There is a Philadelphia 76er who reads all day. On the team plane, while Larry Brown is sipping red wine and Allen Iverson is playing poker, this 76er is curled up reading about Ethiopian kings. It isn't who you think, either. It's someone with a bitter-beer face, someone who ran afoul of the law for peeing in a Detroit bistro. It's someone who told the Lakers this year, "Y'all get one more time to knock Iverson down, and then you're dealing with me." It's someone who's been called a "psychoanalyst's wet dream" by a former coach, someone whose career can be broken down into the four-word sound bite: "Whoop-de-damn-doo."

It is Derrick Coleman, chased out of three cities, who devours three books a month. It is Coleman who won't read anything without his highlighter and his dictionary. It is Coleman who checks into hotels under the name Malcolm X, Coleman who tells kids in his neighborhood to show him their report card.

The surprise with Derrick Coleman is that there's something going on up there, something not at all petulant. If ever an athlete needed PR, it is DC, who predictably has been blamed for much of the 76ers' slide this season. Brown called a midseason players' meeting to refute reports that Coleman was a team cancer for skipping practices, but Coleman's response was, "Don't worry, Coach. I can take it." He always has. He took it in New Jersey and Charlotte, took it from former Sixers president Pat Croce, and can take it now that the 76ers season is in his hands. When Iverson fractured a bone in his left hand March 22, it was Coleman who asked to carry the offense, Coleman who sat in the back of the bus doing Dikembe Mutombo impersonations, Coleman who knew it was his job to hold the fort until Iverson gets back.

The surprise with Derrick Coleman is that he says he gives a s--. He's playing with a left knee that's ached for five months. He burst a baker's cyst behind the knee in November, played through it, then learned he may have a partially torn meniscus. Given the choice between season-ending surgery and playing on one leg, he chose playing on one leg. His critics don't mention that. They don't mention that when he misses practice three times a week, it's because his leg's in an air cast. They don't mention that he takes a heart pill every morning just to play. They don't mention the burns on his chest from three times having his heart shocked back into rhythm. And they don't mention that Brown, the only man on earth who still wants to coach him, says he's "one of the most unselfish guys" ever.

They don't know that his son, Derrick Demetrius Jr. (D.D., for short), is getting all of daddy's books someday. The books on the Black Panthers and Mandela. The books on slavery he lends to teammates. No one sees this. All they see is Derrick Coleman, blowing off practice again. All they see is the Derrick Coleman scowl, the scowl that even gives his wife the heebie-jeebies. The scowl that made the bony Reggie Miller want to fight him.

"What did my daddy do now?" asked 5-year-old D.D., after hearing that his daddy had put a choke-hold on Miller.

Nothing. Nothing that can't be explained nice and simple.

***

You can take the kid out of Mobile, but you can't take Mobile out of the kid. Derrick Coleman's South was the South you despise, the South where black kids were chased from playgrounds by white kids with barking dogs. Derrick Coleman remembers his South precisely that way, remembers being locked in the library on the last day of grammar school while white kids left first. "Maybe they thought there'd be fights," he says.

He went home and told his grandmother, Arrie, all about it, the same Arrie who had eight kids under her roof and waxed other people's floors for a living. Arrie told her grandson, "There's some people you just can't trust."

That was Derrick Coleman's South, and at 14 he took his South up north to Detroit. He went to live with his mother, Dassie, and on the first warm day, he went to play basketball and got his face beat in. He thought he was special, thought he'd learned all there is to learn in Alabama, where he'd hose down dirt courts so the dust wouldn't get in his eye and shoot on rims made of bicycle tires. He'd shoot by the light of his grandmother's bedroom window and work on his ballhandling skills by wearing floppy gloves, and he took all of that bravado to West Detroit. So they beat his face in, and that's when he knew Arrie was right, knew he couldn't trust anyone, knew he had to put up a wall.

"And I've kept my game face on ever since," he says. "My scowl. My defense mechanism. Once I walk out my door, the scowl is on."

He never knew his father, and that's another thing. He only asked about him once, in high school, and when Dassie offered to arrange a meeting, he said, "No, forget it." He never asked again, though he told her later, "Two things I never want to do in life -- die in a plane crash and walk in this house and have you tell me, 'This man standing here is your father.'"

Years later, at an NBA game in Atlanta, a ball boy tugged on Coleman's sleeve to say, "Your father is over here and wants to meet you." But Coleman wouldn't look, has never looked. He's never trusted men -- or women, either -- which is why he made his wife suffer through a five-year engagement.

"People would say, 'When are you getting married?'" says the former Gina Cook, who met Coleman while working for the Nets. "And I'd say, 'I guess when Derrick stops thinking I'll take him to the cleaners.'"

He was comparing every woman to Dassie and Arrie. "They don't make women like they used to," he'd tell Gina. And Gina could then see the South in him. She'd see him watch a tape of the miniseries Roots over and over, and she'd hear him say, "The difference between me and you, Gina, is I'm a field nigga and you're a house nigga. If the massa' tells you to do something, you say, 'How you want it done?' Whereas me, I'm planning to get out."

Gina's response would be, "Honey, don't get mad at me just because I get along with people." Or she'd say, "Honey, stop watching Roots so much -- no wonder you stay angry." But he is what he is, and on the day Arrie died, Coleman couldn't bear to attend the funeral. Instead, scowl-faced Derrick Coleman cried. Cried in Arrie's empty Alabama bedroom.

***

All you need to know about Derrick Coleman is that an NBA referee once told a Hornets executive, "That is the biggest waste of talent I've ever seen. I'll never give him a call."

