I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [40]
All I was saying was your parents and your teachers, people you ought to be listening to, need to be your role models. Charles Barkley the basketball player should not be your role model. Yeah, I can be a role model to my daughter and to kids I have some contact with. But that’s not only Charles Barkley the basketball player, that’s me as a father, or a parental figure. Those kids don’t see me only on TV, there’s an actual relationship there, or at least some association. How many people on TV do these kids have an association with? We all know the answer is “None.”
But if it took me getting slammed to get some dialogue started on this issue, then it was worth it. I’d do it again in a second.
Making a Difference . . .
Politics and Business
Politics seem like such a scam sometimes, because our system is supposed to be inclusive and it’s supposed to represent everybody, right? Okay, so how many black U.S. senators are there? There are no black or Hispanic governors, even though black and Hispanic people make up about 20 percent of the population in the United States. You have to wonder if making an impact is easier to do through private enterprise than it is working through politics in a lot of cases. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to do it through the political process because we should, of course. But look at Earvin Johnson, for example. He’s making a difference. Look at the impact he’s had since he retired from his playing career. He’s partnered with Starbucks to go into communities that would never otherwise have a Starbucks. And not only did he put a brand-new Starbucks in the ’hood, he took a Borders Books in there, a Subway sandwich shop. He’s got movie theaters in several cities. All those businesses represent full-time jobs, part-time jobs. They represent hope, too. A lot of these communities don’t have anybody investing in them. They’re just forgotten communities. I know in some of those cases there was nothing there but vacant buildings or some empty strip mall. I’ve read where each one of his Starbucks is one of the top-grossing stores in the whole country.
I can’t say enough about how proud I am of Earvin and what he’s doing.
See, this is part of my disagreement with Jim Brown. Earvin has done this since retiring. That’s what I’m trying to do now in retirement: find the best way to make an impact and improve people’s lives. I don’t think you can devote enough time to these types of efforts and do it properly while you’re still playing. A playing career now is a full-time job. Yeah, we get some downtime and some vacation time. But it’s not like it was in the 1960s when the NFL season was twelve games and the NBA playoffs ended in early May, and guys went out and got jobs in the off-season because their sport lasted only half the year. These days, the club owns your ass almost year-round.
To be fair, we can never know all the stuff guys in Jim Brown’s era went through and the battles they had to fight and frustrations they had. If you’re in your thirties or forties you can only imagine what it was like, so I understand what he’s calling for. I don’t know what it was like to have to stay in a separate hotel from my teammates or have to enter the back door of a restaurant to eat in certain cities. I understand why he wants people to be active socially. He was involved in a lot of stuff from what I can tell. And he still is.
But we can only fight the battles that we are presented with now. Earvin is doing a tremendous job. People say they don’t see famous black athletes using their platform, using their influence to impact change. Jim Brown has said that about today’s athletes. But again, look at Earvin. You think a poor white or poor black person could have gone to the chairman of Starbucks and said, “Hey, man, I want to start putting Starbucks in urban neighborhoods where they don’t have any coffee shops.” He couldn’t even get his call through.
Earvin is using his celebrity and his wealth to do something serious as an entrepreneur. There’s so much pressure on black