I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [36]
But this notion that your career is somehow failed if you don’t win a championship, which I think is completely ridiculous, really started to get out of control the last ten years or so. People have just become so critical, so quick to ridicule. Phil Mickelson is going through that right now and I feel bad for him. I know Phil Mickelson. He’s the second greatest golfer in the world as I’m writing these words. And I know how badly he wants to win. But I think he’s pressing, and unfortunately starting to believe all this stuff about not being able to win a major championship. It’s difficult not to because you can’t escape it, not with all the sports talk radio and twenty-four-hour sports television and people asking him about it every single tournament. David Duval had it until the summer of 2001 when he won the British Open, and Colin Montgomerie has it to a degree, but nobody has it like Phil. Well, Greg Norman had it a while back until he won a couple of majors. But even with that, people look back on Greg Norman’s career now and you hear them say, “Well, he had the talent to win a lot more majors than he did.”
Man, that’s flat-out unfair. The people making these assessments for the most part don’t have any idea of how difficult it is to win a championship—in golf a major championship—especially if you come along at the same time as the greatest player that sport has ever seen. Of course, I identify with what Phil’s going through because I had something very similar.
There’s really only one thing wrong with Phil Mickelson: he was born at the wrong time. That’s it. He was born too close to Tiger Woods. Same thing happened to me, to Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Reggie Miller, a whole bunch of guys. The guys who dominated at the championship level when I played were Earvin Johnson, Larry Bird and Michael Jordan. They won fourteen championships in nineteen seasons. They played in twenty NBA Finals between them. If you want to say that those guys were better than me, I’m going to agree with you. Is there any shame in that?
Once when he was being interviewed Michael gave me a backhanded compliment and said I was on the next level down from him, Larry and Magic. And I called him up and told him I had no problem with that. I told him, “If I’m right after you guys, I’m okay with that.” That means I’m with Malone, Stockton, Ewing, Gary Payton. Would I like to have won a championship, several championships? Of course. I played my ass off for sixteen years, trying to win every time out. But don’t expect me to see my career as something unfulfilled because I’m with those other guys.
Somebody took a poll once and the question was “Who’s the greatest team player in professional sports never to win a championship?” and I was voted No. 1. A similar topic came up when I was on Jim Rome’s show once, and I told him, “Jim, you never ask this question of a mediocre player. So I’m taking this as a compliment. When you interview a marginal player who managed to hang in there and last long enough in the league to make himself a ten-year career you tell him, ‘You had such a wonderful career.’ So by asking me this, you must think I’m a helluva player.”
The problem to me is the bar keeps moving. If Phil Mickelson wins a major tournament, but only one, when he retires people will say, “He should have won more.” Well, why is that? How many people making this criticism of Phil are the second-best in the world at what they do? You’ve got a lot of no-talents out there on talk radio running off at the mouth, getting people all riled up when they’re not stopping to assess how difficult it is to win a championship in any sport in this day and age, with all the good athletes out there competing. It’s still a special thing to win, to even compete for a championship. So I’m telling everybody when they ask