Hey, Sixers: Answer the call and bring back Allen Iverson

When the 76ers chose Allen Iverson as their first-round draft pick in 1996 — and when he, as a rookie, crossed over on Michael Jordan — I was only a glimmer in my parents’ eyes. When Iverson was running Philadelphia (and the NBA), I was in diapers. When he first left Philly in 2006, I was still in elementary school, barely a baller myself.

And yet, to me, Iverson is the definition of modern basketball, a Philadelphia miracle, a cultural icon that forever changed the game, and someone I always want around.

Over the past few years, A.I. has kept saying he wants to come back to Philly to work for the 76ers, and I gotta wonder: What’s the holdup?

Don’t the Sixers know that when the Answer calls, you … answer?

To anyone willing to listen, A.I. has said he wants to be part of the team — saying as much to interviewers from Bleacher Report and, most recently, Headliners. Not at point guard, please; he’s 48. But as an adviser, or if not an official coach, then a personal coach.

“I get emotional talking about it, because I thought I should have been doing this, you know what I mean?” he told Headliners last year. “I look at other teams and I see former players, they’re just around. Anything that I have as a basketball savant, just use me.”

I get it: He wants more than to just be a team alum who comes back for on-court waves and events. He wants a title. Validation that he meant something to this organization, and still means something. Let the 1997 Rookie of the Year talk to players who are having a hard time adjusting and share his on-court knowledge. Let us, his fans, bask in his presence and give him his props.

He deserves that from us, and from the Sixers.

Iverson is a national treasure, a trailblazer, and an innovator — come on, that crossover still makes highlight reels; my dad literally has the picture of Iverson stepping over Ty Lue framed in our basement. He’s also a point of total Philly pride. Chicago had Jordan. Cleveland had LeBron James. Los Angeles claimed Kobe Bryant. Iverson? He was all ours. In his heart, he says, he still is.

So why won’t they hire him? To that question, a Sixers rep gave me a big, fat, “No comment.”

The only reason I can think of for why Iverson is not already set up at the Wells Fargo Center is that we are talking about Allen Iverson. And the people in charge still don’t get him, still undervalue him, or, at least, undervalue what he means to most people in this city.

Could it be that they are still afraid that Iverson is still too hip-hop, too “street,” too … Black?

Yes, the Sixers have had three Black head coaches since Iverson left in 2006, but Iverson doesn’t like to play by the rules. And many people didn’t like that.

Remember 2005, when former NBA Commissioner David Stern said players had to dress “business casual” — meaning, none of the aspects of Iverson’s trademark look: starter jerseys, hats (including durags over his signature cornrows), chains, pendants, medallions, sunglasses, headphones. Players decried the new rule as racist, and many felt it was targeted to Iverson. Remember when no one understood or respected the grief he was enduring, during his infamous 2002 speech about practice?

That said, A.I. was not perfect by any means. Most people wouldn’t be, given how he was born to his rock star mom, Ann, when she was only 15. He was wrongfully convicted and did time after a bunch of teenagers got into a fight in a bowling alley. (Years later, he was pardoned, citing insufficient evidence of guilt.) He partied. He drank. He hung out with Eve and publicly argued with his family and friends and coaches. He did not follow the script at press conferences. But even with that, he defied a blueprint; instead of stoically towing the company line, he shared his feelings, got emotional.

» READ MORE: Allen Iverson wants to rejoin the Sixers organization

Many of us saw ourselves in him. We forgave him his sins because they were the sins a lot have been accused of, and that a lot of us would make in his position. We celebrated how he celebrated himself because he was also celebrating us. Hip-hop and Philly icon Reuben “Big Rube” Harley remains a friend. He talks to Ann Iverson a couple of times a month, and considers No. 3 “a man of the people,” he said. “When I first met him, he came down to Sharswood, 56th and Catharine, pulled up in his Bentley, got out, started playing hoops, rolling some dice.”

Iverson identified with those of us who lived in the parts of the city others of us are afraid to drive through. He embraced us, fully, personally, and professionally.

In doing this, he revolutionized basketball culture; he made a game dominated by Black players look and feel proudly Black. When the Athletic rated him No. 40 out of the 75 most influential NBA players of all time, they wrote in 2021:

Iverson is hip-hop. Not in the sense of the music genre so prevalent in modern society, but hip-hop in the sense of the culture and the people in it. The demographic that birthed the music as an expression of their largely oppressive experience. Iverson was an ambassador, is an ambassador, for this iteration of the ‘hood, a segment of the population systematically disregarded and disenfranchised that yet proved mighty enough to change the globe.

“Mighty enough to change the globe.” And yet, the Sixers won’t give Iverson an office with his name on it.

Iverson wants and deserves validation, reparations for how he was treated then, and acknowledgment that the people in charge didn’t respect him then, but we respect him and his culture — which comprises the most popular and imitated musical genre on the planet — now.

“How many guys you know who drive around in a Rolls Royce in any neighborhood, beloved by everybody?” said Harley. “That was A.I. He put a smile on everybody’s face. He knows what city life is like.”

The question is: Do the Sixers?

Abigail Chang is a writer and Southwest Philly native.