His is just a bad image, years in the making. But for every Coleman faux pas, there is an explanation. His "Whoop-de-damn-doo" comment? He was only defending a friend. His Nets teammate Kenny Anderson had missed practice, and when a reporter implied it was an egregious act, Coleman said what he said. "I should've had 'Whoop-de-damn-doo' trademarked," Gina says.

The public urination incident? He says when you have to go, you have to go. He was sitting with Jalen Rose and Thomas Hearns at 2 a.m. in a deserted bistro three summers ago, and just couldn't hold it. He says he rushed to what he thought was a bathroom, but ended up in the kitchen instead. By then, he was already urinating, so he let it go. "People act like I stood up from my table and peed in the middle of the restaurant," he says.

The feud with Paul Silas? It's peculiar. Silas coached Coleman when he was an assistant with the Nets, and according to Derrick, it was Silas who called him a "pysychoanalyst's wet dream." But when Silas got to Charlotte, he campaigned to acquire Coleman. Then, before the 2000-01 season, Coleman had a reoccurrence of the arrhythmia that was diagnosed six years ago. Silas insinuated it was because Coleman only sporadically took his medication. Coleman -- who has received electrical cardioversion to shock his heart back into rhythm -- blamed it on a generic brand of pills that didn't work. Trying to make peace this off-season, Silas phoned Coleman when Derrick turned 34 and sang "Happy Birthday." Coleman hung up on him, and this preseason, Silas stripped him of his captaincy and agreed to the trade with Philly. "Derrick didn't get a fair shake," guard Baron Davis says.

The feud with Croce? The former president had Coleman in Philly from '95 to '98, and tried to talk Brown out of reacquiring him last season. "Coach would beg for Coleman," Croce says, "and I'd look at him cross-eyed: Are you kidding?" Croce wanted rah-rah players, and believed Coleman "was poison" in the locker room. Plus, Croce says, Coleman "wouldn't visit hospitals, nursing homes, or do autographs after practice. I'm a Philly homeboy, and if players aren't involved, I don't want them."

Little did Croce know, Coleman did charity work privately. He renovated a home in inner city Detroit, moved in and let the neighborhood kids have the run of the place. He took 30 students to Disney World last year, and always gives bicycles to those with the best report cards. He spent $250,000 to rebuild a nearby park, putting up six backboards, and he'll pay for teenagers to go to the prom. He'll pay for their tuxedos and limos, and one prom night, he even lent a high school senior his BMW.

Another night, Coleman was in a Manhattan limo and saw an elderly black woman with four kids waiting for a bus. He stopped and told his driver, "Take her wherever she wants to go." He says he did it "because no black people are gonna get cabs at midnight," and because he saw a lot of Arrie in that woman. He thinks of Arrie all the time, and when he does, he looks at the tattoo on his biceps that says "Chains Remain." He got the phrase from a book, and it explains all you need to know about Derrick Coleman. "It does, doesn't it?" he says.

***

There's one way to get everyone off his back -- win. Derrick Coleman will never repair his rep, but if he can fill Iverson's void, on one leg, it'll be a start. Brown, for one, is in his corner. He sees what others don't see: that Coleman is a pass-first player who can also give you 20 and 10 a night. And that Coleman can't be coached in a vacuum.

Coleman needs leeway. In New Jersey, Chuck Daly would let Coleman stop the bus at a 7-Eleven to grab beer for the team. Brown is the same. "That's why Larry is one of the few coaches Derrick will play hurt for," Gina says. It is a good fit, which is why 76ers players also say Coleman is Brown's surrogate son. "They always say Coach is my daddy," Coleman says. "They say, 'Coach got four sons on this team -- you, Aaron McKie, Eric Snow and Derrick McKey -- but you the head son.' They say 'AI is the bad son.' They say, 'AI and Coach got that love-hate relationship, but Coach will do anything for you.'"

In fact, on team flights Brown and Coleman are often seen sipping red wine together. Both of them hate to fly, so Brown will invite Coleman over to share a bottle, just to calm them both down. "So AI will be up there playing cards," Coleman says, "and he'll be like, 'Coach'll give you anything!' And AI will want some wine, too. He'll say, 'Yo, D, tell Coach to let me get a cup of that red wine.' I'm like, 'No, you ask him,' and AI will say, 'He won't give it to me; he'll give it to you.'"

Some 76ers executives believe Coleman has led Iverson astray, that Iverson bails out of practice because Coleman bails out. But the truth is, Iverson finally has a teammate in Coleman who can take heat off of him, someone who actually gets ridiculed more than him ("Whoop-de-damn-doo!" Iverson blurts out on the bus). That's why Iverson listens to Coleman. "AI amazes me," Coleman says. "He thinks no one can stop him. But sometimes on the court, I say, 'Hold up, man.' Because he's flying up court. I'm like, 'Allen, we ahead, no rush.' And he'll stop. And laugh."

Iverson listens because he knows the value of an enforcer like Coleman, something the team never had against the Lakers last June. Coleman has already puffed his chest out this year at Shaq, Chris Webber and, of course, the scrawny Miller, who stupidly returned the push. Coleman then put Miller in that choke-hold, and later waited outside the Pacers locker room for more. "Derrick is the world's nicest guy," says his good friend from Syracuse, Rodney Dumpson. "But once you cross that line, he resorts back to survival tactics."

The night he returned from the Miller scrape, Gina had him go and talk to their son. D.D. had questions, and Coleman told him, "I want you to know I didn't start the fight, that I never want you starting fights either. But you can't back down in life. You can't."

Then he smiled and told D.D., "Now, show me your game face, boy. Show me your game face."

And D.D. did the scowl right there. The second-generation scowl.

This article appears in the April 15 issue of ESPN The Magazine.