I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [63]
I never did march. It was my fault I flunked Spanish, and it took me a long time to get over that. I had to take it again in summer school. It taught me that you aren’t going to be given anything in life, that you have to earn what you get. It was my life and my fault. And I feel bad I blamed it on other people. But my dad wasn’t concerned with that important lesson, just that he was inconvenienced. It turned out that he motivated me the first few years—unintentionally—because I was so angry at him. For the longest time I tried, then for years I just didn’t talk to him. I was angry and it was too frustrating. I’m positive my old man never saw me play a basketball game in high school, never saw me play at Auburn. He never saw me play until I got in the NBA. He got interested in a relationship again when I became an NBA All-Star. He was living out in Los Angeles, and he always wanted me to visit him when we played out there. So finally, I started to visit him, spend some time with him when I went out there. But it seemed every time I went to L.A. all of our time was spent with him introducing me to all of his friends, his coworkers and associates. And it was clear what was going on there; he was just showing me off. I was his show pony.
It would make me so damn angry. I mean, I felt this way for years. And finally I had to get to the point where I realized that he had his own life. He had a totally separate existence in which I didn’t even matter to him. He wasn’t walking around all pissed off; I was. This shit was on my mind all the time, but not his.
But one time a few years ago he became sick for a while and I began thinking, “I’ve only got one father.” And as a result, I’m trying now. I’m making a real effort to extend myself, to get to know him better and let him get to know me better. But I did tell him, “Don’t try to be a dad now; it’s too late for that. Let’s be cordial. Let’s be friends.” You can’t be father-son this late in the game when you haven’t actually had that relationship all your life.
At this point in my life I just want to be at peace with my dad. You get one dad, so there’s no sense in being pissed off about what happened, whatever void you might have felt in your life. He’s not going to live forever, and I don’t want to look back and feel I squandered the time. I want him to know his granddaughter. One of the positive things that come from this is I know my relationship with my father—or lack thereof—affects my feeling about fatherhood, about participating and not just being there to take the bows. At the same time, he cannot be my dad, he can only be my friend.
September 11
Normally when I travel from my home in Phoenix to Atlanta to work for TBS and TNT, I catch the midnight red-eye flight to Atlanta. I hop on that flight, get served a late meal, then go to sleep before landing in Atlanta at 6:00 a.m. or whatever it is. That’s what used to happen before September 11, 2001. And of course, everything changed for everybody in different ways. For people who travel for a living, the change was dramatic and damn sure immediate. For the first six to eight weeks after September 11, I flew private jets to Atlanta. I couldn’t bring myself to fly commercial. After a while I flew commercial again, but now I don’t sleep. I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I know I’m not alone in having this experience. It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep on a flight I used to sleep on all the time because now I’m looking over my shoulder for al Qaeda.
People who don’t travel might not understand. People who do travel frequently probably understand completely. I don’t sleep because I’m thinking, “You need a chance to fight if somebody makes a move toward that cockpit and you can’t give yourself a chance to fight if you’re sound asleep.” So you don’t sleep. You can’t sleep. I know if I see or hear