I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It

by Charles Barkley

  In that context, Michael Jordan is underrated. Look at the levels of success those other guys had once they left him. When Horace Grant left and went to Orlando he helped them get to the championship, but the Bulls retooled the very next year without him. Being a star is hard, and so is the actual work involved to be great every night, and the responsibility. And you have to have incredible talent and a different mind-set to begin with.

  Take Robert Horry. He’s a great role player with the Lakers, and he was a great role player in Houston. But in between, he was traded to Phoenix where they wanted to make him a star. And he fought with the coaches and staff. And that doesn’t mean Robert Horry wasn’t a good player, because he is. But you can’t learn to be a star. You either are or you aren’t. I heard Robert Horry say after he hit that three-point shot at the buzzer to win Game 4 of the Western Conference finals against Sacramento that one reason he’s able to be so calm about taking those shots is that if he misses and his team loses, Shaq and Kobe are going to receive all the blame anyway, so why worry about it. See, Robert Horry understands the importance of stars in the league and how role players are supposed to feed off them. A star has to have extra toughness, that special sense of the moment. When everybody in the building knows you’re going to get the ball on all the big possessions, that’s athletic pressure. The pressure of being a star should be fun, even the part where you get all the credit or all the blame for what happens with your team.

  The fans and the media may be fooled sometimes. They’ll think somebody is a star, but he’s not really up to the biggest moment. You can never fool the players. We know who’s a star.

  In high school I don’t remember when I felt I’d become a really good player, and I don’t remember a specific point in college either. But I do remember in the pros. I was in my room one night—we had just played the Knicks in Madison Square Garden, and I had put on a show. Rick Pitino was their coach, and it was the 1988–89 season. I was watching SportsCenter after the game when a reporter asked Rick, “Is it possible Barkley is getting to the point where he can take over a game like Magic, Michael and Larry Bird? Is he knocking on that door?” And Rick said, “If you saw what I’ve seen lately, he’s kicking in the door.” I’m sitting in my room, watching the 2:00 a.m. SportsCenter and I thought, “Damn, I can play with anybody in the world?” I sat there and thought about it for an hour or so. I went to bed, and the next morning I woke up and said, “You know what, Rick is right, I can play with anybody in the world.” And from that point on, I just said, “There might be two or three guys as good as me but nobody’s better than me.” And that was the turning point for me; it came in my fifth year. Of course you need the talent to do it, but talent isn’t the only ingredient. If you don’t feel that way, if you don’t think you’re better than everybody else, you can’t be better. People sitting at home listening to guys when they say that just figure, “He’s too cocky.” But it’s absolutely necessary to have that attitude. When you realize it and can back it up, at that point you just have to get out of your own way.

  The year I thought it would all come together was 1993, my first season in Phoenix. I thought we could beat Michael Jordan and the Bulls that year. But we had such a hard time getting to the Finals. We were the No. 1 seed, had the best record in the entire league, but lost the first two games at home to the Lakers. But we won Games 3 and 4 on the road in L.A., then came back and won Game 5 at home, in overtime. The next series was San Antonio, and I hit the shot at the buzzer to eliminate them in Game 6 and close out the HemisFair Arena. I was so nervous about getting to the Finals. We were up three games to two in the Western Conference finals against Seattle and got our asses kicked real good. I remember sitting on the plane coming back and everybody was scared shitless and nervous. People can talk all the shit they want to, but those deciding Game 5s in the first round and those Game 7s, you ain’t eatin’ and you ain’t sleepin’. You’re nervous and hyper. I remember walking around trying to cheer up guys and you could hear a pin drop. So I figured, this is useless, let me go and get some damn rest myself.

  Frank Johnson came up to me and said, “Look, we’re going to the Finals.” I said, “Frank what do you mean?” And he said, “You’ve never been to the Finals. We’ve got everything on the line in this one game. You play your best game, we’re going to win.” And I thought to myself, “He’s right. If I play my best, the only other person who could beat us in the league right now is Michael Jordan. But nobody else in the Western Conference can beat us if I play my best, and we’re going to the Finals.” I got 44 points and 24 rebounds. Nip-and-tuck game all night, Eddie Johnson tried to bring them back in the fourth quarter, but we won and got to the Finals.

