In this episode, I revisit one of the most infamous press conferences in sports history—Allen Iverson’s legendary “practice” rant from 2002—and explain why I think he was actually right all along.

Iverson’s words have lived on as a punchline for decades, but when you look closer, you realize he was speaking some deep truth about recovery, workload, and the impossible demands of a grueling NBA season.

I share the backstory behind that moment, the tension with his coach Larry Brown, and how the whole thing became cultural shorthand for “bad attitude”—when in reality, Iverson was way ahead of his time in understanding how fragile the human body is under chronic stress.

You’ll also hear some fun clips (including the Ted Lasso parody and a brilliant remix), and I’ll make the case for why Iverson deserves recognition not just as one of the most electrifying players ever, but as a pioneer in the conversation around athlete recovery and self-preservation.

TIMESTAMPS:

Brad is taking a look at Alllen Iverson’s “practice” rant. [00:51

Iverson was right in talking about the imperative for players to save themselves in order to survive a grueling NBA season. [04:16]

Is it a disgrace to the team and the NBA to stick up for your own well-being? [07:34]

Coach Phil Jackson created unity on the team by ensuring that they were together turned against him for some enfraction. [17:51]

Iverson took a hit so that today’s modern athlete would not have to endure this decades of abuse at the hands of old school coaching. [18:55]

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast – where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life. I’m Brad Kearns, NY Times bestselling author, world #1 ranked masters age 60-plus high jumper, and former #3 world-ranked professional triathlete. You’ll learn how to stay fit, strong and powerful as you age; transform your diet to lose body fat and increase energy; sort through hype and misinformation to make simple, sustainable lifestyle changes; and broaden your perspective beyond a fit body to experience healthy relationships, nonstop personal growth, and ultimately a happy, healthy, long life. Let’s explore beyond shortcuts, hacks, and crushing competition to laugh, have fun, appreciate the journey, and not take ourselves too seriously. It’s time to B.rad!

Brad (00:51):
I guess you’re gonna get turned into a meme if you say practice 26 times. Here we are 23 years later after Allen Iverson’s historic practice rant at a press conference. And I want to take this opportunity to celebrate one of the greatest NBA players of all time, my all time favorite player. Now, Steph Curry is up there at the same level, but I was the hugest Allen fan ever. And this rant was hilarious. It became infamous, but I think it opens up the opportunity to talk about his ideas on a deeper level and to acknowledge that he was actually right rather than deserving to be ridiculed at the time and for years later, as the ultimate example of a poor sport, not a team player, all those things. So if you don’t know what Allen Iverson’s practice rant is all about, I’m going to play it for you. So hang out for a minute and a half.

Brad (02:02):
This is a compressed version. And, it was a line of questioning coming because his coach, Larry Brown Philadelphia 76 ERs, was, they had a high tension relationship, although, they worked together to make a historic NBA finals appearance in 2001. But Larry Brown was on his case at this point because he had a tendency to skip practice in his own Iconoclastic style is one of the most unique and exceptional players in NBA history. So here’s him answering to the questions of, Hey, Allen, don’t you think missing practice is harming your team? It’s

Iverson (02:43):
Easy to to, to talk about. It’s easy to sum it up when you just talk about practice. We sitting here, I supposed to be the franchise player, and we in here talking about practice. Well, coach, I mean, listen, we talking about practice, not a game. Not a game, not a game. We talking about practice, not a game. Not, not, not the game that I go out there and, and die for and play every game. Like it’s my last, not the game. We’re talking about practice, man. I mean, how silly is that? Man? We are talking about practice. I know I’m supposed to be there. I know I’m supposed to lead by example. I know that. And I’m not, I’m not shoving it aside, you know, like it don’t mean anything. I know it’s important. I do. I honestly do. But we talking about practice, man. What are we talking about? What we talking about? Practice, man.

