Iverson's hunger, Kobe's passion highlight landmark '96 class

He was at the free-throw line late in the game when the MVP chants cascaded down on him, a moment when the approval finally matched the effort and the fearlessness. A moment Allen Iverson will never forget.
It was late in the 50th NBA All-Star Game, 10 years ago this week -- a symbolic time for a new generation of stars that ultimately would be led to new heights by Kobe Bryant in the post-Michael Jordan era. But the rebellion always started with Iverson. Somehow, the road to ruin or redemption was going through the smallest, toughest, most resilient hombre of them all. Iverson won his first All-Star MVP that night in Washington, D.C., leading the East back from a 21-point deficit in one of the most memorable All-Star Games of the past decade. But as another All-Star weekend tipped off Friday in L.A., Iverson's absence was palpable. For the first time in 12 years, the player who symbolized the NBA's most dramatic generational shift has been pushed out by another one. The rebel, the hip-hop revolutionary, the player too stubborn and proud to back down, is on the outside looking in at All-Star weekend, which was always his time to grab the spotlight.
"Not a good feeling at all," Iverson said by phone Thursday from Atlanta, where he is rehabbing a leg injury that has interrupted his first season with the Turkish team Besiktas. "But God works in mysterious ways. Maybe I needed this experience to get back on track and appreciate what was given to me and what I earned."
What he earned, quite simply, is a place in the NBA's competitive and cultural pantheon -- a troubled, headstrong product of the inner city who went from the streets of Hampton, Va., to the pinnacle of organized pro basketball. Yes, he played every game like it was his last -- and didn't care who he offended along the way. Whether it was brazenly crossing up Michael Jordan at the foul line or feuding and later reconciling with his iconic coach, Larry Brown, Iverson was a dribbling, cursing, scowling contradiction. He tested physical limits by throwing his 165-pound body around among the NBA's giants and challenged our most private thoughts about race, urban culture and how sanitized our professional athletes and games should be.
"People need to understand, some guys go through their NBA careers squeaky clean, and some don't," Iverson said. "I didn't. I'm not bitter about that. I can't be mad about that. I'm just proud of the things I did accomplish in the NBA."

He did things never before seen from a basketball player his size, and challenged authority in ways that made people uncomfortable with their own thoughts. You can see Iverson's impact in flashes of the great point guards now running roughshod over the league -- a crossover by Derrick Rose here, a fearless drive to the basket by Rajon Rondo there. You can feel his legacy in the power and control NBA stars feel they're entitled to -- and see it in the tattoos that Iverson forced onto our television screens and magazine covers. Good or bad, that was part of the package with Iverson, whose complicated and important career could never be painted in black and white.
"He was the guy that everyone wanted to come watch," said Jason Kidd, who witnessed Iverson's signature All-Star performance as a member of the West All-Stars in 2001. "But he took a pounding. His heart was bigger than his body."
So, too, was his impact.
There was never any questioning his talent, his showmanship, his ability to seize the big moment and wear it on his shooting sleeve. But as the NBA embraces another "next" generation, its rise cannot be recognized without a history lesson on the Iverson-led post-Jordan crowd that everyone feared and doubted.
There is a certain confidence that the infusion of talent we are now witnessing -- with Blake Griffin dunking his way to the All-Star stage with LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony and the rest -- will be just fine. They are only Bryant's contemporaries now, but the talent is so deep and pure that no one doubts that the kids will be all right once the likes of Bryant, Kidd, Ray Allen, Tim Duncan and Steve Nash have moved on.
This was never so for Iverson and Bryant when they first arrived as ringleaders of a rabble-rousing 1996 draft class, making no apologies for showing up their elders while at the same time embracing the challenge of seizing the torch from Jordan. The adulation and acceptance that Iverson received from fans throughout his MVP season of 2000-01 and beyond was forged out of more difficult times. "I think history will view him as one of the hardest-working guys, pound-for-pound, who ever played the game," said Iverson's long-time manager, Gary Moore. "And I think that was because of the legacy that was passed down by Charles [Barkley], Michael, Magic [Johnson] and those guys. He really wanted to be appreciated by those guys like no one else. That's why he played the game as hard as he did. That's why he played every game like it was his last."

