Allen Iverson once built a 10,000 square feet mansion in Georgia that had rain gutters fashioned from pure copper and nine bathrooms. He used routinely drop $40,000 (€37,000) per night at strip clubs and put 50 tickets on the door at Philadelphia 76ers' home games for friends.
It’s ironic then that perhaps the best way to illustrate exactly how he burned through a $154 million fortune may also be the most mundane. During 14 seasons when he was often the most scintillating guard in the NBA, $12,000 was leaving his account every month just to pay for car insurance.
The type of oversized bill that tells a story. This wasn’t just a product of the typical athlete’s fondness for tooling around in Lamborghinis, Maybachs and Bentleys. It was also underwriting a fleet of expensive vehicles driven by family and friends. How many? Well, one day a member of his entourage couldn’t remember where they parked their car at the airport so his mother Ann simply bought a new SUV on the way back to the house.
When Iverson’s talent paved his way out of dire poverty in Newport News, Virginia, in the mid-1990s, he brought many along with him for a rather extravagant ride. Befitting somebody with the Chinese word for loyalty tattooed on his neck, he called them “first-day friends”. These were people who knew him as “Bubba Chuck”, his nickname before basketball ordained him “The Answer”.
‘Plain irresponsibility’
“Iverson’s fortune had, since he entered the NBA in 1996, suffered a million cuts of varying depth, just like these – a blend of financial assistance for friends and family, investments that never got off the ground, and just plain irresponsibility . . . ” writes
Kent Babb
in a new book,
Not A Game: The incredible rise and unthinkable fall of Allen Iverson
.
“No one had bothered to teach Iverson how to handle money, and he simply never considered his fortune would run out. But even part of his nest-egg, the game-used memorabilia he had wisely hoarded, had gone to waste, many of the treasures had been sold at auction after Iverson forgot to pay his storage bill.”
Sports Illustrated once investigated the troubled relationship between American athletes and their money, and offered up some startling statistics. Within two years of retirement, four out of five NFL players are in financial trouble. Five years after hanging up their boots, over 60 per cent of NBA stars are broke. Given that the traditional reasons why include bad investments, poor financial planning, spendthrift habits, and the funding of outsized entourages, Iverson appears to be a textbook case.
"Allen was the first guy that showed me how NBA players spend money in strip clubs," said former team-mate Matt Barnes. "That guy went. HARD. He'd throw so much money, and this was when I was first in the league, that I used to take my foot and scoop the shit under my chair and either re-throw it or put some in my pocket. He'd throw $30,000, $40,000 every time we went. I'm like, 'You realise what I can do with this money?'"
That sort of vulgar excess dovetailed with the public image Iverson was cultivating. In his pomp, he was a troubled amalgam of basketball scoring machine and wannabe gangsta rapper. Regarded by many as the most hip-hop player of his generation, all corn-rows, do-rags, bling, and tales of him walking around with a gun in his waist-band, he once recorded an album that was deemed too misogynistic and homophobic (and probably too mediocre) for commercial release.
Legal missteps
Even if that and many other legal missteps impacted on him commercially, his extraordinary ability on the court – he famously dragged the 76ers to the 2001 NBA finals – ensured that even as late as 2009, he was earning almost $21 million a season. That he ended 2010 playing for Besiktas in Turkey for $2 million a year, however, shows how precipitously a player’s earning power can fall off. The problem that Iverson encountered was curbing his spending in line with his diminished salary.
During a messy 2012 divorce from his wife Tawanna (she was thrown out of the family home naked during one domestic dispute with Iverson), it emerged his income of $62,500 a month was dwarfed by expenditures of $358,376.66. Those monthly outgoings included an estimated $10,000 on grocery, $10,000 more on clothes, $5,000 on restaurants, and another $5,000 on entertainment. Against those and other gaudy numbers, outlined in forensic detail by Babb in his book, it’s easy to understand why so many jewellery stores and banks took him to court to recoup debts in recent years.
“I don’t even have money for a cheeseburger,” he shouted at Tawanna during one hearing. Her response was to open her wallet and give him $61 in cash.
If that cameo explains the false rumours Iverson was seen panhandling for change outside an Atlanta shopping mall last year, the truth of his situation is more complex. While he has blown his fortune, he still receives $800,000 per year from Reebok as part of his lifetime endorsement contract, and reportedly draws down a million bucks annually from a trust fund set up to protect him from himself. The kind of revenue stream that could finance a very nice life for most people. Perhaps not for Bubba Chuck.
