I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [11]
But I’m just glad I played basketball. Of all the professional sports, I think basketball is the most enjoyable. We play six months, then have six months’ vacation. We don’t do nearly the damage to our bodies that football and hockey players do. Baseball lasts forever. And basketball is the sport that seems to be evolving in a fascinating way. Look at the trend the NBA has right now with the international players.
Dirk Nowitzki from Germany, that kid can play. Hedo Turkoglu is a tough kid. They’re not afraid of anything. Just look at the European players from a cultural and geographic standpoint. How many of those guys, particularly the ones from Croatia and Yugoslavia, grew up in the midst of war? Some, I know, grew up in or around it. You deal with war, why would anything in sports intimidate you? You look at Vlade Divac. The guy has had people in his life close enough to war that nothing on a basketball court is going to intimidate him. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Shows you it ain’t really got anything to do with what color a guy is, but how he grows up, where he grows up, the environment he’s in. People try to talk white kids in America out of playing basketball, but that’s just America. People talking about “White men can’t jump” and all that crap. It’s interesting, how all these foreign-born players are coming into the league now and doing really well. I’ll bet you they don’t have a bunch of people in their countries telling them they can’t play because they’re a certain color or race. It’s a game that rewards all kinds of different skills, and it’s exciting to see people from all over the world playing it at such a high level.
Nike took an all-star team to Germany one year, not too long ago. Dirk was eighteen, maybe nineteen years old. He laid a smooth 45 on us. He lit up Keith Van Horne, dropped about 20 on Scottie Pippen. He was quicker than Van Horne, and he took Scottie right down to the box. I went over to him after the game and told him, “I’ll pay your way to Auburn myself.” I was serious. He called me not long after and said, “I’m going to be drafted.” I didn’t know he’d be this damn good. I’m proud that basketball is producing great players in every corner of the world now. And I’m proud that I played twice on a team, the Dream Team, that had something to do with making basketball as popular all over the globe as it is today. I’ve had some of the great European players come up and tell me they were twelve years old when the Dream Team went to Barcelona.
My thing is, I want all these guys to do well. Basketball is important to me because it’s given me everything in my life. I don’t have my college degree. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. Basketball has been the thing that connects me with people in ways I could never dream of.
On game days, I could be in the worst mood imaginable—a really bad mood. But sometimes, I’d get a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation—there would be people, sometimes kids, who wanted to meet me before they died. And the foundation would call on a game day and say, “There’s a kid dying here whose last wish is to see you. Can you just come and see him?” I’d get there and sometimes the kid would be comatose. One day, a kid woke up for a split second and smiled at me. I was told he’d been hanging on. The mom and dad called me later and said, “I don’t know what you did to him, but those few moments were wonderful.” And I cried all the way to the game, just cried my eyes out.
Ultimately, I couldn’t do that anymore on game days. I was too emotional. I couldn’t concentrate at all. I’d be wondering about that kid, whether there was something that could be done to comfort him.
It’s very scary. It’s uplifting, too, but so scary. Terminal illness is just . . . man. To think “I can brighten this kid’s life, if only for a few minutes” is kind of overwhelming. And if you can’t get some perspective from that,