The nation got its first glimpse of Iverson and Bryant in the rookie game at All-Star weekend in 1997, and it was nearly unanimous: the nation did not like what it saw. The confidence and fearlessness learned from watching Jordan didn't translate to the court -- or to Madison Avenue, Lord knows, with Iverson's allegiance to hip-hop culture and the inner city that gave him to us as is.
Iverson didn't just collide with bodies during his 14-year career; he made a habit of colliding with history, too. He came in, along with Bryant, during that historic All-Star weekend in Cleveland when the NBA unveiled its 50 greatest players. It was a clash of cultures and attitudes never before seen and never to be duplicated.
Against the backdrop of such champions as Russell and Chamberlain, Magic and Bird, Iverson was greeted with deafening boos when he was named MVP of that rookie game. Barkley, who exempted himself from his own broad brush with the benefit of hindsight, had branded the new generation of stars led by Iverson as "knuckleheads."
"What was he when he was coming up?" Bryant shot back recently, as we reminisced about those days.
With Jordan on the verge of what turned out to be the last two of his six championships, a cloud of concern hovered over the NBA. How could the league venture forth from its golden era and hand the baton to these ... these ...
"Young punks," Bryant recalled.
To steal one of Iverson's pet phrases, it wasn't always peaches and cream. As Jordan faded away, painfully trying to prop up a declining product with an unsatisfying comeback attempt, TV ratings for the NBA Finals slumped for years. The Finals' decline was stemmed by the revival of the Lakers-Celtics rivalry in 2008 and 2010, but as for the All-Star Game, the ratings have never recovered.
Now, with the product and talent proving to be as good as they've been since Jordan retired, Bryant believes the generation that immediately followed His Airness should get a do-over in the history books. The skeptics, like Barkley, predicted the league would never get from there to here, but it has.
In 2001, when Iverson was at his zenith, the NBA was in the third year of a four-year, $840 million television contract. In other words, the reduction in player salaries that the NBA currently is seeking from players in a new collective bargaining agreement is equivalent to all the TV revenue in a four-year contract only a decade ago. That's how much the sport has grown -- and thrived. In 2007, the NBA negotiated an eight-year, $7.44 billion broadcast rights deal that represents a nearly five-fold increase over those turbulent times. "I think we were very entertaining," Bryant said. "We had some entertaining players, players people could gravitate to. You had A.I., who was doing his thing, you had Vince [Carter] coming along, you had Tracy [McGrady] and obviously the Lakers and Tim Duncan down in San Antonio. It was a good run."
Better than anyone expected, which perhaps will cast Iverson's career, his impact and his era in a different light.
"When the new generation comes along, you still can't take away from those players," Bryant said. "[Iverson] did stuff that's never been seen before from a guy his size. You can't discount that. He took a team of one scorer and a bunch of hard-nosed players to the NBA Finals. And when he lost to us, he was doing it during our reign of having a great team."
Bryant, 32, is one of the few who remain from that notable draft class of '96, along with teammate Derek Fisher, the Celtics' Allen and Jermaine O'Neal, the Suns' Nash, Trail Blazers' Marcus Camby and the Heat's Erick Dampier. Stephon Marbury is either in Brooklyn, L.A., China, or outer space. Antoine Walker lost millions in real estate and at the blackjack table and is trying to revive his career in the D-League. Most of them have faded away, or flamed out.
"We're all going to be faced with that," Kidd said. "When we're young, we feel like we can go forever. And it goes by fast. But we're all going to be faced with that question: 'When is it time to walk away?' For [Iverson], he feels he can still play."
Having achieved a measure of contrition and perspective that only time and distance can provide, Iverson is able to see the self-inflicted damage he caused.
"People criticized me for things I did, and rightfully so," Iverson said. "I accomplished a lot of things that nobody ever did before. But I should be criticized for some of the things I did wrong."
He realizes now, as he rehabs the most significant injury of his basketball life -- a painful calcium deposit in his leg that was treated by renowned surgeon Dr. James Andrews -- that the acceptance and approval he craved from the greats who came before him was there all along. He just couldn't see then what he sees now.
