• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 660 0

that. But that was a different day: no Turner, no ESPN, no satellite dishes. My grandfather Simon Barkley watched the Atlanta Braves religiously. He probably watched every game since the Braves moved to Atlanta from Milwaukee in 1966. They were what was on. And the only NFL games we could watch when I was growing up in Alabama involved the Cowboys, the Redskins or the New York Giants. That was it. The affiliates didn’t even care about any regional games. (When I became friends with Roy Greene, the thing I used to ride him about, because he played for the Cardinals, was him getting his butt kicked all the time by the Cowboys, Redskins and Giants.) Every Sunday we’d come racing home from church, hoping the NFL game was a 4:00 p.m. game and not a one o’clock game. Same thing in basketball: it was the Celtics, Lakers or 76ers. No local games, no regional games, nothing. And now, you can see it all, whatever you want, twenty-four hours a day. You don’t have to worry about what the local affiliate wants to show. You’re not at anybody’s mercy. It’s amazing how you get used to what you have. Now I don’t even know how people could live without the dish.

Bobby Knight’s Olympics

I was cut by Bobby Knight in the 1984 Olympic Trials. In a way, it was a relief: a big part of me didn’t want to make the Olympic basketball team in 1984. Seriously, I didn’t. Number one, I didn’t like Bobby Knight. And number two, I was leaving Auburn to turn pro. I just went there to help improve my stock for the NBA draft, and I told people as much before I went to Bloomington, Indiana, for the trials. People heard me say that after getting cut from the team and they said, “Oh, you’re just saying that because you’re disappointed you didn’t make the team.” But no, that was never the case. When Steve Alford wrote a book—and he was my roommate during the trials—he wrote, “Charles didn’t want to make the team.”

I didn’t want to dedicate my entire summer just to playing basketball. My primary goal was to move up in the draft, which meant working out, getting mentally and physically prepared to play professional basketball. It was about to be my first time leaving Alabama for an extended period. I was leaving school early. What I was about to take on that summer made it a really important time in my life. I wanted to go to the Olympic trials, kick a little butt and move up in the draft. Before the trials, most of the scouts thought I was going to be drafted in the middle of the first round, maybe even late in the first round. But at those trials I got to play against everybody. I mean everybody: Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Chris Mullin, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Sam Perkins, Waymon Tisdale . . . everybody. There are seven, maybe eight guys from those trials going to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Half of the Dream Team was at those trials. I remember coming home after getting cut; John Stockton, Terry Porter and I rode home together. People don’t believe this now, but we got cut the same day. That’s a lot of NBA experience that got cut that day.

Bobby Knight pretty much just wanted to keep guys he could control. There were a lot of good players who were cut, guys who were better than ones who made the team. Antoine Carr should have made the team. Karl Malone should have made it. I don’t think people really remember all the great players who came to those trials. Joe Dumars, A. C. Green, Michael Cage, Dell Curry, Mark Price, Chuck Person, Roy Tarpley. As it turns out, A.C, Joe, Dell, those guys all played in the league more than a dozen years. And those were the guys who got cut. It ain’t like those guys went and got good all of a sudden after they left the Olympic trials. Of course they got better, but they were good when they showed up. After the first few obvious guys, Knight kept the guys he could control. There’s no doubt in my mind he would have cut me sooner if I hadn’t played so well. What people don’t remember about the tryouts is that the sessions early in those trials were open to the public and the media. People could see for themselves