  Then we lost the first two games at home.

  The day of Game 5 in the 1993 NBA Finals in Chicago, I was pissed off. We had won Game 3, in Chicago, to make it a series again. But the Bulls were ahead, 3–1, after four games. Michael Eisner, or whoever was running Disney at the time, had called my agent. And my agent called me in the hotel on the day of Game 6 and said Disney wanted to do something different with its “I’m Going to Disneyland” MVP promotion. He said they wanted to hire me, win or lose, to look into the camera and say after the series, “I’m going to Disneyland” if we won, or “I’m still going to Disneyland” if we lost. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, “You call that asshole back and tell him to kiss my ass, we’re not going to lose tonight.”

  So I was ticked off all day. Then, I’m sitting there watching the news and they’re boarding up the city of Chicago. The previous year when the Bulls beat Portland in the NBA Finals, there had been some rioting. People got out of control after the Bulls took Game 6 in Chicago to win the championship. And the storekeepers weren’t going to have any more of that crap, I imagine. So I was already seeing dead-red because of Disney, and then to have all these damn public service announcements running on TV in Chicago about don’t hurt the city and don’t riot after the Bulls win tonight . . . I couldn’t believe all that shit. So I started my campaign, “The Suns Will Save Chicago.” And “Don’t Let Chicago Burn.”

  I told the reporters before the game, “I love Chicago. It’s a beautiful city, so I’m going to do my best to keep it from burning down.” We won Game 5 to get the series back to Phoenix.

  • • •

  It’s a wonderful life we have. Life is funny. Normal, everyday shit is funny. The guy who set off those pipe bombs a few months ago, said he’s mad at the world. Kid is going to college, says he has a nice girlfriend he loves, is in a band and smokes a lot of pot. What the hell has he got to be mad about? He’s mad?

  I would get mad about stuff, but I wouldn’t stay mad. Life is too short to stay upset and hold grudges. People are probably thinking, “Well, you got mad at the refs.” But I didn’t carry that stuff around. I will say, though, that I never got along with Mike Mathis. He threw me out of a game in Atlanta once. You know how you holler and scream and curse at each other? He threw me out of a game in Atlanta, then threw me out of, like, three more after that. It was never over. I actually called him to the NBA office in New York, that’s how bad it got. We went up there and met with Rod Thorn, who was handling discipline for the league at the time. It was that bad. Mathis never let bygones be bygones.

  The best one to me was Joey Crawford. Great official. Once an argument was over, it was over, which is all you ask. Mathis, once you’ve pissed him off you were done for the season with him, maybe your career. Steve Javie is good, but once you make him mad you’re done for the game. Bob Delaney is a good official, too, but same thing—once you make him mad you’re done for the game. Dick Bavetta is terrific. The late Earl Strom. Derrick Stafford is great. Problem is, some of these officials think they’re the show.

  People don’t know how powerful these guys are, how they impact the game. And league officials keep refs’ fines and suspensions private. I never got mad when a guy said, “I think I might have missed that call.” It’s a fast-movin
g, difficult game to officiate. Most of ’em are good guys.

  But I’m just glad I played basketball. Of all the professional sports, I think basketball is the most enjoyable. We play six months, then have six months’ vacation. We don’t do nearly the damage to our bodies that football and hockey players do. Baseball lasts forever. And basketball is the sport that seems to be evolving in a fascinating way. Look at the trend the NBA has right now with the international players.