Iverson (03:39):
We talking about practice. We talking about practice. We ain’t talking about the game. We talking about practice, man, when you come in the arena and you see me play, you see me play, don’t you? You see me give everything I got, right? Absolutely. But we talking about practice right now. We talking about P Man, look, I hear you. I, it is funny to me too, and I mean, it’s strange. It is strange to me too. But we talking about practice, man, we’re not even talking about the game, the actual game, when it matters, we talking about practice. It is, it is, is

Brad (04:16):
<laugh>. So, I guess you’re gonna get turned into a meme if you say practice 26 times and it’s gonna have a long life. I’m gonna show you some other, uh, some of my favorite clips relating to the centerpiece Allen Iverson practice rant. Uh, but as I go through some of this fun stuff, I also want you to really concentrate carefully on what he had to say there, because here he is, here we are 23 years later. And amazingly, he was actually spot on correct about the tremendous imperative for players to save themselves to survive a grueling NBA season. Ateam that goes all the way to finals will play up to 100 games in a very high intensity explosive sport, demanding all that, that power, that quickness, the challenge of playing defense and staying with the opponent shuffling and, and, and diving and, uh, moving around with all this anaerobic muscle activity, but layered onto a grueling season and a game where you’re running up and down court.

Brad (05:30):
Some of the runner uh, athletes have had pedometers on them, uh, tracking their, their movement and, uh, they can run, uh, several miles during NBA or a college basketball game. So you have a very unique situation in sports. I can think of only soccer and basketball that come near this objective where it demands, uh, high explosive, high intensity output as well as the overlay of the tremendous requirement for endurance to make it through the season. And soccer players, I know they have a really hard, nonstop game without the whistle blowing. So it’s, you know, continuous. I’d say that’s more of an endurance weighted activity because they do have a lot of time where they’re walking, standing, uh, jogging, especially in Lionel Messi, the greatest of all time. You watch him play in person, he picks his spots, man, and then he slices in to the defense, gets the ball, works his magic, but a lot of his game is spent walking around.

Brad (06:28):
Of course, that’s also because they don’t want him to, uh, sacrifice too much of his energy toward defense. So he’s mainly the guy who is gonna get the ball in the net or pass it right to your feet so you can kick it in the net. So soccer’s an extremely tough sport that requires that power and explosiveness, but I can’t think that anything rivals basketball. Oh, excuse me, boxing and lasting for 12 rounds or MMA fighting where it’s all about power and explosiveness. Yet if the fight goes for a certain duration, you better have exceptional endurance. So really, NBA players, top level basketball players and top level MMA fighters today can get a lot of votes from me as the most all around supremely conditioned athlete. And here’s Allen, sitting there, maybe not the most eloquent presentation, uh, but he was alluding to something that is now being discovered by the great experts in athletic training, performance, sports recovery, that the NBA player is the highest priority, is to survive the season without that huge risk of injury.

Brad (07:34):
And that entails a lot of downtime. So I believe now that exertion practices are virtually non-existent during the NBA season. They’re definitely going and doing what’s called shoot around, where they put up their reps. Steph Curry especially is getting in hundreds of shots every day. You can see him on YouTube, making 93 in a row from the three point line, and just honing those skills with some really low intensity exertion if you count that as part of practice. But, here’s a superstar player on the Sixers, the centerpiece of the team, and we need him to bring his all every night to be competitive. And he says, rightfully to the media, you’ve seen me play, you’ve seen me play my heart out and play every game like it’s my last. And not many players can answer to that highest standard, but that was absolutely what Allen Iverson was all about through his entire career. He was tremendously undersized, but he was the most, one of the most dominant and most important players in the game in the league for his entire career. And as I wrote in the comments of this Instagram post, I’m gonna show you shortly

Iverson (08:50):
Talking about

Brad (08:51):
Where,

Iverson (08:52):
Talking about <inaudible>,

Brad (08:53):
Where they put the Ted Lasso show a beautiful performance by Jason Sudeikis to model Allen’s practice, rant into the soccer and locker room for the show. And I’m gonna turn on the sound and, and show you this brilliant comedic performance by Sudeikis. But as I wrote in the comments, here’s one thing that you will never ever see, we will never see for the rest of our lifetimes, and that is a five foot 11, 150 pound player leading his very ordinary team. There were no other all-stars on the 76 ERs in that 2001 season, but he led his team to the NBA finals against the juggernaut, the threepeat powerhouse Los Angeles Lakers, one of the greatest NBA teams of all time. They were in the midst of their threepeat dynasty with Kobe and Shaq. And what happens in the first game, the away game in Los Angeles, Allen Iverson scores 48 points in a 51 minute overtime game. The usual game is 48 minutes in the NBA. So he played almost the entire game and just played his heart out, had the most extraordinary performance. Of course, the Sixers lost to the powerhouse Lakers. It was no contest really. But to take that game from the Lakers, he actually, he and the Sixers, but him, you know, single handedly almost, uh, prevented them from his a historic 16 and zero sweep through the playoffs. No one was a match for the Lakers that season. Let’s hear Sudeikis model it

