same windmills of irrelevance that every fading veteran seems to challenge in the twilight. If you had respected him throughout his career, you may have begun to pity him. If you had hated him throughout his career, you may have begun to pity him as well.

Now, as he joins the ranks of those historical greats whose memories he supposedly disrespected with his loud bravado, his legacy is being stamped with the official mark of excellence or set in a sort of historical concrete. As this process moves forward, with the official induction ceremony on Friday evening, it’s worth carving out some space in there for acknowledging Iverson’s humanity, flawed or otherwise.

“I can’t tell you how many, but how many nights I cried from criticism and people critiquing everything about me and my life, and the choices that I made, the mistakes I made. To be able to say after all of that, still, to be recognized as one of the best to ever play the game was just, and still is, a great moment for me my family, my fiends, my teammates, my coaches. I just think it’s the best, the real true ones, the ones that didn’t give up and never ever felt that I wasn’t who in my heart I know I am.”

As his voice cracks and tattooed hands wipe away an errant tear, we can finally see Iverson as everything — a selfish and flawed individual, an incredible basketball talent, a foil to the written and unwritten rules of professional basketball, and one who devoutly followed the most sacred oath to win at all costs. Most of all we can see him as a guy who just didn’t know any other way to be, an individual who was, and is, still figuring out what it means to be Allen Iverson.