  Dirk Nowitzki from Germany, that kid can play. Hedo Turkoglu is a tough kid. They’re not afraid of anything. Just look at the European players from a cultural and geographic standpoint. How many of those guys, particularly the ones from Croatia and Yugoslavia, grew up in the midst of war? Some, I know, grew up in or around it. You deal with war, why would anything in sports intimidate you? You look at Vlade Divac. The guy has had people in his life close enough to war that nothing on a basketball court is going to intimidate him. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Shows you it ain’t really got anything to do with what color a guy is, but how he grows up, where he grows up, the environment he’s in. People try to talk white kids in America out of playing basketball, but that’s just America. People talking about “White men can’t jump” and all that crap. It’s interesting, how all these foreign-born players are coming into the league now and doing really well. I’ll bet you they don’t have a bunch of people in their countries telling them they can’t play because they’re a certain color or race. It’s a game that rewards all kinds of different skills, and it’s exciting to see people from all over the world playing it at such a high level.

  Nike took an all-star team to Germany one year, not too long ago. Dirk was eighteen, maybe nineteen years old. He laid a smooth 45 on us. He lit up Keith Van Horne, dropped about 20 on Scottie Pippen. He was quicker than Van Horne, and he took Scottie right down to the box. I went over to him after the game and told him, “I’ll pay your way to Auburn myself.” I was serious. He called me not long after and said, “I’m going to be drafted.” I didn’t know he’d be this damn good. I’m proud that basketball is producing great players in every corner of the world now. And I’m proud that I played twice on a team, the Dream Team, that had something to do with making basketball as popular all over the globe as it is today. I’ve had some of the great European players come up and tell me they were twelve years old when the Dream Team went to Barcelona.

  My thing is, I want all these guys to do well. Basketball is important to me because it’s given me everything in my life. I don’t have my college degree. I don’t know what I would have done otherwise. Basketball has been the thing that connects me with people in ways I could never dream of.

  On game days, I could be in the worst mood imaginable—a really bad mood. But sometimes, I’d get a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation—there would be people, sometimes kids, who wanted to meet me before they died. And the foundation would call on a game day and say, “There’s a kid dying here whose last wish is to see you. Can you just come and see him?” I’d get there and sometimes the kid would be comatose. One day, a kid woke up for a split second and smiled at me. I was told he’d been hanging on. The mom and dad called me later and said, “I don’t know what you did to him, but those few moments were wonderful.” And I cried all the way to the game, just cried my eyes out.

  Ultimately, I couldn’t do that anymore on game days. I was too emotional. I couldn’t concentrate at all. I’d be wondering about that kid, whether there was something that could be done to comfort him.

  It’s very scary. It’s uplifting, too, but so scary. Terminal illness is just . . . man. To think “I can brighten this kid’s life, if only for a few minutes” is kind of overwhelming. And if you can’t get some perspective from that, then you’re hopeless. I’m bitching because my breakfast is cold?

  Mom and Grandma

  My grandmother has always been the rock of the family. She’s really strong, assertive, aggressive. I’ve always been just like my grandmother, stubborn and strong-willed. I’m 100 percent like her. My grandmother was the father-figure in our family since my father wasn’t there. She took charge of all the important situations, made the difficult decisions. She handled all the discipline. The funny thing is, my mother is just the opposite. She’s really passive. My mother is overly sensitive and easily offended. Her personality is very, very different from mine and from my grandmother’s. Because of that, whatever grandma said, that was it. It wasn’t up for a vote. There was no debate. I don’t know how many whippings I had. Let’s just say they were numerous. My grandmother would use a switch to whip us, a stretch of Hot Wheels track, anything.

  Grandma worked at a meat-packing factory, and it was hard work. Mom was a maid. There was nothing glamorous about it.

  And we bootlegged. We sold alcohol. That’s the way we made ends meet: selling alcohol. It was hard raising three young boys, with no husband and father. John is seven years younger than me, Darryl is four years younger. How much money can you make working in a meat-packing factory? Or working as a maid? So we sold alcohol. The house was like a casino on the weekend. Guys would come on Friday and drink and gamble until Sunday.

