I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [37]
Elgin Baylor’s knees were so bad late in his career, he wound up retiring before the Lakers won a championship. Ernie Banks never won a World Series, never even played in one. Would anybody be stupid enough to make the case that Ernie Banks’s life is unfulfilled, as great an ambassador as he is for the game of baseball? I knew Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers didn’t win a Super Bowl, but I didn’t know until somebody told me recently that those guys didn’t even play a single playoff game in their careers. If you want to make the case that those guys, first-ballot Hall of Fame players, didn’t do everything they could while they wore those uniforms, go ahead and try, but it would be pretty stupid.
I cannot imagine that if I won a championship tomorrow I would lie in bed and think, “Oh, I’m complete now.” I went out there every night and gave my team everything I had, some nights when I was injured and shouldn’t even have been playing. And I know all those other guys did the same thing trying to do whatever they could to help their teams win a championship. We got really close once, in 1993 with Phoenix, and I played on teams that had a chance a couple of other times. I was out there at a little taller than 6-foot-4 battling every night. I think the people I played with and against know that. Only three or four other players retired with more points, rebounds and assists than I had over my career. When I retired, one of my friends wrote me a letter and said, “I’ve stood beside your short ass and you’re only 6-4 but you battled 7-foot guys every night. Congratulations on a wonderful career.” That letter meant a lot to me. It was from Quinn Buckner. At the end of several seasons when I was playing, Michael would call me, knowing how disappointed I was, and say, “Hang in there.”
That’s what really made me angry when Scottie Pippen insulted me and said Michael agreed with him. Michael had just retired and was in Monte Carlo with his family. It was about 2:00 a.m. one night; the story had just broken with Scottie saying all this BS about me. And Michael said, “You know I’d never say that about you. And if I wanted to say it, I’d say it to your face.” He didn’t need to call me, but it was nice of him to do it.
We all want to win, but not everybody could win, especially not when they had to go through Michael Jordan in the NBA, not when they have to go through the Yankees most of the time in baseball, not when they have to go through Tiger Woods in professional golf. But you go out there and fight the best fight you can fight. It’s shameful if you cheat the fans, if you go out there and fail to give everything you’ve got when they’re paying good money to see you. But if you’re going to tell me that the twelfth man on one of Magic’s teams or Larry’s teams or Michael’s teams who played three minutes a night had a more fulfilling career than I did, that’s crazy to me. You can’t convince me that a guy who caught two passes the whole season on a Super Bowl–winning team had a more fulfilling career than Cris Carter had, or that the third-string quarterback holding a clipboard for a Super Bowl championship team had a more fulfilling career than Dan Marino or Jim Kelly. What you’d be saying then is that there is dishonor in giving your best, being one of the very top guys in your sport, coming close but losing. That’s crazy. Those guys didn’t win championships either, but they’re great at what they did and it’s an honor to be mentioned with them.
“I Am Not a
Role Model”
Nike didn’t come to me with the idea to do a commercial