Sudeikis (10:36):
Simple that I can’t practice, I can’t practice, man. I’m hurt, I’m hurt. Simple as that. But it ain’t about that at all. It ain’t about that at all. You sitting in here, you supposed to be the franchise player, and yet here we are talking about you missing practice. So we sitting in here, I supposed to be the franchise player, and we in here talking about practice. We talking about practice. You understand me? Practice. Not a game. Not a game, not a game, not the game You go out there and die for. Not the game that I go out there and and die for, right? Play every weekend. Like it’s your last, right? No, we talking about practice, man and play every game. Like it’s my last, not the game. We talking about practice, man, practice, you know, you’re supposed to be out there, you know, you’re supposed to lead by example. You just shoving that all aside. I know I’m supposed to be there. I know I’m supposed to lead by example. I know that, and I’m not, I’m not shoving it aside. So here we are, Jamie. We’re talking about practice, not game, not the game. We’re talking about practice, talking about practice, man, we talking about practice, sir, we talking about practice. We ain’t talking about the game. We talking about practice, man.

Brad (11:58):
Oh, love it. And, I mentioned that NBA finals game one in 2001 in Los Angeles when Allen scored 48 points. And not to outdo himself from that amazing playoff performance, historic performance, he also gave what I believe to be one of the greatest sports quotes of all time in an interview session after the game. And of course, they had their star player playing out there almost every minute, with, you know, a lot of energy output for game one with a potential seven game series ahead. So of course, he was asked by the media if he thought that fatigue would be a factor in this series after having to go to overtime in game one. And he said, I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life. So I’m not thinking about fatigue right now, man. Fatigue is army close <laugh>. Oh man, wonder he was my favorite player. No wonder, here’s a little fun quip from the great Chinese center Hansen Yang as he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He gave a little plug for Allen and the practice issue. Here we go.

Yang (13:06):
Speaker,

Brad (13:07):
Breaking the ice for his. I

Yang (13:08):
Think maybe somebody mistake don’t have, because I think maybe, uh, because I think this spot belong to great <inaudible>, you know why? Because I need more practice than him.

Brad (13:45):
Yeah. So back to his practice rant. The outcry was really disturbing at the time. And all the pundits and all the traditionalists just gave him the hardest time for not being a team player, for being a disgrace to the NBA. It was just piled on and on and on to the extent that I think a lot of experts fairly called it out as <laugh> potentially racist. Look, here’s this guy who really presented as the first true authentic, I guess, hip-hop style, street cred, NBA basketball player who didn’t kind of suck up to Corporate America. And the image and the branding that we were familiar with when we, uh, brought these stars up to hero worship level and enjoyed them pitching various products to us. OJ Simpson, that’s a whole nother story. And a whole nother four hour, uh, great documentary series, I think it was called, OJ Simpson Story, Race in America on Netflix.

Brad (14:53):
Talking about how he pretty much immersed himself into mainstream American corporate, quote, white culture. And that was what enabled him to become so beloved and act in the movies and pitch rental cars. He had to kind of mold himself into that corporate branded image, as did Michael Jordan so successfully when he’s being like Mike and pitching shoes and Gatorade and never one to ever wade into anything controversial outside of the lines of the basketball court. Similarly to Tiger Woods where he became the smiling face of corporate America and did not dabble into some of the things that he was tried. They tried to pull him into, such as the ramifications and the significance of a mixed race person competing in a lily-white sport. But any of that departure from corporate smiling pitch person obviously was going to cost these athletes a lot of money because we demand, uh, this sort of, uh, plain, um, uh, you know, non-controversial, uh, compliant type of, uh, pitchman.

