A good article on Allen Iverson's evolution to stardom, by Phil Jasner from Philly Daily News. Commets from his coaches, players and press on the day they knew Iverson was a superstar.

Star lite, star bright

Source: philly.com
By PHIL JASNER

For Allen Iverson, there was never a singular moment, at least one that anyone can universally agree on. His quest to achieve superstardom has been a metamorphosis, an evolution.

Here is Iverson, a barely 6-foot guard weighing in somewhere between 160 and 165 pounds. He has won four scoring titles and has been an MVP in his 10 seasons. In 2000-01, he drove his team to the Finals for the first time in 18 years. He finished this season with the highest scoring average (33.0) of any player who did not win the scoring title since 1969-70, when the league began declaring the winner based on average rather than total points.

But what Iverson hears - even as he says how much he wants to remain - is the bleat that a championship team cannot be built around a player of his size and position, that after a decade of show-stopping seasons, it is time for him to go, that it is time for the Sixers to start fresh. In this arena, superstardom does not necessarily come bathed in adulation and overwhelming success. Seven straight starts in the All-Star Game? Nah, say the cynics. Not hardly enough. A record of 34-48 in his 10th season? Give us more, they say.

As fascinating as the genesis and development of Allen Iverson the superstar has been, it has been equally fascinating trying to determine an exact starting point.

Maybe a surreal sequence in 1997, when he became the league's first rookie to score at least 40 points in five games in succession?

"Those games were when everybody realized he could be really special," says Doug Overton, Iverson's teammate that season and the team's director of player development in 2005-06. "He just caught fire, just took off. But all through that year, he kept doing different things, even though we didn't win a lot of games. What I remember is just the hype, how focused he was. At the time, I don't think we all realized how amazing 40 points in five straight games was; now, he gets 40, it's no big deal. I don't think, at the time, anyone had seen a little guy be that dominating."

But Iverson wasn't Magic Johnson, 9 inches taller, bursting into the league in 1979-80, joining Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy and winning a championship.

In 1996-97, Iverson's Sixers won 22 games.

In 2000-01, they went to the Finals.

"It takes years to put 'superstar' next to a player's name," says Steve Mix, who had a 13-season career and is now the Sixers' TV analyst. "In the Finals, a superstar is someone who can put his team on his back and carry it. He was the lone offensive player on a defense-oriented team."

So maybe superstardom arrived March 12, 1997, at the Wachovia Center, when he scored 37 points, including a fadeaway 19-foot jumper off a crossover move that staggered Michael Jordan?

"He had Jordan on a yo-yo," said Henry "Que" Gaskins, global vice resident of lifestyle and entertainment for Reebok. "That's the one. No one had ever made Jordan look like that on a single move. He made Jordan look human."

Or maybe it was the day of the draft in 1996?

"I knew from that day," said Sonny Hill, a senior adviser to the Sixers, the founder of the Charles Baker League for pros in the summer and various youth leagues, and an acknowledged historian of the game. "I said, 'This is electricity, that there would be electricity in the building.' I said he would be something special, not just as a player but as a connection to the city, that he had an aura about him. If you want to say the defining moment beyond that was the crossover on Michael, OK. To me, that was more like reaching a crescendo."

How about before all of that? Bill Walton, a Hall of Fame player and now a TV analyst, recalled meeting Iverson for the first time at the John Wooden Award presentation in Los Angeles.

"This was after, I think, his second year at Georgetown," Walton says. "I had seen him play a little, but had never talked with him. This was the beginning of my media career, and I was blown away by his stage presence, his command of the moment."

Walton was aware that Iverson had had a difficult upbringing, that he had spent 4 ½ months on a prison farm after an incident in a bowling alley as a high school student.

"He has been able to overcome so much," Walton says. "Not that this is the same thing, but it's like my stuttering problem; it's something you have to deal with every day."

Go ahead, look back at Iverson's two seasons at Georgetown.

"I remember him flying around the court," says Sixers coach Maurice Cheeks, an assistant to Johnny Davis when Iverson was a rookie. "But I didn't know then that he was a superstar. When he first came in to the NBA, he was pretty good, but my definition of a superstar is someone who does it year after year after year. I think maybe he was at that level by his fourth year, as he kept getting better, getting more productive. There have been guys who have won awards early in their careers and haven't turned out; he just continued up the ladder."

Stay, for a moment, back at Georgetown, then ruled by coach John Thompson.

"He got John to change his style of play, and that was something that opened everyone's eyes," says John Nash, the Portland Trail Blazers general manager. "John went from ball control to pushing it, and that was an awakening."

Or point to a Hoya play by Iverson that Gaskins has never forgotten.

"I'm not sure whether it was the first year or the second, but it was a game against UMass," says Gaskins. "Allen made a move at halfcourt, extremely quick and explosive, went to the basket and dunked on Marcus Camby. He did that, I knew he was something special."

Keep flipping back the pages of time, keep searching for clues, and you find...

"You might have to go back to high school, when he was in trouble," says Pat Williams, the Orlando Magic's senior vice president. "That's my first memory of him. It was so traumatic, but he was an incredible athlete and people went to bat for him. Eventually, John Thompson took his life over, became a mentor, a leader, a most impactful force. Here was this young kid with superstar ability from a difficult background, and the world was rooting for him. If he hadn't been helped then, he never would have emerged; he would have been just one of millions."

Gary Moore, Iverson's personal manager, insists he knew Iverson was a superstar at two distinctly different stages of his development.

"I knew first probably when Allen was 11," says Moore, then directing a youth football program in the Tidewater area of Virginia. "He was 8 ½, maybe 9 when he came into our program in Hampton. At 9, he was playing at a level reserved for the kids who were 12 and 13. By 15, he was leading his AAU basketball team to a national championship. What I saw, even then, was that the tougher the competition, the better he played. At Bethel High, he led a mediocre team to a state championship."

The second time Moore knew was the day of the NBA draft in '96, the day the Sixers made Allen Iverson the No. 1 overall pick.

"The obstacles he overcame, he really shouldn't be in the NBA," Moore says. "Others who would have had to face the situations he faced would probably have succumbed to the pressures. Because of his athletic prowess, Allen was accused, tried, convicted and sentenced for a crime he never committed. Most young black kids would not have survived that, or may have allowed that to destroy any opportunities at a fair share in life. I've never seen any bitterness in him about that."

This is who Allen Iverson is. He hasn't won a championship with the Sixers, he draws controversy to him as if he were a human lightning rod. He stoically insists there are a million people out there who love him and a million who hate him, but no one has ever been able to log an actual count. He wears his mantle as if it were a huge chip on his shoulder, daring anyone to try to knock it off.

He has the necessary unique skill set: physical talent, magnetic personality, fan appeal and marketing appeal that help create superstardom. He hasn't won nearly enough, and you can point to many reasons why, including, but not limited to, a lack of talent around him, a lack of a firm hand from coaches and management, or an unwillingness to alter his style.

But he has broken records and broken barriers. Philadelphia has seen this before, just never in a 6-foot, 160-pound package.