I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [5]
Another reason I’m looking at a transition is I don’t know that you can give full attention to subjects as serious and as sensitive as race and the economy and education, then just shift into doing all sports. I don’t know if the two go together. I’ve always contended that sports don’t help black people. . . . We don’t own any of the franchises, don’t run any leagues, barely run any teams. You talk to these kids and all they want to talk about is sports, and I guess they don’t realize how little other than playing sports black people have to do with the industry. But they all want to play sports. Playing sports is fine, but too often it’s all they want to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I love sports as much as anybody ever has, and I’ll still be doing my work for Turner during the NBA season, which is a lot of fun. But my duties in Atlanta will be expanded to include appearing weekly as a special contributor and commentator on CNN’s show TalkBack Live, as well as other CNN programming. And I’m going to take that very seriously because the show deals with serious subjects. The primary reason I turned down an opportunity at HBO is that it would have been exclusively sports. And it was a damn attractive situation. I would have worked on HBO’s Inside the NFL—not with football analysis, because they have former NFL players and coaches who already do a great job of that, but doing interviews. I think I would have liked it.
But I need to transition because there are so many things people don’t want to talk or think about, things I think I can get them to think about. Most of the reporters who ask me questions are white; almost all are doing well financially. Most don’t want to talk with me, a person they see involved only in the industry of sports, about issues that concern black and Hispanic and poor white people. I don’t think they see that stuff as something they can sell their readers or viewers.
How is it possible that 80 percent or more of the NBA is black, and there are still so few black writers covering the league? How is that? How many black writers cover the NFL? It’s still a handful from the conversations I’ve had with my friends in the media. It’s a travesty. I know writers and broadcasters all over the country, and I know it’s a more diverse group now than it’s ever been, and that’s really sad because it’s still bad. I know a lot of white reporters who are real nice guys and very good at what they do. But many of them just don’t care about this stuff and others don’t get it. And when the reporter does care, I know for a fact sometimes the boss—the editor or producer or whoever—doesn’t give a damn and figures the readers don’t care. “You think the people reading this sports section give a shit about poor-people issues? Man, you better bring me some stories where the coach is talking bad about the player or the player is talking bad about the coach.”
I pick up the very same publications and read columns or editorials criticizing guys for not talking about anything socially significant. And that’s true of a lot of guys. But if you ask me, I’ll talk about it. And if I don’t say it, the guy isn’t going anywhere else to hear anybody else talk about it. He’s not going to the projects to hear it. The only time anybody white comes to the damn projects is to find a great player.
This is what annoys me about the whole issue surrounding Jim Brown and his criticism of me. I really believe Jim Brown is on the right track on most issues, and I like the way he confronts and