For Iverson, the Answer Rests in the Past

Steve James was well into making in Chicago what would become his epic sports documentary Hoop Dreams when his father, back in his home in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, started regaling him about a phenom of a teenage athlete at James' rival high school, Bethel.

The kid already had quarterbacked Bethel to the state football title over James' alma mater, Hampton. He was working on doing the same in basketball.

The kid's name was Allen Iverson.

"He ... was incredible," James on Tuesday told me he came to realize of the wiry Iverson in the newspaper clippings his father, Billy, sent him in the early '90s.

The only thing that was more amazing about Iverson was what happened to him after a basketball game his senior year in which he celebrated at a bowling alley. A brawl erupted after someone spat a racial slur at Iverson and his friends. Iverson wound up arrested, charged and convicted for mob violence. No white participants in the fight were busted.

On Sunday, James' newest documentary, No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, is scheduled for an official premiere at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

"To me, Allen Iverson's public image that has persisted to this day," James said, "began when he was 17 in this bowling alley incident."

Indeed, it remained on display earlier this week when Iverson responded on Twitter to a Stephen A. Smith column in The Philadelphia Inquirer that portrayed Iverson as struggling with alcohol and gambling with his career appearing near over and his wife and mother of his five children filing for divorce. It is all the toughness ("I will stand tall like always with 'rhino' thick skin"), all the brashness ("I have become used to hearing people say things about me that aren't true"), all the steadfast individualism ("I am going through some very tough times right now") that has come to define Iverson and make him the most authentic athletic personality of his generation.

"You all know that my life isn't perfect," the tweet identified as coming from Iverson stated further on Monday. "I want you to trust that this is another obstacle in my life that, with God's help I will overcome."

James said he was unable to secure an interview with Iverson for No Crossover, which ESPN has scheduled to air April 13 as part of its 30 for 30 film series, but he didn't set out to make a biopic about Iverson anyway. He intended to tell the story of a particular personality in a certain time and place that, reflecting on it this week, has just so happened to look like the defining moment for that person's life.

James admitted to being, like me, an Iverson fan.

"I admired him much more as a player," said James, who played basketball at Hampton, "but I do wish he'd figured out along the way that he'd be better off if he didn't take so much on his own shoulders."

But James said researching his film brought him to understand why Iverson is who he's become. It's his having to prove himself as a smallish athlete, which he found himself having to do in that bowling alley. It's his extraordinary talent that is difficult to keep contained. Remember when he dropped 50 on the Lakers in the opening game of the Los Angeles-Philadelphia Finals to lead his Sixers to an upset win?

It is Iverson's indomitable will that some observers interpret as selfishness.

That's the thing about Iverson, James said he learned. He's not so much a lightning rod for controversy, despite the bowling alley brawl -- for which Gov. Douglas Wilder, Virginia's first and only black governor, pardoned him -- getting busted for weed and illegal possession of a gun, and being investigated for threatening a couple of men with a gun while scouring Philly one night looking for his wife, who was his high school sweetheart, after a domestic dispute.

Iverson is, instead, a spotlight on societal dichotomy.

"His fans give him props (credit) as a guy who never changed, never went corporate," James observed. "His detractors say, 'Yeah, you're right. He never grew up.' "

Most of those who like Iverson are like me, black, and not like James, white.

Iverson didn't fit most everyone's desired image of him until he emerged as a stand-up mature spokesman for the failures of the bronze-medal winning U.S. Olympic men's basketball team in Athens. Then he didn't get invited to Beijing in 2008 as if he was the problem in 2004.

"There was always talk about Iverson not being a nice guy," James said, "that he hung with the bad guys. That accompanied his legend."

In a lot of ways, the most recent Iverson tale is like all those before it. It is, as Iverson tweeted, about being faced with struggle. Instead of poverty it is the threat of being a bereft husband and dad. Instead of a criminal court it is a civil one. Instead of the addictions of everyone around him, it may be his own.

"I'd be very cautious ... to say those kind of things that I think he said without being very, very certain from a medical standpoint," Iverson's retired college coach from Georgetown, John Thompson, said Monday on The John Thompson Show on ESPN980 in Washington. "Does Allen drink? I'm certain he does. Does Allen have a gambling problem? I don't know that. I've never seen Allen drink nor have I ever seen him gamble. That doesn't mean he does or he does not do it.

"But the thing I know about Allen is based on his history, his beginning. It's easy to put tags on him."

It's where Iverson grew up, James said.

"I grew up in that area, but the East End of Newport News where Iverson grew up I spent no time in until I did this film," James said. "That part of Newport News is as tough as any part of Chicago."

It produces those who succumb or those who survive. A.I. has been nothing but the latter.