In late February, Bryan Abrams was driving north on I-95, on his way to a DVD-release party for "The Mighty Macs" - a film about tiny Immaculata College winning the 1972 women's basketball national championship - when his car was sideswiped. The vehicle spun out of control and crashed, leaving Abrams with a severely bruised right side, a sprained hip, lacerations on his hands and face, and two black eyes.
Yet just a week later, when Abrams' beloved Philadelphia 76ers played the Oklahoma City Thunder, he showed up at the Wells Fargo Center early, as usual. His girlfriend had applied makeup to the blackened skin under his eyes, and he slowly limped onto the court to schmooze with the players during warmups. When Abrams told Sixers forward Thaddeus Young what had happened, Young said: "I'm glad you made it to the game. We need you here. You're our No. 1 fan."
Abrams' haggard face lit up. "This is the best therapy," he said, taking his courtside seat, glowing in the neon-green, blue and yellow pastels of his vintage Versace sweater. "Whenever I walk in here, I feel like I've come home."
For more than 30 years, through seasons of heaven and hell and plenty of purgatory, Abrams - forever clothed in Versace from shirt to shoes - has lit up 76ers home games like a Cape May sunset, an aurora borealis, a Pink Floyd laser show, like Lady Gaga, Bjork and Katy Perry all rolled into one.
Night after night, home game after home game, Abrams is a section 113/row AA courtside vision in crossing-guard oranges and highway-crew lime greens, 50,000-watt electric blues, too-close-to-the-sun yellows, passionate pinks, sizzling scarlets, feverish fuchsias, bringing a bit of South Beach glam to South Philly (even though he hates the Miami Heat and tongue-lashes LeBron James without mercy). He's a tie-dyed die-hard, as pure Philly sports fan as a guy from Wilmington can be.
"I missed some games 'cause I got cancer, but that wouldn't have stopped Bryan," says Big Daddy Graham, the standup comic/WIP sports-talk host who has been a Sixers fan since they played in Convention Hall. "He would've gone to the game with an oxygen tank."
Abrams has been a courtside fixture since he first got season tickets in 1977, when Doug Collins, then in his 20s, played for the Sixers. "I've missed five home games in 35 years," Abrams says during a recent pregame warmup. "One when my mom passed away, one when my brother passed away, one when I got invited to the Academy Awards, one when I went to the opening of the Versace boutique in Houston, and one because of the weather."
Abrams looked a little guilty on that last one. "There was an ice storm and a state of emergency was declared in Delaware," he said apologetically.
There's an obvious question here: Why has Abrams been king of the Sixers diehards for so long?
Abrams says his 76ers obsession dates back to watching Collins, Darryl Dawkins, World B. Free and Dr. J up close, from floor seats back in the day. In the mid-1980s, he and and his childhood friend, Andy McConnell, scored seats 1 and 2 at the end of the Sixers' bench, within easy schmoozing distance of the players. "I was hooked," Abrams says. "For life. The Sixers are my winter family. I mean really. They're my family."
That's not an understatement. Last year, when Abrams' brother had a touch-and-go situation in the hospital, Collins sent him a text message: "I hope all is well with your brother. Let me know what's going on. Doug."
"Whenever he sees me, the first thing he says is, 'How's your brother?' " says Abrams. "I love Collins. He's the kind of coach you dive on the floor for."
Says Marc Zumoff, a Sixers broadcaster for 30 years: "He is what he says he is: the Sixers' No. 1 fan. We go to dinner together. He's been to both my kids' bar mitzvahs. We're friends."
Even before he became synonymous with the Sixers, though, Abrams was a self-described basketball junkie. His mother was a 5-7 center for the semipro Wilmington Blue Bomberettes in the 1940s, and passed along her passion for the game to the only one of her five sons who would never grow taller than 5-4. Abrams and McConnell, who have been going to Sixers games together for 35 years, grew up in Wilmington's Green Acres community, where their lives centered on full-court basketball at the pool, three blocks from home. "All we did all day long was play basketball," Abrams says. "In the morning, I'd run over there with Randy Richter, who lived behind me. Andy would already be there. My brothers, kids in the neighborhood would show up. We'd play.
"Today, the same group of guys gets together every summer . . . arguing all these years later over who made what shot, or who could shoot the farthest from the outside. Drives the wives and girlfriends crazy."
Abrams, 59, who still lives in his childhood home, is long past his playing days, but he's run every day for 16 years. "When I run by the pool," he said, "I always look over to see if anyone is hooping it up."
The other question, for anyone who has seen Abrams at a game, is: What's up with the clothes?
Abrams' Versace-only style began in the '80s, when he read that a new menswear designer was going to be at Bergdorf Goodman in New York. He went to see the designer, and was blown away by Gianni Versace's hot colors and personal warmth, striking up a friendship that flourished until Versace's murder in 1997.
