Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson - Softcover

Babb, Kent

 
9781476778976: Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476778973 ISBN 13: 9781476778976
Verlag: Atria, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing

“A searingly honest and intimate portrait of a captivating icon.” —Baxter Holmes, ESPN NBA reporter

Through extensive research and interviews with those closest to Iverson, acclaimed Washington Post sportswriter Kent Babb gets behind the familiar, sanitized, and heroic version of the hard-changing, hard-partying athlete who played every game as if it were his last.

Former NBA superstar Allen Iverson was once one of America’s most famous athletes: a trendsetter who transcended race, celebrity, and pop culture, and emerged from a troubled past to become one of the most successful and highly compensated athletes in the world. Now, his life and career come vividly to light in this “searingly honest” (Baxter Holmes) biography.

Babb brings to life a private, loyal, and often generous Allen Iverson who rarely made the headlines, revealing the back story behind some of Iverson’s most memorable moments, such as his infamous “Practice” rant, delving even deeper to discover where Iverson’s demons lurked. He drank too much, stayed out too late, spent more money than most people could spend in a dozen lifetimes—blowing more than $150 million of his NBA earnings alone.

His then wife Tawanna, seen often as the mild-mannered woman who tamed the bad boy, tried to keep her husband and family on the rails. But, as so many others learned on basketball courts, she was no match for the force of nature that was Iverson. Jealousy, meanness, and relentless eventually wore down even his biggest fans, teammates, and, eventually, even his most formidable opponent.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kent Babb is a Sports Enterprise Writer at The Washington Post, which he joined in October 2012. His work was included in the 2013 edition of The Best American Sports Writing, and his long-form journalism has been honored eight times by the Associated Press Sports Editors, including first place in feature writing in 2005 and 2010.

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Not a Game

CHAPTER 1

STREET’S DISCIPLE

There he went, house to house, hoping he would find the little shit. It was Sunday evening, the sun setting in coastal Virginia, and Mike Bailey’s patience was eroding by the second. He should have known better. No doubt about it now.

Nope, Coach, he’s not here.

Sorry, Coach, you just missed him.

Bailey was the basketball coach at Bethel High School in Hampton, Virginia, a city on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, and after two decades he was familiar with the maze of teenage psychology. Now he was seething, played like a fool by a kid. These were the kinds of things that made him distrust Iverson, Bailey thought to himself, practicing what he would say when he finally found him. This was why the kid’s word wasn’t worth a damn.

Three days earlier, Iverson had asked to go home. Just one weekend, Coach. He wanted to see his mother and his friends. Bailey had gotten to know Iverson’s delicate family situation, and he knew the kid had a chance to do something amazing. Two years earlier, the coach first watched the eighth-grade point guard on the junior varsity team. He was so fast, driving to the basket with such ease. The kid was a blur, and the other boys could not move fast enough to get in front of him or put a hand in his face, and damn, there he went again. Iverson would have a chance at a college scholarship, Bailey just knew it, a rare opportunity to lift himself and his family out of here. But there was so much work to be done, a total construction job, and the first time he had met Iverson they argued about school absences. Ten of them, the policy went, led to sports ineligibility. Bailey told Iverson he had missed seventy-six days of classes. Nah, Coach, the kid corrected proudly, it was only sixty-nine.

After Iverson’s freshman year, Bailey had fallen for Iverson and his future enough that he and Janet, Bailey’s wife, had gone all-in: paying for Iverson to attend summer school, allowing him to live with them, and walking the high-wire act of Iverson enrolled in a session in which one absence meant failure and sports ineligibility—a high-powered train coming off the tracks. Now, with Bailey kicking himself for allowing himself to become so enchanted, the kid was nowhere to be found.

He searched, one house and then the next, his eyes scanning the sidewalks and playgrounds and alleyways.

Yeah, Coach, we just saw him.

Bailey turned his car toward home, and the next morning he walked into the school and saw Iverson sitting in class. Later that day, he noticed Iverson walking alone.

“Come here,” the coach demanded.

