UNPOLISHED GEM : 76ers’ Brash Rookie Allen Iverson Does It His Way as He Takes the NBA by Storm

Greatness just arrived in a baseball cap with the bill turned southwest, an oversized flannel shirt, a large gold crucifix and jeans big enough for Charles Barkley riding precariously on his hips.

This little slip of a thing is Allen Iverson?

In the flesh, what little there is of it. The future just slouched in, looking like any kid at the mall.

Six feet tall, 165 pounds, his body already bruised and dented but his attitude intact, he is already the most exciting NBA rookie of the ‘90s, with an impact challenging more polished and equally hyped young players such as Detroit’s Grant Hill and Orlando’s Penny Hardaway.

If the entire MTV generation had hit the beach in a landing craft behind him, Iverson couldn’t have made a bigger splash. He has an unheard-of $40-million shoe deal. He’s the Philadelphia 76ers’ franchise player, a distinction he gained the first day of camp, when his mere arrival turned Jerry Stackhouse and Derrick Coleman into second and third options.

In Iverson’s first pro game, in Madison Square Garden, he put up 35 points in an upset of the New York Knicks and the tabloids called him “WHIZ KID” and “POISON IVERSON.” In Chicago, the Bulls paid him the ultimate compliment: Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen taunted him for shooting so much and Michael Jordan told him not to pay any attention to them.

“I thought I could play defense,” Ron Harper said. “Now I don’t know. . . .

“The kid is going to be something special when he learns how to play the game. I hope I’m retired by then.”

The story went around that when Jordan tried to console him, Iverson snarled back. Iverson said he’d never “disrespect Mike,” the target of his ambition for all these years--but in the next meeting, when Jordan again tried taking the kid under his wing, the kid pushed the wing away.

For good measure, Iverson got into an argument with kindly old Bulls’ assistant Tex Winter and cursed him too.

“After the game,” said Jordan, who was brash enough in his day, “I was talking to Chief [Robert Parish] and said, ‘I could never tell Larry Bird or K.C. Jones or any other coach some of the things he’s done this far.’ But it’s a whole new breed. . . .

“At one point I mentioned to [Iverson], he was going to have to respect us. If you don’t respect anyone else in this league you have to respect us. He said he doesn’t have to respect anybody.”

Iverson, who brings his act to the Forum tonight against the Lakers, has breathtaking quickness, a 40-inch standing vertical leap. Style? He has more of that than he or the NBA office can control.

Every week, it seems as if the league sends out another memo on his palming, his baggy uniform trunks, the black ankle braces covering his white socks. Next, they’ll tell him he can’t go out until he cleans up his room.

Dutifully, Iverson, who must have a 30-inch waist, stopped wearing 38-inch trunks (he now wears 36s), pulled his socks up and took his hand out from under the ball (a little bit) on his murderous crossover dribble.

NBA security is supposedly concerned that Iverson’s “posse” has accompanied him from Hampton, Va. Indeed, three old friends live with him. However, the league said nothing to the 76ers, not that it had to. Pat Croce, the 76ers’ brash new owner, laid down the law to a couple of Iverson’s friends.

“It was a new buddy who didn’t know me,” Croce says. “I did knock on their car window [in a parking lot outside the arena]. We were talking, one of them got wise.

“I did say, ‘You get in any trouble that reflects on Allen or me, I’ll burn your houses down.’

“I can talk trash with the best of them, but I don’t have any concerns about that. If I was in a different city at the age of 21, I’d surround myself with my family and my best friends too.

“They’re the only ones he can trust, now that he’s got a bunch of bucks. Best way to keep people out of his back pocket, surround yourself with your friends. These kids have been good. They come to games, they come to practices. Yeah, they dress like hip-hop and gangstas. They’re cool guys.”

*

ESPN interviewer: “You don’t let people get close, do you?”

Iverson: “I can’t.”

--Dec. 20, 1996

He always knew it would be like this: going first, walking up to the podium to shake hands with David Stern, putting on that cap. . . .

He knew it even when he was sitting in the Newport News (Va.) City Farm, a minimum-security work camp where he served four months for his part in a racial melee his junior year in high school.

This is not a kid acting tough. This is a tough kid whose mother was 15 when she had him, whose father wasn’t around, who saw the man of the house jailed for dealing drugs. Years later, Iverson would say he understood, that his surrogate father was doing what he had to to feed his family.

Iverson wasn’t merely gifted, he was a prodigy, all-state as a football quarterback, all-world as a basketball guard. He was known for being cocky and combative, for run-ins with coaches and teachers, but he was never in trouble until the chair-swinging brawl in a bowling alley.

It started as an argument between Iverson and a white youth. Iverson insists he left when trouble started. Another witness claimed to have seen him hit a white woman in the head with a chair.

The judicial process became a cause celebre. Iverson and three blacks were the only ones arrested and his celebrity bore on the case. During the trial, Nike paid his air fare to and from its summer camp. In her closing argument the prosecutor proclaimed: “Now it’s our turn to just do it.”

Virginia courts normally allow all but violent criminals to appeal before serving their sentences and the prosecutor was set to recommend a $15,000 appeal bond. Upon conviction, however, the judge slapped Iverson behind bars.

He served four months before Gov. Douglas Wilder furloughed him. The appeals court then overturned the conviction.

He was 18. If the experience marked him, he has it under control.

“I had to use the whole jail situation as something positive,” he says, discussing it matter-of-factly.

