Brotherly Love

Allen Iverson and Larry Brown didn’t get along, which wasn’t a new experience for either. However, after three years in the cross-fire, Philadelphia 76er owner Pat Croce was out of, uh, patter, which was a new experience for him.

So they traded Iverson to the Detroit Pistons, which, it turned out, would have been even worse than going to the Clippers, except the deal didn’t go through.

Iverson promised he’d be good if he could stay and he was, even if he did record the Jack the Ripper of gangsta rap CDs first, upsetting everyone all over again.

Brown began showing a new sensitivity toward Iverson and his teammates, even if the players did get together and vote Brown onto vacation for two days in December, when he was making them crazier than usual.

The little clan of warriors played so hurt for so long, they didn’t have much left for the playoffs so when opposing teams began double-teaming Iverson from the time he got off the bus, the 76ers were outgunned at every turn.

Playing 18 of a possible 19 games, they lost Game 1 to Indiana, Game 1 to Toronto and trailed, two games to one, on the road at Milwaukee before prevailing in an agonizing series of skirmishes that looked like the NBA version of the Hundred Years War.

Then Wednesday, when they were supposed to be just glad to be here, Iverson dropped 48 points on the Lakers who began thinking the unthinkable:

How many more like that does he have in him and if it’s three, how will we ever face anyone?

Back in Philadelphia, the city--which had spent the ‘90s trying to forget it had a team--fell for the 76ers as never before. Everyone was ecstatic, with the possible exception of Ed Snider, the owner of the NHL’s Flyers who became the 76er chief executive in a recent corporate purchase. Snider thought basketball was OK in its place--like the Palestra or St. Joe’s Fieldhouse.

When Croce, a minority owner with only about a 2% stake in the team, began angling for a better deal and freedom from hockey people, Snider noted he was “an employee” with a contract, whose performance would be evaluated after the season.

Croce, who knows nothing if not how to twirl the media like a scimitar, suggested he could work miracles in other cities or find a new field of endeavor.

Nothing has been resolved, but Croce says he and Mr. Ed just had “a great meeting” and doesn’t want his situation to be a distraction.

So what could go wrong now?

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Q: You almost traded Allen . . .

Brown: We did trade him.

Brown, whenever the question comes up.

Talk about your improbable musketeers: an unvarnished street survivor, a nomadic genius and a hot dog from the land of the cheese steak, living their dream together.

So far, anyway.

Talk about your improbable seasons. It started with Iverson and Brown at odds . . . in Brown’s third season in Philadelphia . . . in a career, however brilliant, that had taken the coach to six teams for an average of 2.7 seasons . . . with his mentor, Dean Smith, trying to bring him back to their beloved Chapel Hill for the North Carolina coaching job just vacated by Bill Guthridge.

“Coach Dean Smith called me--at home!--and asked for permission to talk to Larry,” says Croce.

“I was gonna say, ‘Oh, wrong number! Oh, I’m sorry, there’s no Pat Croce lives here!’

“I said, ‘You’re killing me, Coach, you’re killing me! Please! You know I’m not going to deny him that opportunity, because if it’s a dream for him, that’s what I’m about is helping people achieve dreams, but you’re killing me!’ ”

Smith wanted Brown, but Carolina Athletic Director Bob Baddour had questions. Baddour flew out to see Brown in Malibu, but their meeting could have gone better.

“The biggest joke interview of my life,” says Brown, who has had a few. “They spent an hour telling me why [Kansas Coach] Roy Williams should have gotten the job and what a perfect fit he was, which I could understand, I think. . . .

“Coach Smith said he wanted me to coach there and he would get me the job. After my interview, I didn’t want to put him through that.”

Instead, Brown set about restructuring the 76ers, agreeing to a four-team, 22-player deal sending Iverson to Detroit for Eddie Jones and Glen Rice. It fell apart only when the 76ers’ Matt Geiger refused to waive his 15% trade kicker, which turned out to be Geiger’s greatest contribution this season.

Informed he was stuck with Iverson, Brown, assisting on the U.S. Olympic team, singed him daily, saying things like:

“I’m hopeful that at 25 years old a switch will go off inside of him and he’ll want to be here and he’ll want to do what’s right. If he doesn’t, well, I already said there will be consequences.”

One of the consequences, of course, was a teed-off Iverson.

“Larry’s in Australia, blasting Allen and I’m thinkin’, ‘Oh, no! This is awful!’ ” Croce says. “And I’m goin’ down to Newport News [Iverson’s home], trying to talk to Allen. . . .

“He said, ‘Pat, if you’re going to trade me’--and this is in his own passionate way he said this, with some real adjectives in there--he said, ‘Trade me for someone who’s better and can help the team. But if you’re going to trade me because of the little things, comin’ late or missing a shoot-around, I can change all that.’

“I said, ‘Do it. Walk the walk! Please, make it easy on me! You know I don’t want to see you go!’

“I already made my choice--Coach Brown. That’s why I went down there and told Allen, ‘If he wants you gone, you’re gone. There’s no ultimatum, it’s not he or you. I mean, the coach is here, I gave him an extension.’ ”

Before Iverson could walk the walk, there was a little matter of living down the pistol-packing lyrics in his rap CD “Forty Bars,” which had gay groups, black groups and women’s groups picketing exhibition games.

