The Cult: Allen Iverson

The Cult is back with a vengeance, chronicling the life of one of the NBA's most gifted and controversial superstars: Allen Iverson. You can read previous entries here.

You'd like to think that racism in America is way past its sell-by date. In the 1960s, official laws making it basically impossible for black people to vote, and segregating many aspects of everyday life, were removed. That should have been that, though obviously one yearns for a passage of time a little swifter than actually occurs in reality.

So put it in your own terms. If you were walking down Clapham High Street, for example, and saw a black guy hanging from a lamppost outside a council building with a spike through him, having been found guilty at trial, how long do you think it would be before you'd feel that image was 'moved on from'? Within 50 years? Because if you were living in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, you'd have seen James Byrd being dragged behind a pickup until he smashed his head on a curb and died. How long until that is 'moved on from'?

Allen Iverson grew up in Virginia, a state with the honourable distinction of lynching the fewest African Americans of all her Southern cousins. So instead, they lynched him in court. The 'trial' focused on the presence of the Prince of Hampton – the district where at Bethel High he'd unbelievably won both Associated Press High School Player of the Year and Virginia State Championships not just for basketball but football too – in one of the whiter areas of town. Specifically, he was at a bowling alley, where no-one could reliably pin him to the melee between a few black teenagers and a lot of white guys. After they'd waited months for him to turn 17 so he could be tried as an adult, he got a five-year jail sentence, with a further 10 years suspended.

Outside the courtroom afterwards, the pallid little dipshit of a prosecutor happily informs the cameras "I think he can be rehabilitated in jail," and boy did you ever feel like using the top of someone's head as a pivot to kick a hole through the wall she's stood in front of. Here's the only Wikipedia line you need to describe what happened: He, along with three of his friends who were also black, were the only people arrested.

And here's one for the famed American grasp of irony: to make sure they could pin it on Iverson, the arrogant black colt of a superstar athlete, they used a charge of 'maiming by mob' initially designed to include bystanders at lynchings.

That should have been the beginning of the end. No biological father present, a mother drifting in and out of addiction; despite the small group of noble adults, black and white, who acted as various parental figures to him, those were his roots. In a doc I watched, a community worker who took him under his wing, when it was put to him that the teenage Iverson had seen seven of his friends murdered, said he'd be surprised if it wasn't more.

Luckily – sorry, completely justifiably – Iverson was given clemency after only five months in jail; but still, America effectively tried to hand him a surreptitious death sentence for being black and gifted. And he took that sentence, ate it, and spat it back at them. He eventually found his way, despite the obvious obstacles, to a college where he could showcase his talent. But he seemed to never lose the need, for the whole of his career, to keep on spitting.

Iverson is, without doubt, the best 'small' player (at 6-foot) ever to grace the NBA. The average height in the league has always been 6'7. And he took it to them. His hands and feet were a lot closer to his brain than anyone else, and it showed. How's this for Cult – some YouTube guy has compiled the top 100 of AI's crossovers inflicted on an air-grasping, ankle-breaking NBA. The patented move: crossover-crossover. You bite on it, he goes hard to rim, you go for him, and he loops his arm under and around you and suddenly the ball is dropping in over your shoulder. And this was to mobile guys like Chauncey Billups, Ray Allen, not just the hapless trees who ended up having to mark him amid the chaos he caused.

He was drafted number one to the Philadelphia 76ers in 1996 – a team with not a single redeeming feature at the time. On Wiki, the 76ers' history goes from The Dark Ages (1992-96) to The Allen Iverson Era (1996-2006). By 2000-01, Iverson was the regular season NBA MVP, and had led his team first to the Eastern Conference finals against the Milwaukee Bucks, and then to the NBA Finals.

Unfortunately it is here that the fairytale ends. You need two great offensive players, minimum, to win the NBA; with just one the team dynamic is always too nervously focused on you producing. For many years Michael Jordan learnt this hard lesson with the Chicago Bulls. The Lakers, waiting in the Finals, had not just Kobe Bryant but Shaquille O'Neal, and a wealth of decent supporting acts. After Iverson scored 48 points in Game 1 (the next highest 6er had 13) to silence the Staples Arena with a 1-0 Philadelphia lead, LA eventually won 4-1. That would be Iverson's only appearance at an NBA Finals. But still, from a racist near-death-sentence in a jail cell to the key player in the best basketball team in one half of the country isn't bad; and for a few days in June they were the best team, period.

First Philadelphia was leading, then they were tied. Then Milwaukee was leading. Then they were tied. Then Philly again. Then they tied again. Then game 7. Iverson, on the cusp of taking the crucial step from high school sport into college sport, had gone to jail. Now here he was, in rejection of his sentence. He scored 44 of the 76ers 108 points, the stadium echoing as it already had done for years, with Allen Iverson being repeated by the announcer. And in some of those moments, particularly after winding the clock down to nothing at the very end of the second quarter and then sinking a deep three, you can feel that plenty of people in that success-starved stadium probably loved him, however briefly, more than they loved any member of their own family.

In what is generally described as 'the infamous practice rant' – 'We're talking about practice. Not a game, not a game, not a game, we talking about practice. Not a game, not a, not the game that I go out there and die for, and play every game like it's my last, not the game. We talking about practice, man, I mean, how silly is that? We talking about practice. I know I'm supposed to be there, I know I'm supposed to lead by example, I know that. What are we talking about?

Words: @tobysprigings

Illustration: @Dan_Draws