If you were a basketball-loving kid growing up in the Midwest in the ’90s, chances were you were all about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. Those Bulls teams were so iconic that there really must have been no other choice.
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Jordan and the Bulls owned the decade, winning six titles via two separate three-peats, but as the last dance approached, other players in the league began to carve out some real estate of their own. Shaquille O’Neal had been dominating since 1992. Kobe Bryant came along four years later. So did Allen Iverson, and with his unique look and fearless style of play, he changed the game in more ways than one.
Candace Parker grew up in Naperville, Illinois, and although she used to attend Bulls championship parades as an annual tradition, she couldn’t help but be influenced by Iverson. On the newest episode of All the Smoke, Parker told Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson just how important AI was to her.
“My brother [Anthony] got drafted to the Nets and traded on draft night to the Sixers,” she said. “So Allen Iverson was everything to me. I wore No. 3 for Allen Iverson, I had the little finger bands, I met him when I went to watch my brother play.”
Parker recalled how the NBA hadn’t seen anybody like Iverson yet. “During that time, Allen Iverson was larger than life,” she recalled. “His heart, and him being undersized. I loved the way he played the game the way he wanted to play the game, and being 6’4″ and dribbling the ball, people at that time were like, ‘Go down to the basket and work on a right hook.'”
“And I was like, ‘But I have a left hand!’ And they were like, ‘No, work on a right hook.’ So it was like being put in a box, and with Allen Iverson, he was doing all these things he shouldn’t be doing, and so that’s kind off why I idolized him.”
Parker even got the braids like Iverson had, which admittedly worked out much better for her than if she had gone with the bald look like Jordan or her other much-admired Bull, Ron Harper had.
She went on to become one of the greatest players in women’s basketball history, influencing an entire generation of aspiring hoopers herself, just as her idol had done for her.
Whenever Iverson’s legacy is mentioned, it always has to go beyond even his prolific output on the court. Some players transcend the game, and Parker’s stories are proof that for so many, Iverson was one of those guys.
