I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [61]
People will say that I’m against the young boys, but it’s just the opposite. We older guys want these young boys to do well. But they don’t look at the situation critically. Becoming a free agent before you have a chance to become as good a player as you can be doesn’t help you make more money. In some cases it limits what you can make.
But guys think if we offer advice or try to get them to see the big picture that we’re against them. There’s definitely a large generation gap right now. My last couple of years in the league I was trying to work with Steve Francis. I was trying to teach him some of the right ways to do certain things, and while I think he understood what I was trying to do in the end, it was a struggle the whole way. For the longest time, he didn’t look at me as a player who’d already experienced life in the NBA trying to help him. I think he looked at me as an old guy criticizing him while trying to still be The Man.
There are things I just think young players don’t need, and probably hurt them professionally and financially. For example, I’m trying to figure out how entourages, which you only used to see in boxing, became such a big part of pro basketball. Nobody ever in the old days had an entourage. This is all new crap, New Jack stuff. I’m still trying to figure out what you need them for. Guys have drivers and all this crap. They’re essentially just guys on payroll, draining your money. Is there a white player in professional sports with an entourage? I don’t think so.
If somebody in your entourage does something stupid or negative, it’s the player who’s going to get the blame because he’s the guy in the public eye. He’s the guy whose name everybody knows and the guy with everything at stake. I’ve never had an entourage, but it seems to me it’s just a bunch of people hanging around, spending your money, putting you in jeopardy. What’s the point of that?
When I was young, I had older guys on their way out take me aside and offer advice. Some of it might have been critical, but I listened because it was obvious to me they had been there and done that and they had my best interests at heart. It’s the same now, we older guys have the interests of the young guys at heart when we make a critical observation. But they don’t see it that way and we all wish they would.
God Doesn’t Have a
Favorite Team
Athletic competition is emotional enough without bringing religion into it. More wars have been fought over religious conflict than anything else, so clearly it’s an explosive issue.
I don’t think religion and sports should mix. There are so many different religions, and for the most part we only understand our own. People might want to be tolerant of views different from their own, but from what I’ve observed we don’t understand other people’s religions. Even a lot of smart people who deal with complex things in their lives every day can’t understand the rituals or the philosophies of other religions. And that ignorance often just opens up a huge box of problems and issues.
Look at professional sports nowadays. A team is a lot like most other workplaces, just smaller. People are from every part of the globe, speaking a hundred different languages and practicing a hundred different religions. And most of the time we haven’t even been exposed to even half the religions being practiced by guys who are our teammates or the guys we’re playing against. So how can you have a couple of guys who may be practicing one form of religion dictating to the whole team, telling a team full of guys practicing different religions to do one thing? Look at any NBA team. It’s very possible you can have Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and atheists represented on one team. And now guys are coming in from China and