I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [13]
As I look back on it, I’m glad my grandmother didn’t tolerate any foolishness when I was growing up. I believe in my heart there were other athletes who could have made it to the NBA from Leeds High School. Leeds was a sports factory in baseball, football and basketball. We were really good in all of those sports. But I think it helped me that I didn’t know how good I was. Being a late bloomer worked to my advantage. I think it works to the advantage of a lot of kids not to be phenoms when they’re really young. There were no AAU guys coming around, swelling my head with a whole lot of garbage about how good I was and how much money I could make. I had no letters about going to college on a basketball scholarship until my senior year. There was no Big Man on Campus attitude for me. My grandmother wouldn’t have had any of that.
Anyway, my mother and grandmother made me be in charge of my brothers by the time I was fourteen. They said, “You’re the father figure. You’ve got to help take care of your brothers.” And so I was the father figure. We didn’t have the battles I know a lot of brothers had, because I needed to take care of them. With my mother and grandmother working the way they did, I was in charge of the housecleaning, too. That’s probably why I’m a neat-freak to this day. Never did dishes, though. That’s the one thing I didn’t do.
I have a greater appreciation for my mother and grandmother the older I get because I realize they were willing to do whatever it took to provide us with things we needed even though money was so difficult to come by. I distinctly remember being the first kid in my neighborhood to have a pair of Chuck Taylors. Did you know that we get a new pair of basketball shoes every single game in the NBA? When I was fifteen, sixteen years old and playing basketball in high school, I would get one new pair of shoes every season. My mother would bring the shoes to the game, and after the game was over she came and waited at the locker room door, and I handed her the shoes and she took them back home. That’s the way it went all year, too, because that one pair of basketball shoes had to last the whole season. There was no wearing them just to profile or hang out in. I couldn’t wear them other than in a basketball game until the end of the season. She doesn’t have to remind me of that time in my life because I’m constantly reminding myself. All I can say is “Wow!” That’s why I said I can’t imagine my life turning out any better than it has.
I never had any sense, though, that we were doing without. There were no luxuries, but we had everything we needed. The holidays were cool because the three of us knew our mother and grandmother were going to find a way to get you one really nice thing you really wanted. Now my daughter gets ten things. She gets stuff from people who aren’t her family. Kids now get a roomful of things, and you have to wonder how appreciative they are because there’s no sense on their part that these things were difficult to come by, that somebody had to sacrifice to get them.
My original professional goal was to make $10 million, play in the NBA for ten years, be set for life, and make life better for my mother and grandmother. Remember, when I was coming out of college I had led the SEC in rebounding, but I had only averaged 12 or 13 points a game over the three years I was at Auburn. As hard as they worked, my mother and grandmother saw every game I played in high school and I think they saw