Thank you for downloading this Atria Books eBook. Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Atria Books and Simon & Schuster. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP or visit us online to sign up at eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com For the young’uns who aren’t supposed to make it And, of course, for Whitney PROLOGUE A llen Iverson was thirsty the night before the test that would determine how often he saw his five children, but more than that he was restless. His six-bedroom mansion in northwest Atlanta was a prison now: an empty, 7,800- square-foot jailhouse with one inmate, and Iverson could not stand the silence. It was late December 2012, and months earlier his estranged wife had moved out, renting an apartment in nearby Suwanee and taking the kids with her. She kept saying she wanted a divorce, but this was not the first time she had said that. Wasn’t even the first time she had filed. Iverson told himself she would be back, because no matter how drunk or belligerent or violent he got, no matter the hour or condition he staggered home, Tawanna had always come back, filling these walls with life and sound—just the way Iverson liked it. Now, though, it was silent. Uncomfortably so. Iverson had not played in the National Basketball Association in nearly three years, and his last game of any kind had been an exhibition in China two months earlier—a quick paycheck to keep the lights on and the creditors quiet. The house carried a second mortgage now, and in less than two months it would be foreclosed and later sold at auction. But for now, it was home, even if it no longer felt much like it. The previous day had been Christmas, songs and voices filling the air, but now on this Wednesday evening, it was quiet again, and Iverson was stirring. Maybe he would go out for a while. He liked the bar at P.F. Chang’s because it was familiar and close, five miles from his house, and there was valet parking and cold Corona. One drink wouldn’t hurt, would it? Just to take the edge off. Maybe two. • • • THE NEXT AFTERNOON, he walked toward the doctor’s office near Hartsfield airport, assuming he had sobered up enough to beat the test. Iverson had more than a drink or two the night before, but it was four in the afternoon now, plenty of time for the alcohol to pass through his system. The problem was, Iverson had always underestimated his own metabolism, even before he was thirty-seven years old. His face was puffier now, his midsection and arms softer than they had been when he was named most valuable player of the NBA in 2001, when he led the Philadelphia 76ers to the NBA Finals and Iverson’s determined play announced to the world that an athlete and man cannot be judged on appearance alone. Back then, he could stay out until the wee hours, a friend helping him into his Atlantic City hotel room after a marathon night of gambling or Tawanna leading him up the stairs and into the bed, and still function well enough to make it to the arena in time to drop forty points, breaking some fool’s ankles with his crossover dribble and then slashing toward the basket as he bounced off bodies almost twice his size. But he was pushing forty, and the years had been unkind. He drank more now, and the hangovers were less eager to loosen their grip. The booze made him edgy, more impatient and profane, and sometimes he would piss on the floor in front of the kids or, if Tawanna looked at him sideways, drag his high school sweetheart up the stairs by her hair or dig the toe of his Timberland into the top of her bare foot, grinding like he was putting out a cigarette. Sometimes he reminded her of his connections and how inexpensive it would be to have her killed; Iverson estimated her life was worth maybe $5,000. She believed he was an alcoholic, and no manner of plea or threat would keep him home and sober. Tawanna spoke to his mother, Ann Iverson, begging her to talk sense into her son. She hounded Gary Moore, Iverson’s childhood mentor and now his personal manager, asking him to say something because he might not listen to most people, Gary, but you know he’ll listen to you. She cried and asked gently and, when that did not work, she showed her teeth and asked angrily, slinging a champagne bottle against the wall and threatening to take the kids and the rest of his money if he did not stop drinking and throwing their future away. He told her he could stop any time he wanted, but he would not be told to do anything; that was never the way to get Iverson to do anything. And so she did as she said, filing for divorce in 2010 before baiting Iverson into signing a lopsided postnuptial agreement before she moved back in one last time. She filed again in 2012 and hired a high-profile divorce attorney, telling him that she did not trust Iverson around their children. Not when they had been newborns, when he had blown off major events because he was too