It didn’t take long for Iverson to make a splash in Philadelphia after the 76ers made him, at 20 years old, the top overall pick in the 1996 NBA draft. He crossed over Michael Jordan; he hung 19 on Kobe Bryant in the Schick Rookie Game; he dropped 50 on the Cavaliers—still a record for a first-year player. But three months after winning Rookie of the Year honors, he was arrested on marijuana- and gun-possession charges, the first of several run-ins with the law during his pro career. The festering criticism over Iverson’s lifestyle and his loyalty to his hometown friends—posse was quite the buzzword in Philly circa 1997—redoubled overnight.

Yet even as he stumbled—and stumble he did—there was an authenticity to Iverson that made him a magnetic public figure. In an era of sanitized athletes with meticulously cultivated images, Iverson’s lack of filter made him an anomaly. He compromised for no one. Whether you loved him or hated him, you could not look away.

His trendsetting cornrows, for example, were the Beatles’ moptops for the hip-hop generation, while his defiant tattoos became a national talking point and thinkpiece fodder.

“I took an ass-kicking for me being me in my career, for me looking the way I looked and dressing the way I dressed,” Iverson said during Wednesday’s press conference at the Wells Fargo Center, where his No. 3 jersey will be hung from the rafters in March. “My whole thing was just being me. Now you look around the NBA and all of them have tattoos, guys wearing cornrows. You used to think the suspect was the guy with the cornrows, now you see the police officers with the cornrows.”

Iverson came of age in the unforgiving spotlight, and he would spend more than half his life there. He consistently led the league in misguided critics and was subject to more pop-psychological analyses than practically any other athlete of his era—as if the pressures of being a franchise player in championship-starved Philadelphia weren’t burden enough.

“In this profession you have no idea how hard it is to live up to all the expectations, try to be a perfect man when you know you’re not,” he said. “Being in a fishbowl, everybody looking at every move you make, talking about everything you do—it’s just a hard life to live.

“It’s a great one, he added. “I wouldn’t trade it for nothing. I have no regrets on anything. People ask me all the time, ‘Do I have any regrets?’ I don’t have any. If I could back and do it all over, would I change anything? No.

"Obviously if I could go back and change anything I would be a perfect man. And I know there’s no perfect man."

As Iverson’s profile grew, so did the scrutiny and controversies, both real and manufactured. He averaged a league-leading 31.1 points and 2.5 steals in 2001, spiriting the Sixers to the team’s first NBA Finals appearance since 1983 and becoming the shortest and lightest player in history to win the Most Valuable Player award, which in the NBA is a virtual ticket to the Hall of Fame. Yet when he was arrested on criminal trespassing and gun charges barely a year later, the Philadelphia media breathlessly covered every development like the O.J. murder trial. The Iverson case appeared on 10 straight Daily News front pages, culminating with the infamous mugshot cover the day after his arrest. (All 14 counts against him were later dropped or dismissed.)