Taxidermy Church

lichtenblog:

I got pretty emotional the first time I watched this.  My first instinct was that a Philadelphia legend was coming home.  It’s what I’ve hoped for since before the season, when Iverson was without a team and, really, so were the Sixers (a hobbled Brand, a hole where Andre Miller used to be, confusion about where and when Thad Young and Marreese Speights would play).  To see Iverson so apparently feeling the same way is at once vindication and utter confusion: I’m reminded and reliving why I loved this player so intensely but I’m also mad and bewildered that I needed to be reminded at all.  Is it really love if you forget about it or neglect it for years, only to rediscover it in some sort of near death experience?

Because this was nearly a basketball death, and a very painful one at that.  It was unanimous: every basketball writer/blogger I read kept saying how SAD the whole business was.  It was sad to see another diminutive No. 3 (Brandon Jennings) set the league ablaze while the original article was AWOL, first injured and then seemingly unable to commit to the Memphis Grizzlies.  Some kind of spiritual transition was in the air.  It was time, we all agreed, for Iverson to ride into the sunset and gracefully give way to the next generation.  Now he’s back home, ready for the sunset treatment, but I’m crazy enough to think he can change this team and have a real impact.

As always, there are some skeptics and there are the true romantics.  Of course I’m in the latter camp, but not just because Allen Iverson is a great actor (which he is).

It’s because of something indefinable about sports and why we care.  Because of the relationship and yes, the trust, some athletes have with a city, with a set of fans.

Because Philadelphia is important for basketball, and vice versa: despite its recent status as its city’s fourth sport (out of four), basketball traces its lineage back from Iverson to Chuck to Moses and Doc to Wilt.  These players were icons of Philadelphia, a city notorious for its underdog/inferiority complex.  Iverson, Chuck and Moses were undersized warriors who made up for their limitations with an astonishing will to compete.  Doc and Wilt were physical titans, marked by their failures to win as many championships as individual accolades.  Iverson has already lived up to this strange, collective legacy of inconsistent glory, the kind of “glorious failure” familiar to supporters of the Scottish and Irish football teams.

But right now, Iverson seems the ultimate glorious failure: there’s no question he feels real emotions but there’s still doubt in my mind about what it means, about what he can really accomplish this year, about how his career will be remembered.  Isn’t the ultimate Philly underdog the guy who will have to fight on forever in our memories, trying to preserve his precarious, misunderstood, glorious legacy?

Technically meaningless but emotionally moving.  A sports-watching public goes from indifferent to spellbound in the course of one press conference.  Doubts remain the whole time.  The city of Philadelphia’s psyche, reflected in its greatest glorious failure.

I spent the day struggling with sports-related writing at the ol’ day job.  Nick (the husband), on the other hand, continues to write amazing shit.  I just came home from a tech. rehearsal,  I’m dead tired, but I am going to read this post again.