Allen Iverson says he likes Philadelphia, but he's afraid of Philadelphia. He also says he fears that a crooked Philadelphia policeman could someday kill him, just on G.P. "Allen Iverson could end up dead tomorrow if a crooked cop wants him dead,'' he said.

	76ers star Allen Iverson says he fears for his life in Philadelphia, but it doesn't appear as though he's looking at the entire picture.

And the first thought that comes to mind is this: So where would it be different?

Iverson, his wife Tawanna and some miscellaneous lawyer spent 90 minutes Monday with John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Daily News and Stephen A. Smith of the Philadelphia Inquirer in what can best be described as an unburdening session.

Well, an unburdening session except for Smallwood and Smith, of course. They had to sift through 90 minutes of Allen and Tawanna Iverson.

But they did, leaving us with a view of Iverson The Profoundly Conflicted. You know, the burdens of stardom and incalculable wealth, the loss of privacy, the legal entanglements, and the knowledge that he neither can nor would change anything about it.

The key passage?

"If you told me I'd have to go through this in any city, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.''

This is an odd statement to make for a man who fears being cut down by a crooked cop, unless it's a man who believes that, for him, every town would be like Philadelphia.

And maybe for him it would be. Allen Iverson is, after all, Allen Iverson, for all the good and ill that implies. To a certain extent, he asks for this scrutiny. To a certain extent, it comes to find him. Nothing is black and white, even the issue of black and white.

	“	If you told me I'd have to go through this in any city, I'd rather be in Philadelphia. ”
		— Allen Iverson

But to call this black and white is too simple. This is Allen Iverson, the world he made and the world he chooses to live in. He knows Philadelphia isn't all it's cracked up to be -- or maybe it is; Philadelphia isn't like anyplace else.

And you know what other place isn't like any place else? Every place. Home is what you make it, and home is what makes you; if that were false, Detroit would have emptied long ago.

Putting it the way he put it, though, Iverson will be fingered for bashing his adoptive home, the place that enriched him and made him beyond famous. That other sentence, the one that sits so low in Smallwood's story and not at all in Smith's, suggests that Iverson isn't declaring war on Philadelphia as much as he is finally realizing the trap sprung upon him with his own active connivance.

You see, there are rules, and then there are facts of life. The rules say you are entitled to a private life. The facts of life say that when you live outside the box created for you by fame, there will be lens caps on your front lawn.

So here's Allen Iverson's trap. He plays a game that other people want to pay to see, so he's rich and famous. When he was a young boy, he played for the fun of it, but also because of the chance at wealth and fame. He sought it out, and he was one of the rare men to actually get it.

And yet, he is not going to conform to the strangling preconditions of that fame. To his mind, he cannot, and the interview he gave Smallwood and Smith proves it yet again. He will speak in bold colors and broad strokes, and you don't get bolder and broader than wondering aloud for a million readers if a crooked policeman somewhere is thinking about putting a couple of slugs in your head.

But it's the other line, the one about wanting to stay in Philadelphia, that makes you wonder if maybe Allen Iverson doesn't already know that the problem he speaks of is a lot bigger than Philadelphia ... that maybe Allen Iverson knows that there are a lot more Philadelphias than just Philadelphia ... that maybe the Philadelphia you know is better than the Philadelphia you don't.

Now there's a lesson for all of us. Now you all go out and have a Philadelphia kind of day ... whatever that means.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com