Iverson Redefines League With No Apologies

A decade ago, there were people willing to bet that Allen Iverson wouldn't see his fourth season in the National Basketball Association, much less his 10th.

When the Philadelphia 76ers made the electrifying point guard out of Georgetown University the No.1 overall pick in the 1996 Draft, the move was not considered a no-brainer. This, after all, was not Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon or Shaquille O'Neal -- 7-foot behemoths around whom franchises could be easily built. Iverson was a barely 6-foot, almost 165-pound enigma whose freelance, street-ball style may or may not have translated well to the NBA

Besides, the kid had baggage - tons of baggage that any team staking their future on him had to worry would blow up in its face. Whether he had been rightly or wrongly convicted, Iverson did spend four months in jail while in high school for his role in a racially-charged bowling alley brawl in his home state of Virginia in 1992.

The sentence was later commuted, but Iverson had been forever labeled.

He was raw. He was street. More than a few called him a thug.

There was concern that some of the negative influences he grew up with in the ghettos of Hampton would simply migrate with him up I-95 to Philadelphia.

And perhaps most frightening of all was that Iverson, then a 20-year-old with the school-of-hard-knocks experience of someone twice his age, made no apologies for any of it.

His life, his culture, his history were his red badges of courage, and he would shed them for no one. Everything about him screamed defiance: Accept me as I am or simply leave me be."

Coming in to [Philadelphia] at 20, 21, with my talents, everybody expected me to be some 30-year-old man like I am now," Iverson recalled, and it would take more than time for him to grow up. "I wasn't used to the attention. I wasn't used to the money. I wasn't used to being the main focus on a NBA team. I had a lot of learning to do. I had a lot of growing up to do."

That did not come easily to him.

"A lot of times, I learned the hard way," he acknowledged.

Fast-forward 10 years, to the midpoint of the first decade of a new millennium. Iverson, now a 30-year-old married father of four, is a new man. Not only is he arguably the most popular NBA player on the planet, but he has become a bona fide cultural icon. "We didn't want safe," said Reebok chairman and CEO Paul Fireman, who signed Iverson to an endorsement contract before he had played his first NBA game. Fireman later signed Iverson to a lifetime deal worth $100 million. "[Iverson] was something that wasn't what everybody else was. That's what we wanted to stand for and breakthrough with."

Through his spectacular career with the Sixers and his association with Reebok, Iverson has become one of the most influential players in the history of the athletic endorsement industry. With the exceptions of legendary golfer Arnold Palmer and former NBA superstar Michael Jordan, Iverson has had more cultural impact than any sports endorser.

There are only a few athletes who have been able to influence perceptions of style and fashion the way Iverson has. The cornrows, tattoos, clothes and music that first had Iverson pigeon-holed as a hip-hop, basketball thug are now an ingrained part of everyday, American society.

Iverson wasn't the first athlete to wear cornrows, but after he first sported them at the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland, they became all the rage: He wasn't the first to like gangsta rap, but it followed him out of the locker rooms and into the house speakers of virtually every NBA arena.

The same can be said for the baggy clothes, the lavish jewelry - commonly referred to as "ice" - the retro jerseys and baseball caps with bills tilted to one side: Iverson didn't invent any of this, but he unquestionably helped inject those hip-hop flavors into the cultural mainstream.

Imagine how things would've been had Iverson not stuck to his convictions, had towed the line, given in to the voices urging him to conform.

"I think the cornrows, the tattoos, the way I dressed was a Do-Not-Disturb sign for the NBA and society in general," he said, "It took a lot of ups and downs for me to be accepted, but I'm glad I went through that. I went through the things I went through so my son or any kid doesn't have to be stereotyped for the way they dress or look. It's been rough being so misunderstood, but by my being strong enough to withstand it and remain true to who I am will make it easier for my son and the next generation."

The conformists couldn't beat him, so they joined him: The NBA stopped fighting him and started marketing him.

None of which is to say that the league or America has ever gotten completely comfortable with Iverson. There are and will always be people who look at the tattoos and the chains, the do-rag and the fade away baseball caps and see a poor role model for young people in general and young black men in particular. And it is not irrational to discern in the NBA's newly-mandated dress code a direct response to Iverson and the hip-hop style he helped usher prominence. It might not be called the "Iverson Rule," but the dress code certainly seems to rule out everything that Iverson is fond of wearing.

"We're not going to be crazy," NBA commissioner David Stern said of the dress code, which has been described as business casual. "We just want to dress up a little bit, that's all. Remember, your jeans are OK. You would just have to have a collar on your shirt."

Stern knows that many have viewed the dress code as a direct assault on the hip-hop influences the league embraced during the late 1990's when it was attempting to market young stars to replace the likes of Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Reggie Miller and John Stockton.

Stern believes that there is nothing hypocritical about the dress code.

"Hip-Hop is a style," Stern said, "Some of my owners like Jay-Z (New Jersey Nets), Nelly (Charlotte Bobcats) and Usher (Cleveland Cavaliers) are hip-hop, but they dress in a different fashion. Hip-Hop doesn't mean sloppy."

For his part, Iverson said he intends to abide by the dress code, but he wants to make it clear that he doesn't think it's fair or right. Principled dissent: Imagine that 10 years ago.

"Actually, I don't think it's good for the league," Iverson said," because it kind of makes it fake, the whole thing fake. You've got all these guys with these personalities and different games.

Tracy McGrady is different from Kobe Bryant. Kevin Garnett is different from Tim Duncan. I'm different from those guys, and that's what makes the league what it is. Everyone has their own personality, everyone had their own style. I just think it's unfair when you take that away from people.

"You're telling me basically, 'Don't dress hip-hop.' But what does a chain have to do with your outfit? …I have chains with my mom's name on it, my kids' names on it, with my friend that passed away on it. I don't think that's right for people to say I can't war that and I can't express it. It's just not right. I think they went way overboard with it." Still, despite the implications of the dress code, it is truly amazing to see how much has changed for Iverson.

As he enters his 10th season in the NBA, Iverson, who was once held up as the negative poster child for the Generation X athlete, is a league MVP, a seven-time All-Star, a four-time scoring champion, and, yes, a United States Olympian.

Starting with "The Question" and continuing with "The Answer" series, Iverson's signature shoes with Reebok are some of the best selling of all time.

"Reebok believed in me from day one," Iverson said, "They took a chance on me when a lot of people were questioning whether or not I would make an impact on the game."

Perhaps Iverson's appeal lies in his underdog status, as a little guy starring in a big man's game. Maybe it's because his story is one of triumph when all the odds were against him. Or maybe it's because that in a world where everyone told him he had to be something else, Iverson elected to stay true to who he was.

"There's gonna be a million people that love Allen Iverson," he said, "There's gonna be a million that hate Allen Iverson. People finally started to accept that it's not about what a person looks like on the outside... It's about what's on the inside."