The Book of Basketball (76 page)

So why not honor them with a Dr. Jack breakdown? Because Reed was better defensively and had a higher ceiling offensively, that’s why.
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Willis played 28 playoff games against Unseld (twice), Russell, Kareem and Wilt and averaged a 25–14 with 50 percent shooting as the Knicks prevailed in four of their five playoff series in ’69 and ’70, a more impressive stretch than anything Cowens ever offered.
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Willis peaked with a terrific ’70 Knicks team that surpassed any Boston edition from that decade. Cowens had a defining “tough guy” story (the Newlin incident), but Reed’s “tough guy” story was more impressive (the ’67 Lakers massacre where he decked three Lakers and sent their bench scurrying). Cowens’ greatest game (Game 7, ’74 Finals) can’t hold a candle to Reed’s greatest game (Game 7, ’70 Finals), and Cowens’ defining moment (skidding across the floor after pickpocketing Oscar) can’t come close to matching Reed’s defining moment (“And here comes Willis!”). Considering Willis wasted two years playing forward to accommodate the likes of Walt Bellamy, the distance between Cowens and Reed should have been bigger than it was.
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And you can’t gloss over Reed’s reputation as the premier enforcer of a much rougher era.

His remarkable Game 7 comeback shouldn’t matter for Pyramid purposes, but it’s hard not to give Willis credit for single-handedly swaying the ’70 Finals and providing one of the most famous sports moments of the twentieth century. Of all the NBA players who gritted through a debilitating injury, Willis stood out because he was literally
dragging
his right leg underneath him, like when your foot falls asleep and you can’t put any weight on it for a few seconds, only that was his right leg for a solid hour. That’s what made it so remarkable when he drained the first two jumpers and nearly broke Madison Square Garden’s roof. We can all agree Willis’ injury
seemed
worse than any other injury. Was it as gruesome as it looked? We know that Reed tore his right quadricep muscle, specifically a part called the rector femoris, which controls movement between hip and thigh. According to my favorite injury expert,
Baseball Prospectus
writer Will Carroll, you can feel that muscle by standing up, pushing your fingers into the center of your right thigh right inside the hip, then raising your right knee like you’re shooting a layup.

(Come on, just stand up and do it. I don’t ask for much.)

(Come on, just freaking do it! You’re pissing me off.)

(Thank you.)

Okay, once you raised that right knee, did you feel that specific part of the muscle tightening? That’s what Willis ripped in Game 5 of the ’70 Finals. All control had been severed between his hip and right leg, and as Carroll points out, “Willis’ right leg was a lot bigger than ours.” As for quantifying the level of pain, Carroll believes that it hinges on the impossible-to-determine combination of painkiller injections,
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adrenaline (running high for a Game 7, especially after the crowd went ballistic) and Willis’ pain threshold (obviously high). Was Willis draining two un-contested shots on a dead leg more impressive than Kirk Gibson limping off the bench, timing baseball’s top reliever and pushing off a ravaged knee for his Roy Hobbs-like game-winning home run in the ’88 World Series? Was Reed’s Game 7 cameo more courageous than Larry Bird spending the night in traction with a wrecked back, showing up for
Game 5 of the Pacers-Celtics series the next morning, playing with a cumbersome back brace, banging his head in the first half and breaking a bone near his eye, then returning midway through the third quarter and beating Indiana with a vintage Larry Legend performance? There’s no way to know, no Pain Scale that measures it.

But here’s what we
do
know: of all the legendary playing-in-pain performances, Willis Reed had the only one that swung the deciding game of an entire season. Top that, Dave Cowens.

