It’s Hard to See the Good Beneath Bad-Boy Image

Since last week, I’ve been waiting for readers to e-mail me in droves, the way they did last month when basketball’s bad boy, Allen Iverson, was charged with a collection of crimes that could have netted him 70 years behind bars.

“I hope you’ve been following the adventures of your great love interest, Allen Iverson, that cuddly, lovable guy you fawned over [in a column] some time ago,” one sarcastic reader crowed, in an e-mail typical of more than a dozen I received labeling Iverson scum, criminal, a thug, a jerk.

Many readers seemed to take perverse delight in the news of his criminal plight.

But now that the case against Iverson has unraveled--he was cleared last week of all but one minor charge--the silence from readers is deafening.

For the record, my column on Iverson--written last year when his Philadelphia team faced the Lakers in the NBA playoffs--wasn’t about how cute or cuddly he was, but about the heart and passion he brought to his game. The column, I thought, was relatively benign, and I wasn’t prepared for the umbrage it raised among folks determined to see Iverson as nothing more than a pampered thug.

“He’s just a punk who’s been blessed with athletic talent and doesn’t have the good sense to appreciate it,” one reader wrote. Others chastised me for making a hero out of a basketball player who fought with his coach, recorded an obscene rap song, was once arrested for carrying a pistol and served time in jail as a teenager for a bowling alley brawl.

That’s why I wasn’t surprised when his arrest became front-page news and generated days of talk radio patter among folks eager for the street-tough star to get his comeuppance.

According to police, Iverson had forced his naked wife out of the house during a domestic dispute, then gone looking for her with a gun, barged into the apartment of a cousin and threatened two acquaintances. He was charged with 14 criminal counts, including felony weapons, trespass and conspiracy charges.

But in court last week, a different story unfolded. The primary witness said he never saw Iverson with a gun. His buddy didn’t called 911 until 10 hours after the incident, and then only after a 20-minute phone conversation with a personal-injury lawyer. Later, he reportedly told friends he would have recanted the story if Iverson had paid him $100,000.

And that stuff about Iverson throwing out his wife naked? That came from that same discredited victim. There was no police report, and Iverson’s wife--who checked into a motel for two days--is back home and isn’t talking.

The case against Iverson--which drew more police power that most homicides in Philadelphia--amounted to nothing more than “a relative looking for a relative at the home of a relative” the judge decided, dismissing all but a misdemeanor charge of making “terrorist threats” after six hours of testimony.

But the verdict--Allen Iverson is an incorrigible thug--is still the same in the eyes of many.

“People have a vested interest in seeing Allen in a certain way,” explains USC professor Todd Boyd, who has written extensively on the cultural implications of sports in America. “The cornrows, the body full of tattoos, the gangster hip-hop aesthetic. He looks like he walked out of the penitentiary. When some people see Allen Iverson, what they see is ... a thug in a basketball uniform.”

His is not exactly the image many parents want peering down from a poster on junior’s bedroom wall. Yet Iverson’s inspired play on the court, and his in-your-face individuality off the court, make him one of the NBA’s most popular players.

“He’s not Jordan, he’s not Magic, he’s not Kobe ... and he’s not trying to be,” says Boyd, whose latest book “Young, Black, Rich and Famous: ‘Ball, Urban Culture and the Redefinition of the American Dream” will be published by Random House in the spring. “Allen was shaped by different things, and he refuses to bend to accommodate what anyone else wants him to be. And for a large segment of the population, the image he presents is threatening.”

His detractors were comforted by his brush with the law, because it validated their disapproval of his lifestyle, his arrogance, his unwillingness to look or act the part of a superstar.

But if it’s Iverson’s impact on kids that troubles us, we need to recognize that his image as iconoclast is part of the draw, part of what makes his basketball jersey the NBA’s top seller.

Reader Carmen Wisdom said it best in response to my Iverson column last time around: “I myself can’t personally relate to Iverson’s tattoos, pantyhose headgear or choice of music,” e-mailed Wisdom, who teaches English in middle and high school in San Bernardino. “What I can relate to is his determination to be himself. As the kids say, he represents.

“My students look at sleek, clean Michael Jordan, Derek Fisher, Kobe Bryant and they see beautiful, skilled men. They do not necessarily see themselves. They look at Iverson and there they are. Scrappy kids from the mean streets, kids who don’t have to suppress their individual tastes and cultures to succeed.”

So we might as well make room for Iverson in our pantheon of basketball heroes, because his appeal is not about to be undone by a little brush with the law, or our hand-wringing over his homies or his hair or his do-rag or his clothes. The heart he displays in his play on the court is bigger than all of those.

Sandy Banks’ column is published Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes. com.