"I heard certain comments from those guys that were positive, and I heard some that were negative," Iverson said. "You've got to have thick skin in life, period. You're not going to always be praised all the time. Being young, I didn't understand that. Being older, I do. People would sit and debate. That's what made it interesting. That's what made people want to watch.
"I tried to be the best Allen Iverson I could," he said. "When you talk about those guys -- Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas -- you can't follow in those footsteps. You can only be the best player that you can be."
Ten years after his first of two All-Star MVP awards provided a measure of redemption for the knucklehead generation, Iverson realizes that he alone is to blame for his first absence from All-Star weekend in a dozen years. His tumultuous final two seasons -- in Denver, Detroit, Memphis and then back in Philadelphia for a proper curtain call that never came -- were disrupted by marital problems and his now 5-year-old daughter's frightening battle with Kawasaki disease.
Though there have been reports that Iverson went to Turkey because he's in financial trouble, he strongly denied that the decision to sign a two-year, $4 million contract with Besiktas was motivated by money.
"Everybody is making a big deal about going overseas, feeling like it was a financial situation," Iverson said. "It wasn't. Nobody made a big deal about the money I made last season in Philadelphia. Nobody made a big deal about the money I made in Memphis."
Either way, the lack of interest from a single NBA team last summer also stemmed from Iverson's unwillingness to adapt his game and change his ways, something he hopes he gets a chance to fix.
"A lot of the things that happened to me and the reason I'm not in the NBA isn't because of my ability," Iverson said. "I understand it's not my talent. I understand it has nothing to do with my ability to play basketball."
If only he knew then what he knows now. If only he could've united his 35-year-old conscience with his 25-year-old body.
"I wish I could get it back," he said. "I wish I could have done things different at certain times."
Yes, the ringleader of the lost generation that proved otherwise is trying to hang on -- hoping to hear the applause once again. His legacy lives vicariously every time Rose or Rondo drives to the basket without regard for human life, gets clobbered and stumbles to his feet. It lives on every time Chris Paul gives an earful to a referee; in a private moment recently, Paul admitted that while he has Isiah's smile, he also has Iverson's burning disdain for bad calls. It lives on in Brandon Jennings, who idolized Iverson as a boy and wanted so badly for his muse to keep playing so they could compete against each other. It lives on the upper right arm of Tyson Chandler, who unwittingly got branded with Iverson's famous blood-dripping-knife tattoo in an L.A. parlor years ago.
"I wish they'd told me it was his," Chandler said. "... I didn't know him well, but I've always admired his game, admired his toughness, admired the [injuries] that he played with. He brought a different spark, a different element. He changed the culture of the game."
Iverson's stated goal is to return to his Turkish team, Besiktas, in time for the playoffs. But as always with A.I., there's more to it than that.
"Unfinished business," is the way Moore, who has known Iverson since he was an 8-year-old boy, described it.
"He's never been as unhealthy as he is right now," Moore said. "This injury was so devastating to him. His priority is to get healthy, work his butt off, and get back on the basketball court. If it's too late to help his team in Turkey, his goal is to get back to the NBA if possible."
Whether that would be a satisfying, full-circle sort of moment for Iverson -- the rebel of a generation -- depends on how it ends, and whether the opportunity comes at all.
"I don't know if I'll ever play in the NBA again," Iverson said. "Maybe I will. Maybe I'll have to change a whole bunch of things to get a shot. ... I don't want to put the basketball down at this point. That's why I went all the way across the water, because I don't think I'm done playing basketball."
If he is done, Iverson didn't hesitate any more than he did with his crossover dribble when asked what's next.
"Fishing," he said. "Fishing, and being able to help my wife like she helped me through my whole career."
Iverson will watch "every minute" of Sunday's All-Star Game, Moore said -- rooting for the young guys and wishing he was still there to share the cheers. In his home, Moore still has the game ball from that 2001 All-Star Game, which Iverson proudly handed to him 10 years ago this week. The memories are still strong, like it was yesterday. Like Iverson, he just hopes for a few more.