29. ALLEN IVERSON

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 9 All-Stars … ’01 MVP … ’97 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’99, ’01, ’05), Top 10 (’00, ’02, ’03), Top-15 (’06) … 3-year peak: 31–4–7 … best player on runner-up (’01 Sixers), 33–5–6 (22 G) … leader: scoring (4x), steals (3x), TO’s (2x), minutes (1x) … 30-plus PPG (5x) … Playoffs: 30–6–4, 40% FG (67 g’s) … 20K Point Club

As the years and decades pass, both Iverson and no. 21 on the Pyramid will be picked apart by an army of statisticians looking for various ways to undermine their careers. And that’s fine. Just know that Iverson passed the Season Ticket Test every year this decade (starting with his ’01 MVP season): when season tickets arrive in the mail, the recipient invariably checks the schedule, marks certain can’t-miss games and writes those dates down on a calendar. The importance of those games is measured by rivalries, superstars, incoming rookies and the “I need to see that guy” factor. That’s it. From 1997 to 2007, Iverson always made my list. Always. So I don’t give a crap about Iverson’s win shares, his ranking among top-fifty scorers with the lowest shooting percentage or whatever.
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Every post-Y2K ticket to an Iverson game guaranteed a professional, first-class performance (no different
from reservations at a particularly good restaurant or hotel), and for whatever reason, he was always more breathtaking in person. He’s listed at six feet but couldn’t be taller than five-foot-ten, so every time he attacked the basket, it was like watching an undersized running back ram into the line of scrimmage for five yards a pop (think Emmitt Smith). He took implausible angles on his drives (angles that couldn’t be seen as they unfolded, even if you’d been watching him for ten years) and drained an obscene number of layups and floaters in traffic. He had a knack for going 9-for-24 but somehow making the two biggest shots of the game. And he played with an eff-you intensity that only KG and Kobe matched (although MJ remains the king of this category). For years and years, the most intimidating player in the league wasn’t taller than Rebecca Romijn. I always thought it was interesting that Iverson averaged 28 minutes of playing time in his eight All-Star Games and played crunch time in every close one; even his temporary coaches didn’t want to risk pissing him off.

Iverson’s career personifies how the media can negatively sway everyone’s perception of a particular athlete. There was a generational twinge to the anti-Iverson sentiment, fueled by media folks in their forties, fifties and sixties who couldn’t understand him and didn’t seem interested in trying. Nearly all of them played up his infamous aversion to practice (overrated over the years) and atypical appearance (the cornrows/tattoos combination) over describing the incredible thrill of watching him play in person. They weren’t interested in figuring out how an alleged coach-killer who allegedly monopolized the ball, allegedly hated to practice and allegedly couldn’t sublimate his game to make his teammates better doubled as one of the most revered players by his peers.
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They glossed over the fact that he was saddled with an incompetent front office, a subpar supporting cast and a revolving door of coaches in Philly.
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They didn’t care that he was
one of the most influential African American athletes ever, a trendsetter who shoved the NBA into the hip-hop era (whether the league was ready or not) and resonated with blacks in a way that even Jordan couldn’t duplicate. They weren’t so interested in one of the most fascinating, complex athletes of my lifetime: a legendary partier and devoted family man; a loyal teammate who shot too much; a featherweight who carried himself like a heavyweight; an intimidating competitor who was always the smallest guy on the court; an ex-con with a shady entourage who also ranked among the most intuitive, self-aware, articulate superstars in any sport. If I could pick any modern athlete to spend a week with in his prime for a magazine feature, I would pick Allen Iverson. In a heartbeat.