drunk—including the birth of his first son— and certainly not now that things had worsened. One of the court’s first rulings was to order a substance abuse evaluation and gauge how severe the problem really was. The assessment by the substance abuse doctor, Michael Fishman, would go a long way in determining custody and visitation for the children. The test was simple, and all Iverson had to do was not have alcohol in his system for one day. He had scheduled the appointment carefully, factoring in his hatred of mornings, and asked for a window late in the afternoon. Four o’clock it was, and now he entered the office and greeted the workers, two of whom could still smell alcohol on his breath from the night before. A while later, Fishman swabbed the inside of Iverson’s mouth, and his saliva showed that even now, so many hours after that final drink, his blood-alcohol content was between .06 and .08, the latter number indicating that, according to Georgia law, Iverson was still too drunk to even drive himself here. Then Iverson filled a cup with urine, and at 6 p.m., he still had enough booze in his system that the test showed his BAC was .05, suggesting to Fishman that on a most important day, with alcohol as the matter in question, Iverson had either gotten himself so shit-faced the night before that he was still drunk as afternoon turned to evening, or he had kept on drinking that afternoon. Iverson’s test results made Fishman’s assessment easy, and when Iverson finally met with the case’s guardian ad litem, a court-appointed investigator and mediator, at the Fulton County Superior Courthouse—he had blown off their first appointment and called at the last minute to reschedule the second—she noted that Iverson “smelled remarkably of alcohol.” A different doctor had also smelled alcohol on Iverson’s breath during yet another evaluation. In February 2013, about six weeks after his substance abuse test, Dawn Smith, the guardian ad litem, took the witness stand. She had interviewed Iverson several times by now, and during her testimony she pointed out that a man whose penchant for dramatic plays at dramatic moments had made him one of America’s most famous athletes was now wilting in his personal life—a time when, more than ever, he needed to be clutch. “People, in my experience, when you’ve got a guardian doing an investigation,” Smith told the court, “they try to, you know, act their best, do their best job at parenting. So in the midst of this, he still wasn’t able to step up despite the scrutiny.” • • • DURING THE MONTHS that followed, friends and teammates from Iverson’s life as a basketball icon tried to separate fact from fiction. How could he fall so far, so fast? They read the reports in the newspapers and on gossip websites. Could Iverson really be broke, only a few years removed from a career that earned him more than $150 million in playing salary alone? Was it true that he and Tawanna, Iverson’s high school sweetheart and that gentle soul they had come to know as the woman who had tamed the NBA’s bad boy, really split up? Had his spending and gambling and drinking— especially the drinking—really gotten this far out of hand, that it seemed to now be on the verge of ruining Iverson’s life? “Nobody can save Allen at this point except Allen,” said Henry “Que” Gaskins, who in 1996 had been assigned by Reebok to help shepherd Iverson into adulthood and superstardom. “He’s got to first admit that he needs to be saved. I don’t even know that he feels like that’s the case.” After the divorce was final, with the judge convinced enough of Iverson’s instability that she granted Tawanna everything she had asked for, Iverson continued his desperate attempt to return to the NBA. He waited for the phone to ring day after day, assuming a franchise would come to its senses and bring back a former star who believed he still had something to offer. Iverson, for so long seen as an athlete who refused to accept his own limitations, was now nothing more than a sad and broken man unwilling to accept the truth—a truth many of those closest to Iverson had known and tried to ignore for years: Basketball had been the only thing holding Iverson’s life together, and now basketball was gone. “God gave him this great gift,” said Pat Croce, the former Sixers team president and the man who oversaw Iverson’s selection as the NBA’s top overall draft pick in 1996. “But you knew one day, He was going to take it away.” The days became weeks and then months, and the silence ate away at Iverson. The phone did not ring. Tawanna did not return. Friends did not come around. The divorce judge had decreed that Iverson avoid alcohol for a year, an attempt at returning a once- dazzling life to the rails. A life addicted to noise and stimulation had gone quiet, and so three or four nights a week he drove to Cumberland Mall in northwest Atlanta, parking on the shopping center’s north side. He walked past the