He didn’t behave as society wanted him to.
The Philadelphia 76ers’ Allen Iverson was one of the top players in the NBA in the early 2000s.
He was the 2001 MVP, had racked up a bunch of All-Star appearances and was named to a handful of All-NBA Teams.
He was one of the league’s most popular players and had a lot of influence on fans and a handful of other NBA players.
But his problem was that he didn’t look like a professional.
He wore baggy clothes, durags with baseball caps and big diamond chains at press conferences. He also had cornrows and a bunch of tattoos.
During this time, American society was much more conservative than it is now.
Republican George W. Bush was the President of the United States and the country was a lot more corporate.
So, in 2005, then-NBA commissioner David Stern set out to change the image of the NBA.
He wanted the l to be more professional and corporate so that he could get more sponsors and make the team owners more money.
And his solution was to implement a dress code.
According to an ESPN article from 2005, players were no longer allowed to wear:
- Sleeveless shirts
- Shorts
- T-shirts
- Chains, pendants, or medallions worn over the player’s clothes.
- Sunglasses while indoors.
- Headphones (other than on the team bus or plane, or in the team
locker room).
They also had to wear a sports coat on the bench when they weren’t in uniform.
Stern didn’t want players to dress sloppily and to look like thugs, and Iverson felt this was an attack on his self-expression.
Iverson was part of the counterculture* and wanted to dress like hip-hop artists, not businessmen. He wanted to wear streetwear because his job was to play basketball, not represent someone in court.
To protest the new rule, he continued wearing whatever he wanted to wear, despite the tens of thousands of dollars in fines.
He never caved and is now considered a trendsetter for NBA fashion.
*Counterculture Definition: A culture whose values and norms of behaviour significantly differ from those of society.
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