When Joel Embiid scored 70 points against the Spurs in January to set the Philadelphia 76ers record for a single game, it was the foundation for a great trivia question: Whose record did he break?
The tricky part is that Wilt Chamberlain had his 100-point game in 1962 in a Philadelphia jersey, but it was the Philadelphia Warriors. The second tricky part is that the answer is still Wilt, who scored 68 for the Sixers five years later. Has anyone else scored 60 for the Sixers? The answer is The Answer.
No one ever paid for a ticket to watch Allen Iverson play basketball and felt they didn’t get their money’s worth.
As we get ready for another edition of March Madness, a look back at a player who never won a championship, never even made it to the Final Four, but was always entertaining on the court, if a bit polarizing off it.
A chain of stores that operates in outlet malls sells high school jerseys of players who became NFL or NBA stars. Thirty years after he played, Bethel High School jerseys with Iverson’s name on the back are good sellers, though not many people shopping there are anywhere near 30.
At the same time, decades after his two year-career at Georgetown University, the Hoyas site has 13 different Iverson jerseys for sale.
“Iverson’s impact off the court… extends to the realm of fashion, where he popularized a new style that blended hip-hop and sports culture. Iverson’s cornrows, tattoos, and baggy clothing challenged the established norms of professional athletes’ appearance, paving the way for self-expression and individuality,” says Hoop-social.com.
Iverson led Bethel to state championships in both basketball and football in 1992, and that state wasn’t Maine, but Virginia, a jurisdiction obviously loaded with athletic talent.
Despite weighing 165 pounds and being less than six feet tall, he was the AP High School Player of the Year award in both sports, and his football highlights seem like a video game for which someone has a cheat code. (Don’t watch Iverson highlights while people in your house are asleep, unless they like being awakened by shouts of amazement).
Problems with authority started early for Iverson, who eventually became known as The Answer. When he was 13, he watched the father figure in his life get arrested for selling drugs, which was followed by failing the eighth grade because of chronic absence.
Jail
On Valentine’s Day of 1993, Iverson and a group of friends got into a shouting match with another group at a bowling alley.
A racial fight erupted, and Iverson was accused of hitting a woman in the head with a chair, though video later surfaced of him leaving shortly after the fighting began.
In a development that did not burnish the reputation of Virginia justice, only Blacks were arrested, and Iverson, 17 at the time, was convicted as an adult of maiming by mob. That was a felony charge designed to combat lynching.
Iverson would over the course of his career make several statements that showed he never enrolled in media training, the first being: "For me to be in a bowling alley where everybody in the whole place know who I am and be crackin' people upside the head with chairs and think nothin' gonna happen? That's crazy! And what kind of a man would I be to hit a girl in the head with a damn chair? I rather have 'em say I hit a man with a chair, not no damn woman."
Shockingly, Iverson was sentenced to 15 years in prison and that could have been the last we ever heard of him, but after four months at a prison farm, the governor granted clemency and his conviction was overturned.
Nonetheless, the crush of publicity surrounding the bowling alley brawl sent college coaches scurrying, and after Iverson spent his senior year at a school for at-risk students instead of playing for Bethel, Georgetown coach John Thompson was almost alone in offering a scholarship.
College Career
The story that Iverson was high on weed the first time he met Thompson is not true, he said when asked about it during a conversation on Players Tribune. But, he admitted, he had been smoking another time just before the coach, a huge and intimidating man, came looking for him.
“It was like the first time I had come on campus,” Iverson explained. “I remember going to this girl who’s my homegirl now — like I rock with her hard, like all this many years later she’s still my homegirl. And I went to her house, and I was smoking over at her crib. Man, somebody knocked on the door and said, ‘Coach up the hill.’”
Iverson’s notoriety made a quiet entrance to college hoops impossible.
His first game was a loss to defending national champion Arkansas, well known for its 40 minutes of Hell defence and the Hogs colorful coach Nolan Richardson.
“Allen Iverson? I ain’t never seen anything like that in my life,” Richardson said in his postgame press conference. “I’ve been to three calf shows, nine horse-ropings … I even saw Elvis once. But I ain’t never seen anyone do what Iverson does. We doubled him, trapped him, and he broke it. I’ve never seen anyone that quick with the basketball.”
