Voila_Capture 2014-03-02_06-27-10_PMDonovan McNabb is still working on the Twitter thing. Still working on the media thing. Still working on not being a complete egotistical jackass.

He played here throughout a large portion of Allen Iverson’s career and, in many ways, was the anti-AI. Five was a clean-cut guy from a stable family who stayed out of trouble and rarely was involved in controversy away from the practice facility. He was also a superstar and led his team to the Super Bowl. Iverson was rough around the edges, the child of a young single mother, was always in (legal) trouble and made all sorts of headlines away from the court. He was also a superstar and led his team to the Finals.

On the surface, you’d think that it would be McNabb who is beloved in Philly. But nope. It’s Iverson. And it’s not even close. This you know: Iveron’s brutal honesty and balls-firmly-outside-the-shorts style of play endeared him to Philly fans almost immediately. McNabb’s laugh-and-stick-your-tongue-out-and-blame-someone-else style is from Part 1 of the How to Get Philly to Hate You missive.

I’m sure Five never quite grasped why fans gravitated toward AI more than him. [Actually, he probably thought it was someone else’s fault.] But when last night he tweeted his congrats to Iverson, it seemed like a nice, thoughtful gesture:

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A few hours later he found the retweet button, and in doing so answered the question posed in the Tweet from Mr. Hays:

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You see, the difference is that everything Iverson says is real, is visceral. He says and does what he’s feeling– good or bad, right or wrong. He could park his Bentley in front of an emergency room entrance to run in and grab a Coke out of the hospital’s vending machine causing someone to die in the process because they couldn’t get to the operating room in time… and he’d say something so honest and profound afterward that we’d be like, yeah, you know what, everybody makes mistakes and this was one of his. McNabb, on the other hand, he’s so goddamn self-absorbed that he can’t string together a sentence (literally, sometimes) without straining it through a filter of self so thick that it comes off as though he rehearsed it 20 times in front of the evil queen’s mirror, which undoubtedly told him that he is indeed the Fivest of them all. It’s always about me. Me. Me. Me. I. I. I. Fuck you!

http://youtu.be/hTnNsIgQArM&start=29