Says Croce: “I called Allen in, I read the lyrics. He didn’t understand why I was hurt, why I was disappointed and why I was disgusted with the lyrics--’Because you don’t know gangsta rap.’ I said, ‘I know I don’t, but these do not look positive! You’re gonna understand that this is gonna cause trouble!’ “He had no idea. He didn’t know at all. And then 48 hours later the wrath of the offended groups was unleashed.”

Thus did Brown and Iverson embark on their latest season together.

Nothing easy about being Allen Iverson, where everybody’s looking at your every move, criticizing you for just saying a curse word when you get mad, you know? [You] feel like you’re some kind of villain, the smallest guy on the court but the biggest villain in life, you know?

Iverson, on Thursday

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As a thug, Iverson was always overrated, although he had a lot to learn, not to mention a massive image problem.

In person, he was actually engaging but he had a genius for trouble, usually of a misdemeanor nature for possession of weapons or leafy substances.

His worst offense, however, may have been to stand so nakedly for the arrival of the hip-hop generation, with his cornrows, tattoos and baggy uniform shorts that had the league office on the phone weekly. When he failed to treat Michael Jordan with deference his rookie season out of Georgetown, it was viewed as a major breach of etiquette, but as the world was to learn, whatever Iverson was about, it wasn’t manners.

Nor were such niceties as practice and shot selection high on his list, bringing him into conflict with Brown, one of the great idealists working.

Brown is all heart, himself. As a player with the ABA’s Virginia Squires, he was the one who would walk over to a shy kid reporter and introduce himself. As a coach, Brown used to tell players, like Michael Holton at UCLA, he expected them to drop by the office daily to visit, in sessions that would go on for hours, where Brown would say things like it was what you did for others that counted.

On the court, however, Brown was the boss, and a demanding one. The better the player, the more he expected. Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird might have lived up to Brown’s expectations, but mortals, like Danny Manning and David Robinson, were in trouble.

Of course, no one was in as much trouble as Brown, who would turn around every team he took over while piling so much pressure on himself, he’d have to flee for the relative peace of starting over somewhere else.

No one could keep him in place, not even his longtime friend, Indiana President Donnie Walsh, a Carolina alum who had coached under him.

That is, no one until Croce, who turned over the entire, woeful 76er basketball operation to Brown in 1997, which was risky, since Brown made trades as if he were in a fantasy league. As Walsh once noted, if you made all the moves Brown wanted, you would trade all your players . . . and, ultimately, get them all back.

In the spring of 2000, with the 76ers having gone from 22-60 to 49-33 in three years, Croce gave Brown a five-year extension. When Iverson heard the news, he didn’t look too happy about it.

A summer of being dangled over the NBA’s losingest franchises straightened out Iverson’s head. If that didn’t, the “40 Bars” controversy meant he now had more problems than Brown and needed to be on his best behavior.

In a surprise to many, he was.

The 76ers shot to the top of the East. Iverson was most valuable player of the All-Star game. The 76ers turned All-Star weekend into an extension of their dream, with Brown coaching and Iverson leading the East back from a huge fourth-quarter deficit against the favored West. Brown was so moved, he soon traded for his All-Star center, Dikembe Mutombo, a 35-year-old upcoming free agent.

About to receive his All-Star MVP trophy, Iverson kept yelling, “Where’s my coach,” intent on sharing the honor with Brown.

“It’s not that you need it,” Brown said afterward, “but it’s one of the reasons you’re pretty lucky coaching. . . . It’s pretty neat.”

The neatness was just starting. Now, after about 1,000 games--actually only 101--it’s still going.

In a typical 76er day after, Aaron McKie, who did a great job guarding Kobe Bryant Wednesday night, turned up Thursday with a walking cast on his left foot, protecting a newly detected fracture.

Of course, McKie says he’ll play in Game 2.

As he said in the last series: “We know we have to fight for every inch. We’re not the Lakers. We’re the Sixers.”

Three amigos, forever?

Brown compares this team to the dark horses in his storybook NCAA tournament runs, his 1980 UCLA team with four freshmen in the rotation that finished second and his ’88 Kansas team that was just over .500 at midseason and went all the way.

“I think of all the years I’ve ever coached, this has been the greatest experience I’ve ever had because of the group of people I’ve had to coach,” Brown said the night he got his first award as NBA coach of the year.

He’s also so spent after this season and two summers on the Olympic circuit, he acknowledges he’s thinking of retiring when this ends.

Iverson says he has come for a championship, won’t feel right if he leaves empty-handed but he has turned a corner too.

“For the first time in my life, you know, I’m conducting myself on and off the court like a professional,” he said Thursday. “And it just took some growing up, you know. I’m 26 years old . . . today.”

As a friend of his noted later, the fact that he made 26 is the real accomplishment and the best reason for hope.

As for Croce, he was ecstatic before the series started and is about to levitate now, along with the rest of Philadelphia, making it improbable that Comcast, the majority owner of the 76ers and Flyers, will let him go anywhere.

If the Lakers haven’t figured it out, they’d better come ready from here on in. Anyone who made it through all this is no one to mess with.

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