Excerpted from Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson by Kent Babb. Published by Atria Books. Book can be purchased online at Amazon.

There he went, house to house, hoping he would find the little shit. It was Sunday evening, the sun setting in coastal Virginia, and Mike Bailey’s patience was eroding by the second. He should have known better. No doubt about it now.

Nope, Coach, he’s not here.

Sorry, Coach, you just missed him.

Bailey was the basketball coach at Bethel High School in Hampton, Virginia, a city on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, and after two decades he was familiar with the maze of teenage psychology. Now he was seething, played like a fool by a kid. These were the kinds of things that made him distrust Iverson, Bailey thought to himself, practicing what he would…