“I knew when I got out that my back was against the wall and that just made me work that much harder, knowing that everybody thought it was over for me.

“I always knew that I had to still take care of my family, even though I was coming out of jail. And I just tried to learn from everything that I witnessed while I was incarcerated. I found out a lot about people and who they are and how people do things. And I found a lot out about myself, let me know how strong I was.

“I just read in the papers while I was locked up that it was over for me, there was no way I was going to be able to do this or do that. I just sat back and said, ‘If I get another chance one day, I’ll prove all those people wrong.’

“I was never scared. Being where I come from, going to jail could have happened to anybody. Not saying that I was prepared for it but when I was going through the whole ordeal, I knew there was a chance something like that could happen.

“When it did, I just held myself together. I mean, going to jail, someone sees something weak in you, they’ll exploit it. I never showed any weakness. I just kept being strong and I did the time that I had to do until I came out.”

*

“If [General Manager] Brad Greenberg had told me that we were taking Stephon Marbury instead, I would have started tarring and feathering myself, to save the crowd the trouble.”

--Pat Croce at June NBA draft

Three years after incarceration, six months after he became the first star to leave John Thompson’s Georgetown program early, Iverson isn’t merely employed but guaranteed to be rich if he never makes another shot.

The ‘90s have seen a new outbreak of sneaker wars, bestowing megadeals on rookies that only Jordan ever got before: Shaquille O’Neal with Reebok, Alonzo Mourning and Hardaway with Nike, Hill and Stackhouse with Fila, Kobe Bryant and Antoine Walker with Adidas.

David Falk, Iverson’s agent, once hand-in-glove with Nike, is heading in a new direction with Iverson as hood ornament. Falk just took Iverson, a very ‘90s kind of young icon, to Reebok and is hoping for another commercial breakout.

“Allen is a new generation,” Falk says. “He’s younger. He’s not the sophisticated, polished guy in the Jordan mold, a Grant Hill, for example.

“I think Allen is a very natural person and we’re going to leave him alone. We’re not trying to spruce him up or polish him. We’re trying to project him exactly as he is, raw and natural. And I think the fans perceive him as coming across that way, not as an overly packaged, made-for-TV player.”

Teenage boys dominate the sneaker market, and for youth appeal, Iverson looks like the mother lode. He’s getting the big treatment: the $100 signature shoe, the limos, the marketing conference at corporate headquarters, the welcoming ceremony with the company president, the presentation by Leo Burnett, the ad agency handling the campaign; the “Positioning Road Map” purporting to chart his career through 2000, by which time the ad boys figure he will have been in the NBA finals (they’re either very positive or big-time bootlickers), played on an Olympic team and starred in a two-minute commercial aired during the Super Bowl.

No, Iverson couldn’t quite foresee all this but bring it on.

“They’re just going to let me be me,” he said recently, “whatever that is.”

Amazingly, in these days of the toddling prima donna, this young man who came up so hard and is now fawned and fought over, who is such a lightning rod for the mini-controversies that fill the airwaves, remains unaffected, even engaging.

It’s a job and an adventure. His pell-mell drives bring him eye to eye nightly with 300-pounders whose inclination is to swat him like a fly. Two weeks into the season, his right shoulder was separated--”And that was Danny Ferry, that wasn’t even a big guy,” snorts 76er assistant Maurice Cheeks--sidelining him for a week and keeping him out of practice for a month.

Controversies follow him around like kittens looking for milk: his dribble, his uniform, his wars with the Bulls, most of all his shot totals.

After a five-for-22 performance against Utah on Saturday, he is shooting 39.2%, averaging 19 shots, 22.1 points and 6.8 assists.

“He’s not your prototype point guard,” Greenberg says. “But there really aren’t very many of those alive these days, certainly not playing in the NBA.

“There are a lot of guards that can handle the ball, can get their team into their offense but don’t necessarily come over half court looking to make the first pass to start an offense all the time. Allen can run a team, he can get you in your offense, but he puts a lot of pressure on the defense by being an attacking player. That’s something that’s good. He’s good at it, so you’d be a fool not to take advantage of it.”

When he thinks of it, Iverson is actually a brilliant passer. He promises to try to think of it more.

“People think it’s a big thing, I put up 35, 36 points, average 21, 22 points,” he says. “But, I mean, that’s something I’m used to all my life, being able to get my points. Really, I’m more concerned now with my assists. I want my assists to be up there with the top guys. . . .

“I’m leaving games with five and seven turnovers. I mean, I can’t do this in the NBA. It doesn’t make sense for me to average seven, eight assists if I average five turnovers.”

The next game he takes 23 shots, misses 16 and turns the ball over five times.

But genius shows itself in jagged streaks of lightning across the night sky, especially when the genius is 21.

When you have had real problems, sports stuff is merely sports stuff. Iverson’s family is taken care of. He’s in the NBA.

“It’s just fun,” he says. “I mean, the thing is, I could have a bad game but I know we play again in another day or two and you forget all about it that fast.

“I mean, it’s just the competition out there. Everybody’s good out there. I mean, it’s just so fun, traveling from place to place, playing different teams and you see great players on every team. I mean, it’s just a dream come true, something I always wanted to do. And sometimes I just sit and think, like, ‘God, I’m finally here!’ And it feels good.

“Even with all the negatives that come with it--my shorts are too low, my ankle braces being black, my crossover--even with all that, this is an experience I’ll never forget.”

This experience is only two months old. For Iverson, this is only the beginning.