Practice? We talkin' about practice.

Allen Iverson's practice rant will no doubt go down as one of the greatest recorded rants by a professional athlete in history. In my experience, if you start mimicking his rant, people always get the reference. (And if you don't, you can watch it here.)

The occasion for revisiting this monologue was this short piece posted on philly.com the other day. It was a pleasant surprise to see him publicly expressing regret over his infamous diatribe and recognizing that he probably was sending people a poor message. His statements in the article were also a reminder that Iverson was always a complete mystery to me. One day he would sound reasonable and mature (e.g. the Olympics in 2004), but then the next day he would seem completely out of control (e.g. his practice rant or the domestic incidents that got reported). It's nice to see "mature Allen" stepping forward and taking responsibility for some of his less savory moments.

I also thought it was great that Iverson had such nice things to say about Philly fans:

"It's a tough town because they love their sports so much," he says. "And they care about it. They're passionate about their sports. And you have to love them for that. I loved every minute of playing for those fans because they cared about it and it meant so much to them."

It's pretty rare that an athlete leaves a city under acrimonious circumstances and still says nice things about the city and its fans. Philly fans always showed AI a lot of love (and he deserved it because of how hard he played), so it was nice to see him show some love to the Philly fans even after his trade to the Denver Nuggets.