[ii] Reporter: "So you and coach Brown got caught up on Saturday about practice?" 

Iverson: "If I can't practice, I can't practice. It is as simple as that. It ain't about that at all. It's easy to sum it up if you're just talking about practice. We're sitting here, and I'm supposed to be the franchise player, and we're talking about practice. I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, but we're talking about practice. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it's my last but we're talking about practice man. How silly is that?

Now I know that I'm supposed to lead by example and all that but I'm not shoving that aside like it don't mean anything. I know it's important, I honestly do but we're talking about practice. We're talking about practice man. (laughter from the media crowd) We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We're not talking about the game. We're talking about practice. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you've seen me play right, you've seen me give everything I've got, but we're talking about practice right now. (more laughter)

Reporter: "But it's an issue that your coach continues to raise?"

Iverson: "Hey I hear you, it's funny to me to, hey it's strange to me too but we're talking about practice man, we're not even talking about the game, when it actually matters, we're talking about practice."

Reporter: "Is it possible that if you practiced, not you but you would make your teammates better?"

Iverson: "How in the hell can I make my teammates better by practicing?” Return

[iii] Which I seem to recall a long-ago Gillette Razor television ad campaign describing as something that every man's experienced: A brilliant bit of suasion: simultaneously appealing to men who really had been at least once in their lives uncontested at the crest of their games and shoveling coal into the furnace of Joseph K guilt felt by all other men who hadn't and suspected deep down that we were to blame, since maybe all we really needed was a high-performance shave.

At any rate, accounts are myriad of basket-cylinders' circumferences suddenly seeming distended to those of heavy-duty waste-disposal bins, or even oceans, and it's as if anything the in-flow player tosses up is destined to go in. Return

[iv] Lucasfilm Ltd. reference mine, not A. I.'s. Return

[v] And there are few stills in the Association photo-vault more iconic than Jordan's lingering follow-through held above a Bryon Russell already half-crouched in defeat as a transfixed arena stares at the Spalding caught just between twenty-four-second clock and backboard, frozen for now in its progress over the rainbow arching from the tips of those famously outsize fingers to the bottom of the net—the 1998 Finals Game 6 game-clincher that earned Jordan and his Bulls a sixth NBA crown (an image that not even his subsequent return to active duty at a decidedly less demiurge-like level of play in his so-called “Floor Jordan” next phase did all that much to tarnish) Return