The Joy of Basketball by Detrick Ben;Kuo Andrew;Nice Desus;

Author:Detrick, Ben;Kuo, Andrew;Nice, Desus;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams, Inc.
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

IVERSON, ALLEN

Back in 1970, a column published in Cherokee County, South Carolina’s Gaffney Ledger juxtaposed Pete Maravich, a rookie shooting guard on the Hawks, to the shiftless ilk of his generation: “While you were out smoking marijuana, Pete was playing basketball like the good, American boy,” wrote the essayist. It included this kicker: “Pete is now a millionaire.” To today’s conservative intellectuals, that prototype of young NBA player—hardworking, drug-free, and deserving of vast wealth—is a thing of the past, an abstraction supplanted by, as they see it, a dangerous variant. Thug, criminal, ball-hog, team cancer, lazy malcontent, fortune squanderer. Or Allen Iverson.

Iverson grew up in the East End of Newport News,Virginia, a place nicknamed Bad News. His father, the leader of a local gang called the Family Connection, bounced in and out of jail before going to prison in 1996 for stabbing a woman. His mother was fifteen at the time of Allen’s birth. “When the nurse brought him to me, I looked at his little body and saw those long arms and said, ‘Lord, he’s gonna be a basketball player,’” Ann Iverson told Sports Illustrated. Light bills went unpaid, a broken pipe spewed raw sewage onto the floor, friends were murdered and incarcerated. As a junior at Bethel High School, Iverson was named the Associated Press High School Player of the Year in basketball and football.

On Valentine’s Day of 1993, Iverson and three friends were arrested after brawling with a group of white teens at a bowling alley. None of the white participants were arrested, but he was convicted of “maiming by mob” and sentenced to five years in prison. “It’s a high-tech lynching without a rope,” said Marilyn Strother, an organizer who rallied against the sentencing. Iverson spent four months at Newport News City Farm before Governor Douglas Wilder granted him conditional clemency (later, an appeals court overturned the conviction). By virtue of his supernatural gifts, Iverson was able to escape anonymously tumbling into the American meat-grinder that has devoured Black lives for hundreds of years.

As his mother knew, Allen was the chosen one. Even by the impossible standards of professional athletes, he was peerless—a sinewy, 6-foot outlier among the fieldstone-shouldered caste of generational deities like Jim Thorpe, Jim Brown, Bo Jackson, and LeBron James. On the court, Iverson moved in a spasmodic blur. He seemed to glide on a different plane than everyone else, shifting with precise coordination to hit a third gear, vanishing with a soft sonic burp to magick a 1-on-3 break into a 1-on-0 layup. Despite his size, he was unyielding. Over his first twelve seasons, Iverson averaged a shocking 41.8 minutes a game while leading the league in the ironman category seven times. “He is, indeed, a prodigy,” wrote talk show host Tony Kornheiser in 1995, after watching him play for Georgetown University, “with talent so stunning he shimmers on the court like light reflected off a mirror.”

Iverson came to kill your idols. As a rookie, he crossed-up Michael Jordan and buried a jumper in the face of His Airness.

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