Most of Abrams' Versace-only wardrobe is vintage, one-of-a-kind fashions that date back to his friendship with Gianni. "The bright colors are about joie de vivre [joy of life] or la dolce vita [the sweet life], if you want to say it in Italian," Abrams said. "You can always spot me at a Sixers game."
Says Graham who's usually considerably less sartorially splendid than Abrams: "I've know Bryan for so long now, and he knows so much about basketball that sometimes I forget I'm talking to a guy wearing a rainbow shirt and chartreuse loafers.
"World B. Free dresses kind of flamboyant. Sonny Hill is pretty resplendent. But Bryan's a bald white guy, so the way he dresses takes way more nerve. I'd love to see him in a tweed suit jacket with elbow patches. You'd probably have to drug him to dress him that way, and point a gun at him to get him to walk into Wells Fargo Center."
Graham remembers taking his daughter to New York City years ago. "She'd never been on Madison Avenue, so I figured maybe I could afford to buy her shoelaces or something, and there was the Versace store so we went in," Graham says. "She put her name on some sort of mailing list and when the guy behind the counter saw that she was from Philly, he immediately said, 'Oh, you know Bryan?' "
Thanks to his sartorial splendor, opposing players know Bryan, too. "On one of his last times in town, Shaquille O'Neal was inbounding the ball near me and asked me where I got my sweater," Abrams says. "It was bright orange, yellow and purple. I told him it wasn't available in his size."
Then Abrams went back to taunting Shaq, as he does all enemy stars.
"I'm very vociferous," Abrams said. "I'm going to say anything I can to get a player off his game."
Scott Granloff, who has sat near Abrams for years, remembers when Allen Iverson was a rookie playing against Seattle SuperSonics' star Gary Payton.
Abrams loved Iverson. "Since he first got here as a Sixer, Allen Iverson's nickname for me was 'Day 1' because from Day 1, I was in his corner," Abrams says.
So, Granloff says, when Iverson was having a great game against Payton - who was nicknamed "The Glove" for his defensive prowess - Abrams couldn't contain himself. "Bryan's yelling, 'Our little rookie's going to bust you and there's nothing you can do about it,' " Granloff says. "When Payton finally got a layup, Bryan tells him, 'That's one,' and Payton yells back, 'Why don't you take your little bald ass home.' "
"I told him I would when he stopped Iverson," Abrams says, laughing. "I said, 'One basket doesn't mean a thing.' "
When he's not screaming to get inside an opponent's head, Abrams calls out picks for the Sixers' defense. "Could be a blindside pick," he says. "I'll be shouting, 'Pick left!' or 'Pick right!' Lou Williams has pointed over at me to thank me. It's just my way of being into the game."
Abrams cannot abide refs who don't call enough fouls in the Sixers' favor. "During a game against Orlando, I was screaming, 'Moving on the picks! Offensive foul!' " Abrams says. "Finally, in the third quarter, the ref called an offensive foul on Orlando for a moving pick, then looked over at me. I shouted, 'Yeah, that's me. I'm the one that's calling you out.' "
During that same game, Orlando superstar Dwight Howard was so taken with Abrams' baby-blue silk Versace shirt that he exclaimed, "I want to take you shopping!"
Abrams, who often gets on Howard about his foul shooting, has recently been trying to be more positive. "We've gotten to be friends," Abrams said. "I'm working on him to be a Sixer."
Tom Kline, a well-known personal-injury lawyer, is a firsthand witness to his fellow diehard's friendship with Howard. "Before the game, Bryan walks onto the court, shakes hands with me, shakes hands with Howard, and then they both turn their backs on me and engage in a deep conversation," Kline says, laughing. "What is this mysterious access that Bryan has?"
It may have to do with the infectiousness of Abrams' passion. "What's the vision of Bryan?" Kline asks. "I saw it the other night during a loss, and it was reminiscent of when the Sixers were in the doldrums - the year that they won 20 games or something like that. It's the moment where Bryan gets up and he holds his hands up and he pushes them toward the sky and he basically says to everybody, 'Get up! Get up!' And if you sit near him, you feel, 'I am either too lazy or not a good enough fan because this guy is doing what a real fan should do.'
"I've seen the whole Bryan Abrams show over the years," Kline says. "It's clearly a religion for him. Almost every fan roots selectively. Bryan roots for every player on every play. He roots for the team like Doug Collins coaches the team."
Collins himself agrees. "When you look over there and see fans like Bryan - and he's endured some tough, tough times, some tough losing seasons - you never, ever see them lose their love for their team; that to me is what it's all about," he says. "I want to win, but I want a team that, when the people leave, they can say, 'That's our kind of guys, our kind of team.' I look over and I see Bryan and it motivates me, it really does."
"He's on his feet for every play," Kline says. "That creates a challenge if you sit behind him- except that God was good and made Bryan five-foot-four, not six-foot-six. See? He was even built to be a fan. I've never seen anyone like him."
- Daily News Staff Writer Bob Cooney contributed to this report.