  One of the fascinating things about growing up poor in those projects was that a guy who fit the description of being a bum, a guy who drank all the time and didn’t amount to much, would most likely be protective of you. Back then, some of those guys who were drunks or bums would be the first to tell you, “Hey man, don’t screw it up!” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. The culture has changed. But back then, the guys who didn’t amount to anything were very supportive. They would go out of their way to keep you out of trouble. They knew full well which kids might have a chance to make something of their lives if they stayed out of trouble, if they stayed away from drinking and drugs and crime. They’d tell you, “No, we ain’t havin’ that; you’re getting out of here. Put that alcohol down.” It’s true. They might have screwed up their lives, and some of it might have been beyond their control depending on how much education they had or what kind of job they could get. But they didn’t want to see the cycle continue. I think a lot of those guys knew how difficult it was to turn your life around if you got started in the wrong direction. And they didn’t want to see that hopelessness continue. That can be some depressing stuff. But at least they wanted you to do well. They didn’t begrudge you the chance to make life better for yourself or your family. They didn’t want to see you fail just because they failed.

  It probably sounds strange for people who didn’t grow up in those kinds of circumstances, but that’s just how we lived. The sad thing is, in poor communities now, the drunks and addicts are the ones pulling kids down, not pushing them out. That’s why I started going back to the neighborhood and spending time with kids. Derrick Stafford, the NBA referee and now one of my good friends, grew up in Atlanta, graduated from Morehouse. He once said to me, “I know how involved you are in charity work and how often you speak to kids at schools and camps and things. But have you spent much time with the kids in their neighborhoods?”

  It was something I needed to hear because my view is that you can make it—that anybody can make it—if you just work hard enough. I tend to believe hard work can overcome almost anything. But now you’ve got thugs and drunks pulling kids down and these kids live year to year without any encouragement. There’s nobody steering them away from trouble. In fact, somebody’s bringing trouble right to them, handing it to ’em.

  I realize now how much support I had from outsiders, but mostly from home. There were three important men in my life: my grandfather Simon Barkley, my grandmother’s first husband, Adolphus Edwards, and her second husband, Frank Mickens. My father wasn’t there, and I was always resentful about that. But I know how great it was to have those three men in my life. My grandfathers were spectacular. I was probably too immature to understand at the time how necessary they were to a kid’s success. It’s just so difficult to be successful without that kind of support network. That�
�s why when I speak to kids, I tell them, “Hey, you think your parents are a pain in the ass now, but they’re going to get smarter as you get older.”

  As I look back on it, I’m glad my grandmother didn’t tolerate any foolishness when I was growing up. I believe in my heart there were other athletes who could have made it to the NBA from Leeds High School. Leeds was a sports factory in baseball, football and basketball. We were really good in all of those sports. But I think it helped me that I didn’t know how good I was. Being a late bloomer worked to my advantage. I think it works to the advantage of a lot of kids not to be phenoms when they’re really young. There were no AAU guys coming around, swelling my head with a whole lot of garbage about how good I was and how much money I could make. I had no letters about going to college on a basketball scholarship until my senior year. There was no Big Man on Campus attitude for me. My grandmother wouldn’t have had any of that.

  Anyway, my mother and grandmother made me be in charge of my brothers by the time I was fourteen. They said, “You’re the father figure. You’ve got to help take care of your brothers.” And so I was the father figure. We didn’t have the battles I know a lot of brothers had, because I needed to take care of them. With my mother and grandmother working the way they did, I was in charge of the housecleaning, too. That’s probably why I’m a neat-freak to this day. Never did dishes, though. That’s the one thing I didn’t do.

  I have a greater appreciation for my mother and grandmother the older I get because I realize they were willing to do whatever it took to provide us with things we needed even though money was so difficult to come by. I distinctly remember being the first kid in my neighborhood to have a pair of Chuck Taylors. Did you know that we get a new pair of basketball shoes every single game in the NBA? When I was fifteen, sixteen years old and playing basketball in high school, I would get one new pair of shoes every season. My mother would bring the shoes to the game, and after the game was over she came and waited at the locker room door, and I handed her the shoes and she took them back home. That’s the way it went all year, too, because that one pair of basketball shoes had to last the whole season. There was no wearing them just to profile or hang out in. I couldn’t wear them other than in a basketball game until the end of the season. She doesn’t have to remind me of that time in my life because I’m constantly reminding myself. All I can say is “Wow!” That’s why I said I can’t imagine my life turning out any better than it has.