I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [43]
Home and Away
One of the great benefits of making a career out of professional sports is the travel. On the most basic level, road trips are business trips: you’re going to a place in order to make your living, a place that you probably wouldn’t be visiting otherwise. But once you’re there, it can be so educational and rewarding if you only allow yourself to experience the people and the culture.
One of the cool things about travel is finding places you want to visit over and over again when you hit town. If you’re going to Milwaukee, you’ve got to go to Perkins, the soul food spot. There’s another spot I love in Phoenix, Johnson’s. Houston is one of the best restaurant cities in America, maybe the most underrated. A spot named Ruggles is one of my favorites. South Philly has a ton of great restaurants.
I’ve also found living in different places—Philadelphia when I first left Alabama, then Phoenix and then Houston—fascinating. Take Philadelphia. Philadelphia is just a real tough city. A lot of people in the news media can make it difficult to play there because a bad game or a bad series isn’t treated as a bad game or a bad series. It’s treated as though you’re a bad guy and you meant to play poorly, like you’re personally trying to cheat the team and the fans. Even if you’re a star player it can be difficult to live in Philly because of that. And if you think you can separate living in a place from how you’re treated publicly, you’re crazy.
Now, I know the fans can be tough, too. But I always thought the fans treated me great. And that’s not to say that there weren’t some tough nights and difficult stretches. But overwhelmingly, I thought the fans were great to me. And what I find really interesting is that once I was traded, after playing in Philly for eight years, the fans showed how much they appreciated me when I returned for games. From what I could see, the same was true for Randall Cunningham once he was traded from the Eagles after a great run, and would come back to town to play against them. It seemed to me as if, regardless of what had happened before, the fans tried to really show Randall they appreciated all the effort he put forth to help make that team a contender every week for years.
But when it does go sour, it really goes sour. When it does, I think it’s largely because a columnist or talk show host or somebody prominent in the local media puts the hammer on somebody, and then the fans just run with it and it becomes a huge local issue that just hangs around for days and weeks. When Eric Lindros first arrived in Philadelphia to play for the Flyers, I was playing golf with him and I told him early on, “Eric, you have to watch your back. This can be a really enjoyable city but it can also be very tough and you have to know that going in.”
He was just a kid at the time, and he thought, “Hey, this is going to be okay.” And I understand that, because you can’t know another city until you experience it, until you know what the people are like and what makes them tick, what gets them inflamed. And it’s very hard to appreciate how frustrated fans might be about a certain team’s performance historically. I do know that about five years later, I saw Eric someplace and he said, “Man, you were so right years ago.” See, when things go bad, they really go bad.
I will say this, though I know a lot of people in Philly will see it as criticism: They were wrong to boo Kobe Bryant the way they did at the 2002 All-Star Game in Philly. It was ugly, mean and totally unwarranted. From what I understand, the people who have a beef with Kobe in Philly are upset that he said going into the 2001 NBA Finals that he wanted to come back and “cut Philly’s heart out.” He was referring to the 76ers, not the city of Philadelphia, and everybody should have been able to see that. The context was clear to me. And for that, people booed him unmercifully. But what else is he supposed to say when he’s playing against the 76ers for the NBA championship? You expect him to say, “We’ll come there and have