Iverson and T.O.---An interesting contrast
http://www.csnwashington.com/basketball-washington-wizards/talk/watch-full-allen-iverson-76ers-number-retirement-speech-video/
It goes back a while but at one time Allen Iverson attracted my attention for analysis, in part I suppose because he was a small guy who excelled in a sport of mostly giants. Like Walter Payton and Tom Waddle he took amazing physical punishment but remained durable. That is physically amazing. Most of us would never be able to withstand such brutal punishment. But his life story was even more intriguing, a young boy with no permanent home, who was adopted by a girlfriend and a 'posse', both of whom he stayed loyal to, foolishly loyal since his financial support of them (excluding his wife) made them useless, arrogant unproductive members of society. Thrown in jail his senior year in high school on a purely race basis, to punish Iverson for enabling the ghetto school in town to beat them in basketball ---in a case eventually called by the regional district courts as one of the worst injustices they had ever come across, Allen emerged from jail a very angry and bitter young man who would have self destructed were it not for all those people he mentioned in his retirement speech. But the chip on his shoulder for how he was treated by the dominant culture and race at the time would never go away. He never missed a chance to irritate the dress, music, and language of the culture which tried to lock him up for most of his life.
His path and that of T.O. are interesting comparisons. Allen had pure raw talent, evident from Junior High on. T.O. had no raw talent to speak of. Allen had a large contingent of supporters, from his girlfriend to his posse, to his coaches, to his teammates. T.O. had only an eccentric grandmother who isolated him from other kids and all cultures. Outside his grandmother, who would T.O. thank for his success on the football field? Owens had a lot of backers on a lot of teams who defended him---both coaches and players, but none really who would claim they were remotely close to him, let alone claim they made him the kind of football player he became. Allen has a lot of people to thank for his success and I admire his gratitude and loyalty to them. T.O is a one man band, and many in the media or fans hated him for that, and as much for his obliviousness to their anger as to the substance of their anger. Nothing illustrates the irrationality of their anger more than this example. If Terrell Owens had been the first player to leap into the stands after a touchdown does anyone doubt that such a thing would then have been subjected to a severe penalty?
Both players, off the field, were damaged goods psychologically, due in large part to their unusual formative years backgrounds, but damaged in different ways. Allen recently was divorced by his childhood girlfriend. T.O. never found anyone outside his grandmother who he could bond to with any degree of closeness. What kind of life either will have in the future is anyone's guess. Allen perhaps will abuse recreational drugs, T.O. is more likely to suffer depression. Both will probably blow all the money they earned. I noticed Allen never stood still, was rocking the entire time of his speech. Maybe he was under drugs, it just didn't seem normal to me.
Both players had in common an active mouth. But even this is unique. Allen was verbal all his life. T.O. was such a wall flower socially that hardly anyone in his high school or college days much remembers him. T.O.'s verbal outbursts were self designed for the sole purpose of getting him the ball and then expanded to attract the attention for his achievements on the field. The attention was what drove his self serving comments. Attention was to T.O. what loyalty and revenge were to Allen. Allen has strong personal relationships, T.O. had strong self imposed barriers to keep himself protected from everyone else. It would be hard to find anyone who thrived so much on isolation from others.
Both cases raise the question of just how much do many really famous people pay to get to the top of the mountain in their profession? It gives a lot of us, with far less success in our career, reason to ponder the costs often required for that kind of success. I see life, especially later in life, as pure theatre, and people like Iverson and Owens make the best theatre and create the most intrigue.
