I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [44]
So, yeah, when things go bad for a guy in Philly they really go bad. Scott Rolen of the Philadelphia Phillies found that out the hard way in the summer of 2002. Once he turned down a contract extension, it was just a matter of time until they ran him out of there because so many guys in the press and people in Phillies management treated that as a personal rejection of them. And then the fans run with it, and all of a sudden it’s just miserable. When the work environment is difficult, living wherever you live is going to be difficult, no matter how wonderful the city is, especially when you’re living a public life.
The sad thing is sometimes you don’t really get to enjoy a city the first few years you’re there simply because making friends is so difficult. There are just too many balls to juggle at one time. You’re trying to find a place to live in a community you know nothing about. You’re trying to learn a new city. You’re trying to practice and play as well as you can as a rookie, or as a guy just signed or traded to a new team. You have new teammates to learn and adjust to. And half the time, you’re not even there, because you’re traveling.
Obviously, though, I think the fans in Philadelphia have been great to me, and it was a great place for me to be those eight years, because I still live part of the year in the Philly area. My first culture shock was coming to Philly from Alabama. I had my first cheesesteak my first or second day there. I didn’t like it. There was too much meat and it was messy. It just wasn’t my thing. So that was my one and only cheesesteak. But that’s one of the few things in Philly that disagreed with me: I met a lot of wonderful people there.
And the turning point of my adult life came in Philly. Winning had become so important, so consuming, that it was okay in my mind at the time to spit on a heckler. By now many people know the story, that I missed the guy I was spitting at and hit a little girl named Lauren Rose who was attending the game that night and sitting near the heckler. The thing that really struck me the most when I talked to Lauren two days later was her demeanor, how calm she was, how nice and trusting. I haven’t talked to her in a while, but she and her parents were such nice people. I knew then and there I would never do anything like that again. There are things that happen in the heat of battle with players, but they’re combatants in that arena with you. There’s nothing that should make you do what I did that night. I told myself, “Calm your ass down.” That’s the one thing I really, really regret.
My second culture shock came when I was traded to Phoenix before the 1992–93 season. Being from Leeds, Alabama, and living my first eight years in Philly, I had never in my life had much contact with a large Hispanic community or Hispanic culture. So I got there, and obviously the Phoenix metropolitan area has a large Hispanic population, and it was eye-opening for me.
The people I met in the Hispanic communities in Arizona were incredibly hardworking. They’d come to a new place, where the language was a second language, and their mission was to educate their children and make their families’ lives better and be able to enjoy both their own culture and the mainstream culture in America. It makes me so damn angry to hear people say, “We’ve got too many immigrants coming into the country,” as if that’s the biggest problem we have.
The Hispanic people I met came into a new country, did the most menial jobs in a lot of cases, took whatever work they could get without bitching or complaining,