I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [1]
Years ago, Michael Jordan observed that we all want to say the stuff Barkley says, but we don’t dare. And particularly, most athletes don’t dare. I don’t enjoy going into locker rooms as much as I used to, not because there aren’t plenty of smart and observant guys—there are. It’s that guys with commentary in their souls are afraid to say what they’re really thinking, particularly on sensitive issues. Sadly, it’s understandable. The league might be offended, and if not the league then the shoe sponsor that is shelling out three mil a year or whatever it is for the athlete to appeal to customers, not potentially offend them. And if not the corporate sponsor, then the women or the gays or the blacks or the whites or the Hispanics or . . . somebody. And rather than take that public beating or risk losing that endorsement income, or sound like an uninformed fool, most guys just say the safe thing, or clam up altogether and put on headphones to shut out the noise of the world. I’ve never seen Barkley wearing headphones in public. Never.
Early on, Barkley made his peace with mixing it up, and decided the consequences were very much worth it to him. And that makes him as radically different in these modern celebrity times as a 6-foot-4-inch power forward. And most days it makes him a compelling figure in the world of sports and entertainment. When I was approached about editing his words I was excited because I knew from seventeen years of hanging around him that Barkley had things to say, things worth writing and hearing and debating, some of it about touchy and even volatile subjects of which most celebrities are deathly afraid. Not sound bites, not thirty-second commercial clips that have at times gotten him into swirling controversy, but fully developed thoughts he’s been mulling and shaping for years. I may have edited this book, but it was written by Charles Barkley.
The first time I ever saw Charles was November 5, 1983, in Auburn, Alabama, on the campus. I was the beat writer covering college sports for the Washington Post, and I was there to see Maryland play Auburn in football. The football game would be memorable enough since Maryland was led by a young quarterback named Boomer Esiason and Auburn that day would unleash a third-string running back named Vincent (Bo) Jackson on the college football world.
But while I’ve covered football, I’m a basketball junkie. My friend, mentor and columnist colleague Ken Denlinger—an even bigger basketball junkie—made the trip as well. He knew the Auburn basketball coach, Sonny Smith, and had arranged for us to go watch the basketball team scrimmage that Saturday morning before the football game.
College basketball was a regional pleasure back then; you pretty much only watched the teams where you lived. You didn’t get to see North Carolina and Duke if you lived in Chicago; you got DePaul and Notre Dame and Marquette. ESPN was only about three years old, so there was no Big Monday. There also was never any Big West game starting at midnight Eastern Time. So I’d heard a little bit about Charles Barkley, but I’d certainly never seen him play.
We went to the gym, and there was Barkley, 280 pounds or thereabouts, stuffed into those Daisy Duke shorts that were still fashionable in the early 1980s. I didn’t want to say anything out loud to embarrass myself. So I just thought, “That’s Barkley? This is the guy people are raving about?” I was stunned. At a shade under 6-foot-5, he wasn’t much taller than me, and he looked more like a defensive tackle than a basketball player. But when the game started, he was a force of nature, rebounding and leading the break and dunking. Bodies bounced off him. He played taller and more confidently and with greater passion than anybody on the court.