I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [33]
Tell you something else: no black athlete or performer could be portrayed in mainstream media as a hero if he openly hated white people. He was a product of his time? No damn way. That excuse would never fly for a black athlete or entertainer. And after I said something about it, after I commented about it on TBS or TNT, people came up to me and said, “How could you call Bobby Jones a racist? You shouldn’t say that.” Hey, ESPN just told me about Bobby Jones in the SportsCentury profile, and from all indications he was a bigot. I didn’t know Bobby Jones personally. He’d be 129 years old by now. I can only go by ESPN’s reporting. And it’s not like anybody has come forward to dispute their reporting. What am I supposed to say after I see a profile of Bobby Jones’s life that made it very clear he didn’t like black people? Am I supposed to say, “God Bless Bobby Jones”?
I was telling some friends that if Tiger keeps winning the Masters, Bobby Jones is gonna walk through the front door of the Augusta National clubhouse one day and say, “If y’all can’t beat this colored boy I’m gonna come back from the dead and kick his ass myself. I know y’all can do a better job than this against him.”
I know Bobby Jones wasn’t alone in the way he thought, but damn, let’s not act like a great golfer is the only thing he was. The lives of athletes and public figures get examined all the time today. This ain’t the 1930s. Things have to be looked at and discussed and not just swept under the damn rug.
I know people of all colors and ethnic backgrounds, particularly kids and people in their twenties, who don’t get bogged down with ugly shit like race; they embrace Tiger. Kids just don’t care; they haven’t been programmed by adults yet and brainwashed with a whole lot of garbage. Their interests are pure. They see somebody doing something great, they like it and appreciate it and aren’t polluted with some sick-ass agenda.
But I think also that a lot of other folks who’ve been carrying around their own baggage see Tiger win at Augusta and want to think everything is okay. They’ll try to act like everything at Augusta National is just fine. Look, if they want to take the easy way out and not confront a whole lot of truths, fine, go ahead. But it’s still a bunch of BS.
I didn’t know until recently that Lee Trevino went to that clubhouse only once. Somebody wanted to throw him out the very first time he went there to play and he never wanted to go there again. They made him feel so uncomfortable being there he went out back and changed his shoes. He changed his shoes in the trunk of his car like he was some weekend hacker at a public course. Lee Trevino, one of the greatest golfers of all time. Can you imagine that? And you know there are people running around saying, “How can Lee Trevino be bitter toward Augusta and the Masters?” The people who ask that question, with disgust in their voices, were probably never turned away from someplace or asked to leave or enter a back door because of their color. I was down in Alabama playing golf one day in May, not long after the Sports Illustrated article ran, and I ran into some guys who said, “Hale Irwin said your views about Tiger and Augusta National were silly.” I said, “Listen, I like Hale Irwin. But Hale Irwin doesn’t live in Alabama where y’all are rednecks. Hale Irwin flew in here in a private jet for a few days, maybe a week. He played at the finest country club and he stayed in the most luxurious hotel he could find, which didn’t exactly give him a taste of what it’s like to be poor and black in Alabama, or poor and