I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It - Charles Barkley [66]
The physical talent, everybody who makes it to a certain point has that. Then what? Guys screw it up, that’s what. Jayson Williams is a perfect example. He signed that contract with the Nets for $100 million, and even though he got hurt and had to retire earlier than he wanted, he still had the world in his hand one minute. On national TV, making a second career for himself. The next minute it’s all gone. He’s facing jail time and the money he made could be gone in a civil suit. I know Jayson and he’s a good guy and I just feel bad, but that’s such an example of one mistake. We could sit here and talk about basketball stuff, but it’s the management of your life that is really the big difference between making it and not making it for a lot of guys, or hanging on versus making it big. If you don’t start with that, you’re wasting your time. I’ve probably played with twenty players who should have played in the NBA for a long time but didn’t. It’s because their heads weren’t together. You see guys with talent all the time who can’t make it.
And leaders are even harder to find in sports because most guys want to do it by example, when there’s more responsibility involved than that. It’s difficult to do because you can’t worry about what others think or say. You can’t put your efforts into pleasing folks. I had Julius Erving and Moses Malone as leaders, so I got to play with two great ones. It’s not a coincidence that in their prime they were able to lead a team to a championship, and Doc was able to lead them to the Finals three other times.
You have to be obsessed to get to the NBA Finals, and I’m not talking about just one guy or just the best player on the team, but everybody. That first year in Phoenix that we reached the Finals, nobody cared about contracts or the number of minutes he played or the number of shots he got or who had the most endorsements. But what you see often in team sports is that after you win once or get to the championship series, guys start saying, “I need more minutes than him,” or “I should be making more money than that guy,” and when that’s the case, you ain’t gonna win. That’s what happened to us in Phoenix after that first season.
But one guy who really helped me while I was in Phoenix was Paul Silas, who was an assistant under Paul Westphal. Paul Silas helped me with how to judge whether a guy could play, who could play and who couldn’t. My fourth and final season in Phoenix, which was 1995–96, I thought we had a really good team. Paul said, “Nope, we really don’t have that good a team.” And he was right. I’m not surprised by Paul’s success as a head coach one bit. Really, he should have gotten a job a lot sooner. Way too much time passed and far too many guys were hired between the time Paul got fired from the Clippers in 1983 and hired again, by Charlotte, in 1998. Hell, the Clippers were still playing in San Diego in 1983. There were something like 140 coaches hired between the time he was fired from his first job and hired in Charlotte.
I’ve been fortunate to play for several different guys who were good leaders, good coaches, good communicators. Paul Westphal, who I played for in Phoenix, is a great person. No better person ever coached in the NBA, I can say that with certainty. Billy Cunningham was a strict disciplinarian, and he was a great coach for me as a rookie because he provided a lot of structure and discipline. Rudy T. is a great coach for a veteran team because he’s more lax. There are a lot of people who have very different personalities who can lead teams effectively in their own ways. Same thing goes for certain players. Mark West, who I played with in Phoenix, is a guy who you’ll never hear mentioned as a great leader. But he was a great guy and knew the subtleties of the game and could communicate with the star players or the role players. I had started to develop Michael’s mentality, hollering and screaming at