“[Iverson] was the personification of who we were, which was a scrappy, undersized magazine.”
–Tony Gervino, editor-in-chief of SLAM, 1994-99
Doesn’t Anybody Like Allen Iverson?
–Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13 1997.
There’s a natural tendency to exaggerate the basketball exploits witnessed only by a precious few. There are no television cameras, no large crowds, no genuine fanfare and thus the opportunity to embellish. It makes the story better. So when Scoop Jackson received a call sometime in the first week of August, 1995, while in Washington D.C. on assignment for a then-infant SLAM magazine, his excited friend made one request: You need to see Allen Iverson play. Jackson had seen Iverson before as a freshman at Georgetown, was impressed, and listened to his friend. Iverson was, apparently, dominating the Hampton Pro-Am in nearby Norfolk, Virginia, scoring over 50 a night, putting on shows. Later, Jackson found himself in a smallish high school gym, late for the game in question. It was halftime, Iverson’s team was down 20 and he was barking at his coach. The scene didn’t lend itself to greatness. But within the next hour, something special happened. Iverson’s team won—and he finished with 81 points. Jackson’s excited friend was right, except that Iverson had in fact exceeded the hype. Jackson didn’t know what else to do other than call SLAM’s publisher.
“We have to put Allen Iverson on the cover of the magazine,” Jackson announced.
“But nobody knows who Allen Iverson is?” said the voice on the other line.
“I don’t give a shit. You have to put this cat on, because what I just saw was unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
Five months later, Iverson became the first college player to grace the cover of SLAM.
SLAM was less than 10 issues old, still somewhat finding its feet in the print media cosmos when it planted its flag with Iverson. The magazine was conceived on the premise of telling not the stories of the generic publications, but of telling the untold. There was a lifestyle, a love, a culture that could be articulated, even celebrated; there were players of excessive talent, victims of the street or of circumstance, whose names weren’t known outside their neighborhoods; and while the stars of the game were to be celebrated—you can’t sell magazines without them—there was another part of the game, largely ignored, that SLAM was devoted to. 
It was a magazine that consisted of writers with an unusual determination to be different, to not be just another guy with a microphone. They were fans who wore the same shoes and listened to the same music as the players, not separated by the culture from the people they were writing about, but of the culture. And here was Iverson, appearing almost like an epiphany, a new generation player, himself something of an untold story, exhibiting a similar freedom that this new magazine strived for.
He entered the League in 1996, a time when the chasm between the media and its stars was perhaps never wider. These were writers of a different era, weaned on the beat by a more pure form of the game, with team play, with the Celtics and the Lakers, with stars whose true pledge was with the game and not its outside privileges. They had watched the game change, its new stars now perhaps inheriting the fallout of the Jordan superstardom influence: Not the striving for greatness or the competiveness or the love for the game seen in a superstar, but the sense of entitlement, the feeling that they too deserved the lucrative endorsements and the franchise player tag, the status of having a team revolve around them. The resentment was reserved for players with obvious talents and abilities that went undisciplined; with mentality’s slanted towards individual and not team goals; with a style of play where the completing was as important as the completed; where auras were created not from on-court accomplishments, but from shoe sales and salaries.
Iverson was thrust into this group of players largely because of the timing of his entrance into the league. Subsequently, by, at 5-10, leading his talented but awful team in shots taken, unleashing a streak of 40-point games from the point guard position, and leading the league in turnovers, he almost came to symbolize, to them, all that what was wrong with the modern star. There was a chip on his shoulder that infuriated legends of the game past and present, and questions regarding the level of respect he had for the game.
There was a unique disconnect early on between Iverson and sportswriters. He was wary of them, not fully pampered and prepared in his youth to be savvy with them, disinterested in letting them in to his world. He had in some ways been burnt by their world, and now was determined to exist within another to enjoy freedom—that of expression, of appearance, of play. His rookie year, full of ridicule and nit-picking, subconsciously hardened him; they pushed and he pushed harder. Conversely, great lengths made to understand Iverson, his background, his expression, weren’t made by portions of the media. He was confusing to them, what with his baggy clothes, his jewelry, braided hair, excess of tattoos. The way he played the game, aesthetically pleasing to them or not, could be processed and understood. However, what he was about, what he represented, not so much. It was a cultural gap that divided two parties disinterested in accommodating the other.
SLAM was on its own sort of voyage of finding itself, with choices made on how to stand alone, to express and to separate. The marriage with Iverson developed over time, almost naturally, and at one point he graced their cover more than any other player. They would write about Iverson from Iverson’s perspective, at a time when the majority of expressed views were from 180-degrees. His qualities were to be embraced, even at times inflating the already inflated elements, such as his hair, or his attitude. Allen Iverson was, in some way, SLAM.
Who’s Afraid of Allen Iverson?
Part two will run on SLAMonline Wednesday.