And yeah, his field goal percentage wasn’t that good and he took too many shots. Whatever. Fifty years from now, I hope people realize that Iverson had better balance than everyone else, that he was faster and more coordinated than everyone else, that he took a superhuman pounding and kept getting up, that he was one of the all-time athletic superfreaks. We already know that he was the best high school football player in Virginia history, but he also would have been a world-class soccer player, boxer or center fielder, someone who could have picked his sport in track and competed for an Olympic spot, and while we’re here, I can’t
fathom
how much ground he could have covered on a tennis court. (Tangent that’s too important for a footnote: Every time the World Cup rolls around, I always find myself thinking about which NBA players could have excelled at soccer. Iverson would have been the best soccer player ever. I think this is indisputable, actually. Deron Williams would have been a great stopper. Josh Smith could have been unstoppable soaring above the pack to head corner kicks. And can you imagine a better goalie than LeBron? It would be like having a six-foot-nine human octopus in the net. How could anyone score on him? Couldn’t we teach Bron the rudimentary aspects of playing goal, then throw him in a couple of Cleveland’s MLS games? Like you would turn the channel if this happened?) Iverson wrecked his body on and off the court and somehow kept his fastball, which shouldn’t be counted as an achievement but remains amazing nonetheless.
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And he deserves
loads of credit for dragging a mediocre Sixers team to the ’01 Finals when so many other scoring machines had failed before him. Unlike Gervin, McAdoo and Dominique, Iverson played with a swagger that pushed a decent team to a whole other level. He believed they could win, he killed himself to that end, and everyone else eventually followed. Watching Game 7 of the Bullets-Spurs series from ’79 and Game 7 of the Bucks-Sixers from ’01, the biggest difference between Gervin and Iverson—two spectacular offensive players—was the way they carried themselves. Gervin never gave the sense that the game was life or death to him, whereas Iverson went into foxhole mode, with his ferocity lifting his teammates and energizing the crowd.
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That ferocity separated Iverson from everyone else after Jordan retired; for most of his twenties, he was the Association’s single most menacing player. He had a darker edge that belonged to nobody else, a switch that instantly transformed him into a character from
The Wire.
I remember attending a Boston-Philly game when Iverson was whistled for a technical, yelped in disbelief, then followed the referee toward the scorer’s table before finally screaming “Fuck you!” at the top of his lungs. The official whirled around and pulled his whistle toward his mouth for a second technical. They were maybe 25 feet away from me, so I could see everything up close. And I swear on my daughter’s life, the following moment happened: As the ref started to blow the whistle, Iverson’s eyes widened and he moved angrily toward him, almost like someone getting written up for a parking ticket who decides it would be easier just to punch out the meter maid. For a split second, there was real violence in the air. The rattled official lowered his whistle and never called the second technical. By sheer force of personality, Iverson kept himself in the game.

Look, I’m not condoning what happened. It was a frightening moment. I specifically remember thinking, “I am frightened.” But I haven’t seen a basketball player bully a referee like that before or since; it was like playing an intramural hoops game against the football team and watching the biggest offensive lineman intimidate a 130-pound freshman ref. And that
goes back to the seeing-him-in-person thing. At his peak, Iverson played with a compelling, hostile, bloodthirsty energy that nobody else had. He was relentless in every sense of the word, a warrior, an alpha dog, a tornado. He was so quick and coordinated that it genuinely defies description. He was enough of a lunatic that officials occasionally cowered in his presence. And none of this makes total sense unless you watched him live. Could you win a title if Iverson was your best player and you didn’t have a franchise big man? Of course not. Could you win a title with Iverson as the second-best player and crunch-time scorer? Yeah, possibly. Would you pay to see him in his prime? In the words of Mr. Big, absah-fuckin’-lutely.
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I will remember him.

28. DAVID ROBINSON

Resume: 14 years, 10 quality, 10 All-Stars … ’95 MVP … runner-up: ’94, ’96 … ’90 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’91, ’92, ’95, ’96), Top 10 (’94, ’98), Top 15 (’90, ’93, ’00, ’01) … All-Defense (8x) … Defensive Player of the Year (’92) … leader: scoring (1x), rebounds (1x), blocks (1x) … 3-year peak: 28–11–3 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 24–11–3 (25 G) … 2nd-best player on 1 champ (’99 Spurs), starter for 1 champ (’03 Spurs) … scored 71 points (one game) … one quadruple double (34–10–10–10) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 20K-10K Club

I mentioned seeing every relevant NBA player from 1976 to 1995 strolling through the Nancy Parish Memorial Tunnel and how only four stood out. Not including Ken Bannister or Popeye Jones, of course.

One was Manute. Already covered him.

The second was Bird. Nearly everyone in our section had watched the
Legend walking by us dozens and dozens of times, but that didn’t stop us from staring at him the next time. This was the single most famous person who kept popping up in any of our lives. You worked, you slept, you ate, you went to the bathroom, you studied, you dated, you worked out, you did whatever normal people do … and then you went to the Boston Garden for a basketball game, and suddenly one of the greatest players ever was ambling by you again. When does that stop becoming surreal?
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