fountain, through the revolving door at P.F. Chang’s, and past the host’s station. Along either side of the aisle were tables with families and laughing friends, and straight ahead was the crescent-shaped bar, where a pair of televisions were usually tuned to sports highlights. Comfort waited only a few strides away. Sometimes diners recognized him, and Iverson occasionally smiled as a stranger snapped a photograph. Other times he wore a floppy hat and sunglasses, taking his normal seat and ordering the night’s first Corona, his eyes finding highlights that no longer included him, tipping the clear glass bottle upward and trying like hell to hide from an unsympathetic world. CHAPTER 1 STREET’S DISCIPLE T here he went, house to house, hoping he would find the little shit. It was Sunday evening, the sun setting in coastal Virginia, and Mike Bailey’s patience was eroding by the second. He should have known better. No doubt about it now. Nope, Coach, he’s not here. Sorry, Coach, you just missed him. Bailey was the basketball coach at Bethel High School in Hampton, Virginia, a city on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, and after two decades he was familiar with the maze of teenage psychology. Now he was seething, played like a fool by a kid. These were the kinds of things that made him distrust Iverson, Bailey thought to himself, practicing what he would say when he finally found him. This was why the kid’s word wasn’t worth a damn. Three days earlier, Iverson had asked to go home. Just one weekend, Coach. He wanted to see his mother and his friends. Bailey had gotten to know Iverson’s delicate family situation, and he knew the kid had a chance to do something amazing. Two years earlier, the coach first watched the eighth-grade point guard on the junior varsity team. He was so fast, driving to the basket with such ease. The kid was a blur, and the other boys could not move fast enough to get in front of him or put a hand in his face, and damn, there he went again. Iverson would have a chance at a college scholarship, Bailey just knew it, a rare opportunity to lift himself and his family out of here. But there was so much work to be done, a total construction job, and the first time he had met Iverson they argued about school absences. Ten of them, the policy went, led to sports ineligibility. Bailey told Iverson he had missed seventy-six days of classes. Nah, Coach, the kid corrected proudly, it was only sixty-nine. After Iverson’s freshman year, Bailey had fallen for Iverson and his future enough that he and Janet, Bailey’s wife, had gone all-in: paying for Iverson to attend summer school, allowing him to live with them, and walking the high-wire act of Iverson enrolled in a session in which one absence meant failure and sports ineligibility—a high- powered train coming off the tracks. Now, with Bailey kicking himself for allowing himself to become so enchanted, the kid was nowhere to be found. He searched, one house and then the next, his eyes scanning the sidewalks and playgrounds and alleyways. Yeah, Coach, we just saw him. Bailey turned his car toward home, and the next morning he walked into the school and saw Iverson sitting in class. Later that day, he noticed Iverson walking alone. “Come here,” the coach demanded. Iverson walked over, and Bailey pulled him into a dimly lit room, grabbing the kid by the throat. “If you mess this thing up,” Bailey said, “I’ll kill you.” • • • SHE MOVED INTO Hampton’s Aberdeen district when she was still pregnant, fifteen years old, and a live wire. Look at her go, running through the neighborhood, which decades earlier had been part of resettlement legislation for some of the Virginia Peninsula’s black residents, and now it was a kind of community within a community. The neighbors appreciated the quiet, but here she came, bursting from her grandmother’s doorway yet again. Her voice carried down the streets and through the windows, that round belly pulling up her basketball jersey. Ann Iverson kept running in the months after she celebrated her fifteenth birthday by going all the way with Allen Broughton, the boy she had met three years earlier in Hartford, Connecticut, the boy who seemed to never keep his distance from trouble, the boy Ann just could not resist. They had talked about it: first love, first kiss, first fuck—it all went together, didn’t it, and so when she felt she was old enough, he would tap on her grandmother’s back window at midnight of her birthday, and then they would go down to the basement. Broughton had played basketball and earned the respect of men much older than him. Ann loved him, would fight for him, would do anything—and then he was just gone, not coming around anymore, even after the basketball trainer told Ann that her physical revealed she was two months pregnant. That would not stop her, though, from slamming doors and playing ball and bothering the neighbors. Then Ann’s mama died, and her