Welcome To The Mountain Times

The player is Allen Iverson, who is also my favorite athlete of all-time and – there is something pitiful about men speaking of their “heroes” of the sports world, even in reminiscence, but here it is – a person I’ve admired to such an extent over the past 13 years that, if I can be said to have a hero, it is he. He recently turned 34; he has entered that stage where his age will continually surprise me, because I will always think of him one way, and he will every year move visibly further away from my mental picture. With the Detroit Pistons, he just finished the first bad season of his NBA career, averaging only 17.5 points per game in 57 games and sitting out the Pistons’ brief postseason with a bad back. Before ’08-’09, Iverson never averaged fewer than 22 points per game. He once averaged 33 for a season.

Because we identify with those whom we idolize, the inevitable downturns experienced by our favorite athletes affect us, too, as reminders of our own unavoidable deterioration. But no one has taken Iverson’s decline as harshly as has Iverson himself, who – probably as much from frustration at his failing abilities and pain-riddled body as from annoyance at the Pistons’ decision to bench him – has threatened to retire from basketball. Even if he does not, his future is uncertain. He is currently a free agent. The biggest name of the summer crop, he nevertheless must accept both a diminished salary and a diminished role at whichever organization should choose to sign him. He no longer commands a maximum contract, and he must expect to come in as a complementary scorer, not as a superstar. But which team will take a chance on Iverson, who has, since he began his basketball career, known only superstardom, has never needed to learn how to play another way, until now? Many in the NBA still regard him as a petulant, selfish child, forever breaking the rules to suit his own whims: Can he learn?

Perhaps it never occurred to him that he’d one day have to; it certainly never occurred to me that he would. For the nine seasons Iverson spent in Philadelphia, where I cheered him on, his energy seemed bottomless. It was a joy, every game, to celebrate his swift, limber genius on the hardwood, as he raced rabbit-like past defenders, dribbled around entire teams, and sank shots from everywhere on the floor. He’d slip past his man on the perimeter with a supersonic crossover, charge at the center who towered in the paint, jump, and then figure out, midair, how to contort his body in such a way – seemingly a new way every time – as to dodge an assault of massive limbs and lay the ball into the basket. His style was fast, inventive, artistic, and daring: he was perpetually being knocked to the ground by players a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than he. I saw him make plays that no one else could have made.

Best of all, my team, the 76ers, drafted him when I was eight years old, roughly the age at which one can become a basketball fan, and his tenure with the Sixers reached its pinnacle in the late spring of 2001, when I was 13, the age at which one can begin to watch basketball intelligently and, at the same time, can devote one’s entire heart to a team, can live and die with it as sane grownups cannot. In 2001, a 25-year-old Iverson earned the NBA’s MVP trophy – which currently sits alongside four scoring titles, a Rookie of the Year award, and two All-Star Game MVP trophies on his shelf – and led a scrappy, defense-oriented squad that boasted not a single other legitimate scoring threat to the finals, where they succumbed in five games to the Los Angeles Lakers, who had swept their three previous postseason opponents.

He was the perfect subject for my idolatry. I’ve never been able to admire the people we’re supposed to admire, the ones whose clean-cut looks and Good Samaritanism (surely phony!) always seemed to promise a kind of spiritual death. Iverson, however, wore cornrows and tattoos, fought with his coach, and alienated older folks – spectators, journalists, and NBA veterans, most of whom hated him. Yet he was more brilliant than his opponents and, during games, worked harder. I still think, sometimes, of the four months he spent in prison as a high schooler (barely 18, he was sentenced to five years for his alleged role in a brawl at a bowling alley in Virginia, though the governor, believing him innocent, would later pardon him and eventually see the conviction overturned altogether) and of the improbable dream he somehow held onto in that place. Here, most of all, is where the young fan, even if spared the hardships Iverson faced, stands alongside him – where the good people are so terribly wrong, and we must endure it, and one day we’ll triumph.

But, 16 years later, the triumph still feels incomplete. If he retired today, he’d be correctly regarded by intelligent viewers as the greatest “little guy” in NBA history, but we’ve never gotten to see Iverson on top. In the NBA, he hasn’t found the right fit – the 76ers failed to provide him with an adequate sidekick (I blame poor drafting) – and even in the Olympics he won only bronze, as part of that dreadfully constructed 2004 team. So I pray he’s not finished; I badly want to see a contender pick him up. I’m sure that, in the right situation, he could still contribute: In ’07-’08, not so long ago, he averaged 26.4 ppg on 45.8% shooting and 7.1 apg. I want him to finish with a ring. I want him to go that place where athletes whose careers sing of victory, rather than of disappointment, remain perpetually young and brilliant, no matter their age.

Click here to Visit Brett's Blog