Iverson walked over, and Bailey pulled him into a dimly lit room, grabbing the kid by the throat.

“If you mess this thing up,” Bailey said, “I’ll kill you.”

• • •

SHE MOVED INTO Hampton’s Aberdeen district when she was still pregnant, fifteen years old, and a live wire. Look at her go, running through the neighborhood, which decades earlier had been part of resettlement legislation for some of the Virginia Peninsula’s black residents, and now it was a kind of community within a community. The neighbors appreciated the quiet, but here she came, bursting from her grandmother’s doorway yet again.

Her voice carried down the streets and through the windows, that round belly pulling up her basketball jersey. Ann Iverson kept running in the months after she celebrated her fifteenth birthday by going all the way with Allen Broughton, the boy she had met three years earlier in Hartford, Connecticut, the boy who seemed to never keep his distance from trouble, the boy Ann just could not resist. They had talked about it: first love, first kiss, first fuck—it all went together, didn’t it, and so when she felt she was old enough, he would tap on her grandmother’s back window at midnight of her birthday, and then they would go down to the basement.

Broughton had played basketball and earned the respect of men much older than him. Ann loved him, would fight for him, would do anything—and then he was just gone, not coming around anymore, even after the basketball trainer told Ann that her physical revealed she was two months pregnant. That would not stop her, though, from slamming doors and playing ball and bothering the neighbors. Then Ann’s mama died, and her grandmother, Ethel Mitchell, moved the family to the Virginia coast, quieter environs, the old woman hoped, for a granddaughter known around the streets as “Juicy.”

She went into labor in early June, and when her son came out she noticed the length of his arms. He was going to be a basketball player, she thought almost immediately, or at least that was what she would tell people she thought. She named him Allen after his daddy and her first love, but she would call him Bubba Chuck, combining two uncles’ names.

Ann found stimulation even in Aberdeen, and other times she brought the party to Miss Ethel’s house, the old woman trying to keep young Allen asleep or at least shielded from the ruckus in the other room. Bubba Chuck grew, and like his mother he liked to go fast, jumping on a ten-speed at four and five years old, roughhousing with his uncles Greg and Stevie in the backyard as Miss Ethel screamed for them to stop, for God’s sake, y’all gonna break that boy in two!

“They would sling the hell out of his little ass up against the house or something,” said Butch Harper, who lived next door. “He would take the hardest damn hit, and he’d pop right back up.”

Ann worked evenings at the shipyard, taking on daytime jobs as a typist and a forklift driver. Miss Ethel was looking after the kids, Ann and her siblings included, and it was up to Ann to keep the lights on. She worked most times, and even when she was off, she was not home—­another party to attend, even if the fun came back to Aberdeen or, later, their home in Newport News, a few miles northeast on the Peninsula. Often there was a man with her, Michael Freeman, who did mysterious things to make ends meet. Before they disappeared for the night or a few days, they put a ball in Bubba Chuck’s hand and watched him go, and when he was nine Ann called Harper, her old neighbor, and begged him to waive the rule that kids had to live in Hampton to play in Hampton, where Harper oversaw the Deen Ball Sports league. Ann was so excited about it, telling the other mamas and daddies at work about how her son was so good, he was going to play in the NBA, just wait.

One of those people in earshot heard the commotion one day, the enthusiasm common but the details intriguing. Gary Moore was a coach for Harper, working with football players, and he liked what he was hearing. He wanted to take a look at this little dynamo, and so he put nine-year-old Bubba on the field with eleven- and twelve-year-olds, pushing the ball between his arms, and—hot damn, look at him go! “He was kicking so much ass, man, it was ridiculous,” Harper would recall more than two decades later.

Moore vowed to Ann that he would do more than coach her son. He would look after him, protect him, shield him from the sharks that would forever circle him. He would see to it that he would be challenged and disciplined and sheltered. The way Moore looked at it, a kid with Bubba Chuck’s gifts needed to be nurtured and strengthened, mentally and physically, built from the ground...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476778973
ISBN 13 
9781476778976
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
319
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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