This is perhaps the most famous press conference in NBA history. On May 7, 2002, Allen Iverson appears before the press, after the elimination of the Sixers in the first round, against the Celtics of Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker.
A memorable flight, a remix…
Following the elimination, his coach Larry Brown, with whom his relationship was still explosive, criticized him for missing collective training. And these 30 minutes of questions/answershistory will remember a few sentences (“ We’re sitting there, I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and we’re talking practice?!“) and this flight where “The Answer” repeats the word “ practice 14 times in two minutes!
But the context is ultimately much more complex than DJ Steve Porter’s remixleft to posterity.
Because Allen Iverson still has in mind the exchange attempt, two years earlier, the Sixers then being very close to sending him to the Pistons. His response in the 2000/01 season was fabulous, and the Sixers were just three wins away from the crowning glory, but the following campaign was much more complicated, with injuries, a steeply declining record (from 56 to 43 wins) and therefore this entry elimination against Boston.
Criticized by his coach, the back of Philadelphia has a heated discussion with Larry Brown on May 7, and the tension only goes down when the coach promises his player not to exchange him, and to leave for a season.
Allen Iverson agrees to hold a press conference the same evening, to validate this agreement.
Behind the anger, the death of his best friend
Except that as his biographer Kent Rabb explains, in “Not A Game”, something changed when “The Answer” returns to answer journalists. Larry Brown thinks his player was drunk, but Allen Iverson assures that he was simply carried away by anger in the face of questions from journalists.
An anger whose reason we will only understand at the end of the press conference, an often forgotten part where Allen Iverson recalls that he lost his best friend, Rahsaan Langeford, a few months earlier. An absurd tragedy, a bad joke in a bar that turns into a settling of accounts at the end of the evening…
A tragedy that followed the back of Philly, eternal skinned alive, throughout the season.
“I hope it is. (that the problems are over and that he will be able to bounce back). But that’s not really about me. I’m selfish about the fact that my daughter has to go through this. My daughter is seven years old. Ask yourself: if your daughter had to listen to people say bad things about her father or mother all the time, how would you feel, honestly? If you have kids, I know you understand that. This is what my daughter experiences at school. She comes home and says her teacher told her that her father should not leave. Dad, the girl in my class says you’re getting traded. All for a game, a fucking game. A lot of you can’t put yourself in my shoes, because you couldn’t stand it. But just try to put yourself in my shoes. Not even for a fucking day, but just for a minute and try to deal with what I have to deal with in my life. My best friend died and we lost. And that’s what I have to endure for the rest of the summer, until the season starts up again. This is what I have to go through…this is my life in a nutshell. Now you can all go home and you can live your good life. Live it well, live your life to the fullest. »
