Even as he enters Hall, Iverson still needs happy ending for his story

Once he arrives in Springfield, Mass., for Friday's Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony, Billy King will find Allen Iverson, embrace him, and pump his hand before pleading with him one more time: Please, Allen, turn your past into your future.

He will say what he said to Iverson the last time they were together, when King - once the 76ers' president and general manager - saw Iverson before a Sixers-Brooklyn Nets game at the Wells Fargo Center last season. He will encourage Iverson to start making speeches to schoolkids, to prisoners, to anyone who could find inspiration in the story of a small, spindly kid who went from jail to Georgetown to the Hall of Fame, who pounded the Staples Center floor with his foot over Tyronn Lue in the 2001 NBA Finals as if he were planting a flag atop the basketball world. Maybe then, Iverson could find some fulfillment.

"It's a story that people, especially a lot of kids, need to hear," King said in a phone interview late Wednesday night. "It's a story that I think most people would have said the odds were against him that he would become an MVP. And yet he did."

It's a story that Iverson is likely to tell Friday night during his acceptance speech, and like everything else he says, he will mean every word of it wholeheartedly in the moment. Then the speech will end, and the cheers from the audience will crescendo and recede, and the onus will again be on him to withstand the silence of the day-to-day. There are only so many of these honors yet to come, only so many chances for him to bask in the glorious parts of his playing career. And in a post-basketball life littered with broken relationships and empty bank accounts and bad decisions, how will he fill the void?

The people who care about Iverson keep trying to help him, keep searching for something that will give his life the same purpose and pleasure that pro basketball did, but the efforts and overtures are half-measures, nothing more. The Sixers have him sit courtside or in a suite for a few home games, letting him bathe in a standing ovation and cup his hand to his ear like he did in the old days, an aging showpiece there for sentiment.

Before he stepped down as Southern Methodist's head coach, Larry Brown spent weeks last year lobbying the Sixers to hire Iverson for their front office, though it apparently never occurred to Brown that, if he was so desperate to help Iverson, he could have just hired him to his staff at SMU.

There's a reason, for all the worry about Iverson's self-destructive tendencies, that many of his friends will go just so far to lend him a hand. Ultimately, they doubt that they can rely on him, and his hours-late arrival to Thursday's pre-induction news conference was merely another example of Iverson's doing things on his terms, on his schedule, for his benefit. He is Allen Iverson, and it is all he ever will or wants to be, and perhaps he can best forge a life without basketball merely by continuing to be himself and capitalizing on it.

"Exactly," King said. "He's always done it his way, and I don't think he should ever change because that's what made him unique. He didn't conform to society. He said, 'I'm going to get cornrows. I'm going to get tattoos. I'm going to do certain things.' He may have lost some endorsements along the way, but I think he was true to being who he was. He still can be that, like Mike Tyson, who everybody had forgotten about and all of a sudden was in The Hangover. People can put Allen in movies, and he could just be himself."

That's the hope for Iverson, however slim - that somehow the circus doesn't have to end, that the qualities that made him so irresistible as an athlete, so exhilarating to watch, can carry him to a better place. Every game with Iverson was a potential event, a night that might turn out to be unforgettable because of what Marc Zumoff, the Sixers' TV play-by-play voice since 1995, called Iverson's "sheer artistry, his explosiveness, his ability to do things we may never see again." If the Sixers - even in that 2001 run to the Finals against a dynastic Lakers team - never had a realistic chance of winning a championship during Iverson's era, at least they met the minimum requirement for a professional sports franchise: They were never boring. He made certain of it. Two hours of Iverson at his best was four hours of Springsteen. It was Sinatra at the Copa, Michael Jackson on the move. There was no greater entertainer anywhere.

"The further he gets away from playing, the bigger his allure becomes," King said. "Now, kids who maybe didn't see him play are going to see him in the Hall of Fame, and they're going to go back to YouTube and look at him and realize how great a player he really was. For me, nine years I was with him, you see it every day, so you sometimes take it for granted, how good he really was."

It was an incredible package: how he played, how he was built, where he had come from. It was an incredible story, and Allen Iverson once more will have a chance to tell it Friday night in Springfield, and it might be the only thing that can save him from an ending no one wants for him.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski