In a great piece written by Chris Palmer for Bleacher Report, he speaks with Allen Iverson and the result is a very intriguing story. If you saw the Iverson Documentary on Showtime it makes the piece even better. If you haven’t seen the doc yet then I suggest you should. Palmer discovers during his conversation that AI almost never wound up in the NBA and his arrest as a teenager changed that but not in the way you might think.
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Iverson obviously was not the biggest guy but he was a beast on the football field as well as the court. In fact, his plan as a high school senior wasn’t even to play college basketball. The plan was to accept a scholarship to play college football at Notre Dame!
Until the bowling alley incident—a brawl that eventually led to Iverson, a 17-year-old, being convicted as an adult of maiming by mob—turned his life upside down, he says he would have gone to Notre Dame to play quarterback, return kicks and win the Heisman Trophy. He would have done what Lou Holtz asked and showed them he was faster than Raghib “Rocket” Ismail. “I loved those gold helmets,” Iverson says longingly. Then it would be on to the NFL, hopefully the Cowboys.
Playing in the NFL would have been a long shot for such a smaller quarterback, but we have seen it more recently be very successful with guys like Drew Brees and Russell Wilson.
Knowing this information now, a selfish part of me is almost happy he went through that nonsense when he was younger because there would have never been the NBA Iverson who set trends, changed culture and played with heart like nobody before.