That same season, as Georgetown made a visit to Villanova, on the outskirts on the City of Brotherly Love, Iverson was greeted by four fans dressed like prisoners, holding a sign that read ALLEN IVERSON: THE NEXT MJ,” with MJ crossed out and replaced it with OJ.
John Thompson wasn’t feeling that at all. He pulled his team off the court and when the referees came to the Hoyas locker room, informed them he’d forfeit the game unless those four fans were removed.
“Coach knew,” Iverson wrote long afterward on the Players Tribune. “And he could see my heart just sinking in that moment. He knew he couldn’t protect me from everything that was in this world. But he sure tried.”
Iverson was Big East Rookie of the Year in 1994-95 and led the Hoyas to the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA tournament, eventually losing to North Carolina. In his second season at Georgetown, the team rode Iverson to a Big East championship and to the Elite Eight.
At 23 points per game, he was the Hoyas all-time leader in career scoring average, a first-team All-American, and conference defensive player of the year in both of his two seasons at Georgetown.
NBA Career
Those who felt a short, skinny guy couldn’t handle the rigors of the NBA did not include the Philadelphia 76ers, who drafted Iverson first overall, a choice vindicated by his Rookie of the Year award after a season in which he scored 40 or more in five straight games, breaking a record set by Wilt.
Over his 14-year NBA career, AI was an all-star 11 straight seasons, a four-time scoring champion, twice the MVP of the all-star game and the NBA MVP in 2001.
His playoff career scoring average of 29.7 points per game is bettered by only Michael Jordan and Luka Doncic.
He did crazy stuff like a foul-line tip dunk, making a defender fall down twice on the same play, and crossing over Michael Jordan, but more than a decade after he retired, Iverson is probably best remembered for two things: 1) leading the Sixers to the NBA Finals against the Lakers of Shaq and Kobe, and 2) “talkin’ ‘bout practice.”
The Finals
On the court, Iverson was one of the league’s top draws, and the Sixers sold tickets like few teams. His effort was never questioned. But the look and the persona he adopted wore on some people, not to mention arrests for gun and drug offences, and for pissing in a garbage can in a casino.
So, after the 1999-2000 season ended, weary of the bullshit and his constant arguing with coach Larry Brown, the Sixers looked for trade partners.
How much of a pain in the ass are you if you’re that good and your teams wants to get rid of you?
Philadelphia made a deal with Detroit, but one of the Pistons in the deal refused to give up a trade kicker and the deal died.
That fall, Iverson led his team to ten straight wins to start the season, on the way to a 56–26 record, scoring 31 points per game to lead the league, and became the shortest and lightest player to win the MVP award.
In the playoffs, the 76ers beat the Raptors in seven and the Bucks in seven to reach the finals against the defending champion Lakers.
Vegas had L.A. at – 2000 entering the series, the most lopsided odds ever.
So, it was quite a surprise when the Sixers prevailed in game one in overtime, 107-101, with 48 points from The Answer outdoing 44 from Shaq.
The Lakers then won the next four games to take the title, despite Iverson scoring 35 or more in three of them.
“Practice”
In the first round of the 2001-02 playoffs, the 76ers lost to Boston and after the defeat, Brown criticized Iverson for missing team practices.
In a press conference that has now been viewed approximately a billion times, Iverson’s response was, "We sittin' here, I’m supposed to be a franchise player, and we in here talkin' about practice," and then said dozens of times, "We talkin' about practice. Not a game."
Iverson ended his NBA career with mostly unsatisfactory stints with Denver, Detroit and Memphis, finishing up in Turkey in 2011.
Money
In 2015, after the release of a documentary on his life, he denied rumors of financial struggles
"That's a myth. That's a rumor... The fact that I'm struggling in any part of my life", he said on the CBS Morning News.
What was not a rumor was that Iverson had spent truly remarkable amounts of money on cars, clothes, trips to strip clubs and an entourage of several dozen, to the point that at one point he was flat broke.
But his lifetime deal with Reebok, brilliantly negotiated, includes a yearly stipend and a reported trust of $32 million.
Allen Iverson was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.
Said a profile in The Atlantic on his retirement: “He played like young men act and feel: without boundaries, impulsively, fearlessly.”
