The Heart as Transmission

The human heart produces a magnetic field so strong that it can be detected up to three feet away. It has an electrical field 60 times greater in amplitude than the electrical activity of our brains. While this field is active at all times, silently thrumming away as we go about our lives, the heart is capable of upping the ante of these magnetic fields when involved in something called energetic communication—when it interacts with other living beings.

Researchers have found that we are capable of picking up on the electromagnetic signals of other people’s hearts. Dubbed “energetic communication”, these signals are detected best by people familiar with one another but can also be determined in states of heightened moods. Feelings like anger, for one, are easier for us to detect in other people—think jagged, erratic and sharp electromagnetic readings—but so is joy.

Seen this way, it’s no surprise that, even 20 years later, a thrum of energetic communication runs through the grainy game footage of Allen Iverson. Dunking, then hanging off the rim atop a 6’11” Marcus Camby; crossing over Michael Jordan in two tidy feints; every steal he snatched, then running alone down the floor for a transition basket—these are the moments when fans felt something radiate outward from Iverson, turning jagged or rolling into waves of soaring joy.

All Heart
Iverson grew up in Hampton, Virginia, a peninsular town 30 miles north of Virginia Beach. While Virginia Beach boasts miles of sandy, unblemished coastline facing the sprawling Atlantic, Hampton sits on the Hampton River, a salty, flat pan boxed in by Chesapeake Bay and the state’s Eastern Shore. It’s low marshland, hemmed in by trees, tight-clustered houses, and highways. Against that backdrop, it’s easy to understand Iverson’s later penchant for forcing his way into open space—bullying his compact frame into driving lanes, sending defenders backwards and off-balance with his signature crossover. His fearlessness on full display. 

“The reverberations, or currents of Iverson’s heart and effort were felt by others on the court.”


His desire for space comes into even sharper focus when you learn he grew up in a small house with 14 other kids—a house that flooded with sewage most times it rained and the neighborhood pipes backed up, the smell lingering for days.

In high school, Iverson was such a gifted athlete that he led his school’s football team to a state championship, then did the same for the basketball team. High school would also be when Iverson felt firsthand the racial divisiveness that ran through Hampton, when he was caught up in a fight at a local bowling alley and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his participation. The fight, documented in an ESPN 30 for 30 called “No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson”, broke out when a racial slur was used against Iverson and his friends. Footage from the incident is grainy, difficult to parse, but it was Iverson and his three friends who bore the brunt of punishment despite the large group involved.

After community agitation led to national attention, Iverson was granted conditional clemency by the governor of Virginia four months into his sentence. Iverson’s mother, Ann, urged Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson to visit her son. After his release, Iverson was offered a full scholarship to join the Hoyas where over just two years he’d be named Big East Rookie of the Year, selected for the All Rookie Tournament First Team, named consensus All-American, and crowned Big East Defensive Player of the Year (twice). 

The Step Over
Iverson’s accomplishments in college led the Philadelphia 76ers to select him as the first pick in the 1996 NBA draft, and he exploded into the NBA. What he didn’t have in size he seemed hell-bent to make up for in personality and indomitability. In response to his tattoos, baggy silhouettes, and cornrows—elements of style that are now ubiquitous across the league—the NBA ushered in the restrictive dress codes of the mid-2000s.

Iverson didn’t just kick down the door when it came to culture; his snarling style of play continues to echo through the hard-nosed defensive aptitude, offensive chippiness, and theatrics of the contemporary game. It was a take-no-prisoners, occasionally solitary style of play, but the reverberations, or currents of Iverson’s heart and effort were felt by others on the court. “Going against him brought the best out of me,” Vince Carter said of the playoff series when Toronto battled the Sixers. “As far as that series, it was probably one of the best in my career.”

