Meteor flying too close to the ground. . . .

Any tragedy in Allen Iverson's life has nothing to do with his basketball career, which was inspiring and earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, some of which we hope he kept after all those widely chronicled trips to Atlantic City, N.J., when he was in Philadelphia.

Everything that came before was tragic, the poverty growing up in Hampton, Va., the controversial 15-year jail sentence for his part in a bowling alley race riot as a teenager, of which he served four months before he was granted clemency and his conviction was overturned.

For all the subsequent outcries in the NBA over his braids, tattoos, below-the-knee shorts, failure to defer to Michael Jordan and whatever else he did, the basketball was the easy part.

It's still the easy part, it's just that it's not as easy as it used to be at 34 . . . with his third team in two seasons . . . coming off the bench . . . and upset about it.

Breaking the American land speed record for creating controversy, Iverson made his Memphis Grizzlies debut as a reserve last week, after a hamstring injury cost him most of his preseason, something else that didn't used to happen.

Asked after his first game if his hamstring had been a problem, Iverson replied, "I had a problem with my butt sitting on that bench for so long. . . .