“Practice?!” 20 years of Allen Iverson’s famous press conference

It is perhaps the most famous press conference in NBA history. On May 7, 2002, Allen Iverson appeared before the press, after the elimination of the Sixers in the first round, against the Celtics of Paul Pierce and Antoine Walker.

A memorable flight, a remix …

Following the elimination, his coach Larry Brown, with whom his relationship was always explosive, criticized him for missing team practices. And of these 30 minutes of questions / answers, history will retain some sentences (” We are sitting there, I am supposed to be the “franchise player”, and we talk about training?!“) and this flight where “The Answer” repeats the word ” practice ” 14 times in two minutes!

But the context is finally much more complex than the remix of DJ Steve Porter, left to posterity.

Because Allen Iverson still has in mind the trade attempt, two years earlier, the Sixers being then very close to send him to the Pistons. His response during the 2000/01 season was fabulous, and the Sixers were only three victories away from the supreme title, but the following campaign is much more complicated, with injuries, a balance sheet in sharp decline (from 56 to 43 wins) and thus this elimination from the start against Boston.

Criticized by his coach, the Philadelphia back has a stormy discussion with Larry Brown on May 7, and the tension goes down only when the coach promises his player not to trade him, and to start again for a season.

Allen Iverson agrees to hold a press conference the same evening, to validate this agreement.

Behind the anger, the death of his best friend

Except that as his biographer Kent Rabb explains in “Not A Game”, something has changed when “The Answer” returns to answer reporters. Larry Brown thinks that his player drank, but Allen Iverson assures that he was simply carried away by anger in front of the journalists’ questions.

An anger which we will understand the reason only at the end of the press conference, a part often forgotten where Allen Iverson recalls that he lost his best friend, Rahsaan Langeford, a few months earlier. An absurd tragedy, a bad joke in a bar that turns into a settling of scores at the end of the evening…

A tragedy that followed the Philly back, eternally flayed alive, throughout the season.

“I hope that’s the case (that the problems are over and he can bounce back). But it’s not really about me. I’m selfish about the fact that my daughter has to go through this. My daughter is seven years old. Ask yourself, if your daughter had to listen to people talk bad about her mom or dad all the time, how would you feel, honestly? If you have children, I know you understand that. This is what my daughter goes through at school. She comes home and says her teacher told her that her dad shouldn’t leave. Dad, the girl in my class says you’re getting traded. All for a game, a fucking game. A lot of you can’t put yourself in my shoes, because you couldn’t handle it. But just try to put yourself in my shoes. Not even for a fucking day, but just for a minute and try to deal with what I have to deal with in my life. My best friend died and we lost. And that’s what I have to endure for the rest of the summer, until the season starts up again. This is what I have to go through… this is my life in a nutshell. Now you can all go home and you can live your beautiful life. Live it well, live your life to the fullest.”