The most iconic of Iverson’s controversial signatures came, in his stepping over a toppled Tyronn Lue during the 2001 NBA Finals. Watch the clip out of context and the move can feel like a throwaway gesture. But understanding the facets that led up to it matter. Entering that season, Iverson’s relationship with Sixers coach Larry Brown was fractious. Brown had entertained the idea of leaving the NBA. He also drew up a complicated four-team trade that would have sent Iverson to Detroit. The trade was only nixed because Matt Geiger, who would have been sent to the Pistons with Iverson, refused to waive a contract clause. Take the tense and emotionally rife conditions in Philly going into the next season—a season in which Iverson led the league in minutes and steals per game and was its scoring champion, earning him the MVP vote—and the step-over becomes symbolic.

Lue had been hounding Iverson all game, it was overtime, the Lakers were considered an indomitable force and yet, here was Iverson with a chance to steal Game one and give his team a taste of triumph after so many heartbreaking seasons. It’s incredibly decisive, that step. Lue seems to tumble backward to the floor in defeat, Iverson shifts his body over to avoid him. Instead of taking a sidestep onto the floor, Iverson sees the most direct route back to his waiting teammates and takes it—over Lue. That firm, almost stage-drama planting of his foot on the other side of Lue’s legs is a message as much as a stamp in time. Here’s where I got us the win, he seems to say. It’s impossible not to feel the resonating pulse of that moment?

Practice
Another of Iverson’s iconic moments, this one off-court, comes steeped in the same complicated context. His “practice” presser, when he says the word 22 times in under two and half minutes, came after a bad season rife with team injuries. Iverson was ranting during the presser but listen carefully—it’s been clipped into oblivion—and you’ll detect a tremor in his voice, a strain.  

“Iverson’s snarling style of play continues to echo through the chippiness of the contemporary game.”

Iverson’s best friend, Rahsaan Langeford, was shot and killed seven months before that presser. Throughout the 2001–02 season Iverson struggled with the loss, a tightening tangle of grief there wasn’t much room, or time, to process. Days before Iverson’s “practice” press conference the trial for Langeford’s murderer had started, dredging those feelings up anew. Focus on the end of the practice speech, when Iverson strains, “Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it's my last. Not the game. We talking about practice, man.” What gets excluded from all those clips floating around of all the different times Iverson says the word “practice”, is what he said only a few moments later in the same presser.

“I'm upset for one reason: 'Cause I'm in here. I lost. I lost my best friend. I lost him, and I lost this year. Everything is just going downhill for me, as far as just that. You know, as far as my life. And then I'm dealing with this,” Iverson trailed off. “My best friend is dead. Dead. And we lost. And this is what I have to go through for the rest of the summer until the season is all over again.”

The repetitive loop of that word, “practice” seemed to sync with the loop in Iverson’s own mind of a season ultimately coming to a disappointing close—again. There’s desperation in those words, a sense that he wanted to break out of the spiral but had no idea how. If it’s possible to read the waves of someone’s heart retroactively, we might afford more grace to Iverson during that presser. During that entire season and beyond. 

The Answer
So much of Iverson’s career was attempting to settle on a balance in the push-pull of wanting to belong and desperately rejecting anyone he seemed to interpret as not wanting him to. Criticism—from coaches, media, teammates, peers in the league—was something to deflect, with real rigor, like its touch could lead to a usurpation of the place he’d worked to inhabit. The irony of course that criticism, when meaningful, is often meant to strengthen ties of identity and belonging. To strengthen the individual it’s directed toward.

Iverson’s heart, a fierce thing, battled along with him for the entirety of his career. Since he left the game, he’s talked about his penchant to love too hard, too much, too deeply. He tends to choke up and cry openly when asked about his family or peers, like Shaquille O’Neal, and their impacts on him personally and professionally. Where we once witnessed him communicate clearest through his ferocity on the floor, we now hear him do it at an entirely deeper and softer level, recalibrating the energy of his communication. 

Another thing about the heart’s magnetic field—it will intensify in moments of deep attention or when we are doing something we love. This phenomenon also takes place between people who admire one another. This means that sitting there, whether in the arena or watching replays all these years later, we’re reverberating right along with Iverson. His heart roaring out to ours, and ours back toward his.