In a life that hadn't been a "sunshine story", Iverson was left standing in the middle of a brawl between black and white students in a bowling alley. One Valenite's Day, Iverson and some friends - all jocks and black - walked into a Hampton Bowling Alley.
Allen was already a local sports hero, having quarterbacked Bethel High School's football team to the state championship only two months earlier, and in the process of leading the basketball squad to the same trophy. He was probably the best known person in the city that night. Iverson's crowd was loud and had to be asked to quiet down several times, and eventually something of a shouting duel began with another group of youths. The only undisputable fact is that shortly thereafter a huge fight erupted, pitting the local white kids against the blacks. 17-year old Iverson was tried as an adult, convicted of maiming by mob, and sentenced to five years for throwing a chair at a girl. Virginia's first black Governor, Doug Wilder, granted him conditional release after four months behind bars. The trial and the verdict set off an national debate on race politics.

Iverson and his supporters maintain his innocence. Allen cannot be seen on an amateur video if the incident, and he claims he left the alley as soon as the trouble began.
"For me to be in a bowling alley where everybody in the whole place know who I am and be crackin' people upside the head with chairs and think nothin' gonna happen?" asks Iverson. "That's crazy! And what kind of a man would I be to hit a girl in the head with a damn chair? I wish at least they'd said I hit some damn man." Allen's supporters were enraged that only four people got charged after the fight - all four were blacks
They were upset with the media's allegedly biased coverage of the incident. And they claim the whole thing started when one of the white boys called Iverson a nigger.
"It's strange enough that police waded through a huge mob of fighting people and came out with only blacks and the one black that everybody knew," said

Golden Frinks, crisis co-ordinator for the National Association for Advancement of Coloured People. "People thought they'd get a slap on the wrist and that would be the end of it. Instead, prosecutors used a Civil War-era statute designed to protect blacks from lynching to charge a group of black teens with mob violence. And the judge, who was friends with one of the victims family, first denied them bail and then sentenced them all four to 15 years on prison." "A Fight!" said Newport News minister Marcellus Harris. "They were given long prison sentences because they got in a fight in a bowling alley. On the other hand, numerous witnesses un-aligned with either of the two crowds bowling that night testified Allen threw a chair at the girl. No-one else heard the racial epithet. "During a break in the fight, the girl went up to one of the black guys and said: ' Why do you have to make this racial?'" explained Kristi Alligood, one of the witnesses. "He just pressed two fingers against her face and pushed her away. The young man was Iverson."
And a bowling centre employee testified that Iverson used a different chair to hit him over the head as well. The prosecutor, a life-long member of NAACP himself, insists that none of the blacks in the fight wanted to pursue charges, and points out that several black witnesses also identified Iverson as the main culprit. What really happened that night in Hampton will perhaps never be known!!
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Two things matter more: based on his personality and behaviour, everyone agrees that it is at least plausible that Iverson was indeed guilty. "He's one of the most competitive kids I've ever seen," said Bo Williams, who runs a summer camp where Iverson used to play. "He's not one to back down, but that doesn't mean he's violent either, just cocky." And perhaps at least partly because of his attitude, he was sent to jail, an experience that would profoundly affect the way he views the world, and to a large extent the way the world identifies him. Allen says about going to jail:"I'll always remember what those people did to me in Hampton. And I think about it because that's one of the reasons I'm here right now. It just made me stronger. I don't know if I would be as strong without that incident. When I was incarcerated, I prayed and I learned from other guys in there. That's what I did mostly -- I just listened. A lot of the inmates in there knew me before I got there, and when I came there, all of them were just standing around quiet, just looking at me. And I was scared. I was only 18 years old, and all of them were staring at me. And all the older inmates were like, "We're going to take care of you." And whenever I got around the younger inmates, the older inmates would tell me, "Leave them alone. They're bad news, man." And they would tell the younger inmates to leave me alone, too. And they'd always tell me I was going to get out, and I was going to do something. And I tried to keep my head straight. I remember right before I got locked up, I asked my grandma, "If God knows I didn't do what they accused me of doing, why is he letting this happen to me?" And I'll never forget it. She said, "Never question what God does." And after that, I never did again. " Iverson explained how life in prison was when talking to The Source Sports this year: "We had one part of the jail called The Jungle - that's for all the kids that was my age", he says. "The old heads didn't want me to be in The Jungle, so I was in the part where people was on work-release. My dad spent 15, damn near 20 years in jail, so he had made the Iverson-name famous even before me. I had to walk through the jungle in order to get to the mess hall. On that side of the jail, it was just crazy: everybody screamin', shit thrown down from here to there, motherfuckas settin' shit on fire, all kinds of shit. Real shit. When I got there, I was like,'Damn, I know ain't nothin' pussy about me. I know I can handle myself,' but I never felt I was ever in danger." While in jail, Iverson's friends took care of his family. That's why he doesn't want to get rid of them, that's why he'll never let them down. They took care of them financially and physically.
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