Not a Game by Kent Babb

Author:Kent Babb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER 14

* * *

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Iverson’s talent and heart bought him otherworldly, transcendent fame, which attracted fans and admirers around the globe. Websites devoted to Iverson were born during the boom of the Internet, kids found themselves on playgrounds emulating the crossover and the braids and the swagger, a generation of young Americans stepping into Reeboks and balling their fists to say fuck you to the way things used to be.

Iverson was, even if unwittingly, influencing the next generation, and a young player named Bradley Beal mimicked Iverson on the St. Louis blacktops years before the Washington Wizards drafted him and Beal wore jersey number three in honor of his hero. Young ballers wore cornrows and compression sleeves not because they were taking a social stance but because Iverson had done it, looking so damn cool in the process. “You know, my whole thing was just being me,” Iverson would say during his retirement news conference in October 2013. “And now, you know, when you look around, you see all the guys in the NBA now, all of them got tattoos. All them guys wearing cornrows. You used to think that the suspect was the guy with the cornrows. Now you see the police officers with the cornrows.”

With the fame came power and entitlement. His penchant for tardiness became a bigger problem for his teams and for Reebok, whose representatives eventually stopped scheduling events before noon. Que Gaskins, Iverson’s former body man for the shoe company, said he eventually started lying to Iverson about when he was supposed to be somewhere; if an event truly started at three in the afternoon, Gaskins told Iverson it began at noon. Iverson came to expect a certain lifestyle, of disconnected velvet ropes and bulging groups of friends and onlookers, of favors and women and money. He indulged his car collection, at one time owning nearly a dozen luxury cars, including the marble-white Bentley he liked to park in spaces reserved for the handicapped. Who was going to stop him or tell him to move it?

During shouting matches with Tawanna, police officers were occasionally called to break up the disputes. Usually they gave him a quick warning and, in part because he was Iverson and it was cool that they had been here and allowed to decide his short-term future, they went on their way. Lawyers and judges and authority figures came to admire Iverson as much as anyone, even when they were supposed to be impartial, and in return he came to believe he could manipulate anyone to say or do whatever he wanted. “Do you know who I am?” he reportedly asked an Atlanta police officer in 2011, and on top of him being Allen Iverson, he was also a man who had not renewed the license plates on his Lamborghini Murcielago two years after they had expired. Iverson unleashed a tirade on the officer, who eventually let Iverson walk away, though not before the car was towed.

He told Tawanna occasionally that he

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