Brad (16:07):
And Allen came into the league, after a really controversial and really rough go as a youth. And he was not apologetic to be exactly who he was and say whatever he wanted, including saying the word practice 26 times when he was absolutely dead on right? And, you know, read the riot act for year, months, and years afterward about what a disgrace he was to the NBA. So, I enjoy standing up for him now and reflecting on this real crisis right now in present day NBA, when you have superstars like Jason Tatum, Damien Lillard, Tyrese,Halliburton, snapping their Achilles tendons in the playoffs and being sent to the sidelines for long periods of time. It’s clear that the overload is extreme, especially on the superstar players who have the ball more and they are deed up with more intensity than players who are on the bench most of the time.

Brad (16:59):
And so these guys are really fragile to the tune that they should be treated like race horses and when they’re off the court, they should be getting massage and good food and rest and private jet travel and all the things that we now know are extremely important for the NBA player to survive. And certainly not having any expectations heaped upon them, for the sake of team unity or whatever other nonsense that Larry Brown is giving Allen Iverson a hard time for not showing up at practice or perhaps not hustling at practice or whatever the problem. It’s possible that Brown being sort of the master psychologist type coach, kinda like Phil Jackson, maybe this whole thing was an act to get Allen upset and get him to turn up the notch at the next game, which didn’t seem to be a problem for Allen anyway.

Brad (17:51):
But I remember reading some interesting passages in Phil Jackson’s books about how when he detected some, lack of team unity or some splintering of communication or energy or camaraderie, he would deliberately have everyone on the team turned against him by, for example, instituting some lame curfew so that everyone could get mad at him and it would be a way to recapture team unity and camaraderie ’cause now they could unite for the common cause of their coach being a jerk. It was absolute pure genius. I don’t think many other coaches would like sacrifice their own ego or do something, uh, to orchestrate something at that level, just to bring back team unity. But again, credit to Allen for putting this issue out in the forefront. And this is how culture shifts. Its brave people that are not afraid to speak up at great expense to their own reputation and their own credibility or whatever.

Brad (18:55):
You know, Allen was facing, he probably didn’t realize it when he got up there on the dus at that press conference, but he took a hit so that today’s modern athlete would not have to endure this decades of abuse at the hands of old school coaching where seems like the coaches oftentimes make it all about them. I talk about how this even permeates into endurance training culture where I was a ambitious young NCAA division-one college athlete, and I was beat to a pulp by the program and by the template coaching model that surreptitiously pitted teammates against each other because we had to compete for valuable spots on the traveling squad, such that it harbored and harvested an environment of misplaced competitive intensity. <laugh>, That’s a lot to say, but let’s see what DJ Steve Porter did with Allen’s rant. Uh, talk about art form. Take an art form and take it to the next level. If you haven’t heard of this guy, I think you’re gonna go binge on his musical content when he puts Allen Iverson’s practice rant to song.

Porter (20:04):
We sitting in here, I supposed to be franchise player. We in here talking about practice. We sitting here, I supposed here talking about we sitting in here. I supposed to be franchise player. We in here talking about practice. We sitting here, I supposed to be franchise player. We in here talking about practice. How the hell can I make my teammates better by practice? Not a game. Not a game, not a game. We talking about not a game. Not a game, not a game. We talking about practice. Not a game. Not a game, not a game. We, I make my teammates practice my opinion. Playoffs. Anybody tell you that I miss practice. I might and miss one practice this year, go out and play every game like it’s my last, I don’t care. A disgraceful performance off.

Brad (21:32):
All right, so there’s Allen bringing it back. You could tell he was my favorite player from some of my videos back in the day. Let’s do another clip here.

Porter (21:55):
I’m waiting all the mountain the moment that the sky will strike. My apologies.

Brad (22:19):
Yeah, that’s Allen Iverson’s, Denver Nuggets, Jersey, the famous number three, hope they retire. That with all the teams he played mainly for Philadelphia was his core of his career, but he had some cameos with some other teams. Wonderful career in the NBA. And now he is an ambassador for Reebok along with Shaquille O’Neal, and they’re doing some good work. I think bringing back some retro shoes or something. So, uh, I love what that guy stood for, and I had a slightly different sensation in my body when that practice rant and controversy came out because I knew deep down, uh, what he was talking about, and I could see through all the nonsense and the ridicule and the racism to realize that this player actually had an important point. So cool that he’s vindicated 23 years later. Hopefully enjoyed this little reflection on Allen Iverson and his great career. And lemme know what you think in the comments.

Brad (23:13):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email podcast@bradventures.com and visit brad kearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.