George Gervin

George Gervin (born April 27, 1952, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.) is an American professional basketball player who rose to stardom as a member of the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the 1970s and established himself as one of the greatest guards in the history of the sport. His nickname “The Iceman”—which became inextricably linked to Gervin from his first pro season, with the Virginia Squires of the American Basketball Association (ABA)—was the perfect summation of his game: cool, understated, but also cold-blooded in execution and intensity. Gervin was a quietly smooth player and personality who could have been lost in the flashy shuffle of basketball in the 1970s. Emblematic of that time were his former teammate Julius Erving and fellow ABA star David Thompson, who were powerful players with outsized personalities. Gervin had his own thing. The Iceman did not need showmanship to make anyone believe in his greatness—he set his own pace, played the game at his own rhythm, and opponents could never quite pick it up.

(Read James Naismith’s 1929 Britannica essay on his invention of basketball.)

Gervin originally signed to play his college ball at California State College, Long Beach (now California State University, Long Beach). But this through-and-through product of Detroit wanted to be close to home, so he transferred to Eastern Michigan University before he finished a semester in California. He spent two years there before being dismissed from the team for a poor performance on an eligibility exam. Then he played in the Eastern Basketball Association, which led to a tryout for the Virginia Squires (at that time the NBA required that players be out of high school for four years before entry into the league). Gervin was briefly a Squire alongside Erving, a pairing of future superstars that sets the modern mind reeling. As with many ABA teams, however, the Squires had a host of financial problems. They traded Gervin to the Spurs, and he immediately became the face of that franchise—and one of the ABA’s premier performers.

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Gervin was known as much for his signature move, the finger roll, as for his nickname. The finger roll—an underhand shot in which a player rolls the ball off the tips of the fingers while approaching the basket—was a basketball staple that few could pull off with as much elegance or precision as Gervin. Even if the defender knew what was coming, Gervin could catch him at just the right (or wrong) time and score points in the lane. The finger roll was Gervin in a nutshell: consistent, familiar, and yet never any less virtuosic or improvisational in each occurrence. Also a deadly long-range shooter, he was the consummate inside-outside scoring threat, which was one of the reasons why he was able to rack up such impressive numbers (averaging 25.1 points per game over the course of his career) even by the ABA’s run-and-gun standards.

After the 1976 merger between the ABA and the NBA, Gervin picked up right where he had left off. In the 1977–78 season he and Thompson engaged in a noteworthy battle for the scoring title that went down to the final game of the season. Thompson put up an otherworldly 73 points; Gervin, never one for excess, nevertheless poured in 63 and held on to the lead. He also led the NBA in scoring average in 1978–79, 1979–80, and 1981–82.

Gervin played with the Spurs until 1985. He spent one season with the Chicago Bulls before finishing out his career overseas and in the Continental Basketball Association, retiring in 1990. Gervin was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1996.