As deserving as Denzel is of that Oscar, I don’t know if he deserved it for Training Day. My movie fascination began later in life, when I had time to go to the theater. But I see a whole lot of movies now, and I thought he deserved the Oscar for Best Actor for The Hurricane and for Malcolm X. It was silly that the problems with the historical accuracy of The Hurricane wound up penalizing Denzel. How stupid and how unfair is it to hold The Hurricane to this lofty standard when every picture made in Hollywood is dramatized to some extent. All these movies that are “based” on real life or a script or something historic in nature . . . in every one of those damn movies the producer or the screenwriter has taken liberties with the original work. So please don’t tell me The Hurricane should be treated differently, or that Denzel’s portrayal of Hurricane Carter didn’t count or needed to be diminished because of it. And Denzel’s performance as Malcolm X was one of the great, great performances to me, not just that year but over many years.
As happy as I was that night for Denzel and Halle, I guess the thing that disappointed me the most is that this was, what, the seventy-fifth year of the Academy Awards? After all this time it’s a big deal that a black woman and black man win Best Actor and Best Actress? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s sad. It’s sad to be even having this discussion. It’s like I said about people making a big deal about Tyrone Willingham being hired as head coach of Notre Dame. If this is a big deal in 2002, we’re in trouble. Same goes for black actors winning an Oscar in 2002.
If you don’t think prejudice is alive and well, that Oscar night is a damn good reminder. I know there are great white actors and actresses who’ve never won an Oscar. Bob Hope never won an Oscar. But none of the great black actresses had ever won one, and Sidney Poitier was the only black actor to win one. Then again, it’s probably difficult to be considered for the Oscar when all you get to portray is a junkie, a drug dealer, a pimp or a hoodlum. What kind of choices are those? I think Brad Pitt has a few more choices than that, doesn’t he? But where are the choices for Morgan Freeman? How come Morgan Freeman gets nominated one year for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor, then you don’t even see his ass for the next two or three years in a meaningful role? How is it that Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson can be accepted by the moviegoing public one year, then have no choices of reasonable roles the very next year?
Seriously, it’s disturbing. The people who go to the movies don’t seem to care. They’re like sports fans in a way. If word is out that there’s a good movie, people are going to want to see it, no matter what color the actor is. Yeah, there are some racists out there who don’t want to see blacks or Hispanics or Asians in any mainstream role and don’t want their kids to go see those movies. But for the most part, you put good material out there and people are going to go see it. People who go to movies know Morgan Freeman is a great actor. It’s the people in Hollywood who don’t allow him to have any choice of roles. Man, Hollywood is worse off than sports when it comes to inclusion and diversity. There are no choices, no range of characters for black and Hispanic people.
And just think, Morgan Freeman and Denzel and Halle Berry have it better than just about everybody else. The rest of the brothers better be content to play a drug dealer, a gangsta or a playboy ’cause that’s all he’s getting to portray. Who is doing the casting for these movies and who holds them accountable? Who’s writing the scripts? At least in sports, people know the owner and the general manager and who is doing the hiring, and people can jump on ’em and insist that a league or a sport do better. In sports you tend to know who ought to be accountable. But how many of us know the studio head or an executive producer, and where do you go to make a damn complaint? I’m just so disturbed about this. I had a woman say to me one day last summer, “Charles, you’re doing well. . . . I know a lot of black people making money and doing well.” And I told her, “Yeah, I do, too. In the NBA.” People see a few black celebrities doing well, getting a chance to pursue their ambitions, and they think it’s that way across the board. Well, it isn’t. If it was, Halle Berry and Denzel winning those Oscars last March wouldn’t have been such a huge deal. And neither would Tyrone Willingham being named coach at Notre Dame. But what’s going on with the television industry and the movie industry is troubling, especially considering how much the people forgotten by those industries patronize them.
• • •
My daughter can watch a little bit of television on school nights. But at 9:30, it’s going off. When I was growing up, we could watch a couple of hours of TV per night. But my grandmother said the TV was going off at ten, and that was 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 le
ft 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 who could play. It was all out there for everybody to see. We had open scrimmages. I don’t care if anybody had heard of John Stockton or not, you knew Stockton could play his ass off. I don’t care whether people had heard of Terry Porter or not; the guys on the court knew Porter was one of the best players there. You can’t fool the guys on the court. Those guys knew I was one of the top two or three players there. When ESPN interviewed Sam Perkins a couple of years ago for the SportsCentury piece on me he said, “When they read the names of the guys who were making the team and I heard Charles didn’t make it, I just knew I was getting cut.”
And then when we got to the NBA and our careers started to develop immediately, it was obvious Bobby Knight had cut some great players and just kept guys he wanted to keep.
But being able to play with and against those guys was a big turning point for me in my career. That kicked me to a whole different level. You have to remember, just about every great player was at those trials, and you started off being somewhat intimidated. Remember, some of the guys who made the team were Michael, Patrick, Sam Perkins and Chris Mullin. Those guys were on every All-America list. All these guys were there from big-time schools that you’d see on TV all the time but didn’t get to play against. But I do remember going home, and when I got back to Alabama my coach said, “What did you think?” And I told him I knew then that if I worked on my game, worked all summer and had myself ready, that I’d be able to play with any player in the country. I knew I’d be able to do well in the NBA because these guys I’d already held my own against at the trials were going to be the stars of the NBA. He’d already told me that. But I had to tell him, “Coach, there was one guy up there who’s the best player I’ve ever seen. It’s Michael Jordan. He was the only guy better than me.” I’ve only felt that way twice in my life, that when I was standing there watching a guy, that I knew I was with somebody who was special, who had to be the best at what he did. And the other time was the first time I played golf with Tiger. Those are the only two times I’ve felt that way. They could just do things athletically and competitively that other people couldn’t do.
I don’t begrudge Knight anything, nothing at all. I have nothing against him. When he cut me, I thought he felt bad about it. I’d always thought if he cut me he’d be a jerk about it. But he was actually pretty cool.
When that whole thing was over, people asked me, “How come you played so well in the Olympic Trials?” Hell, even though it’s always more difficult playing against great players, when you’re playing with other great players it ought to be easier. If you’re playing with other great players, guys who can all haul their part of the load, all you have to do is play. That’s why I feel bad now for Kevin Garnett and Gary Payton in recent years, and for Tim Duncan in the 2001–02 season. They just didn’t have enough help. Patrick Ewing, for most of his career, didn’t have enough help. As great as they are the game would be so much easier if they had just one other guy. So, the Olympics were easy. I played twice in the Olympics, 1992 and 1996. I led the team both times in scoring and in 1996 in rebounding. I didn’t have to do everything, I just had to do my thing. And it was so easy.
A Dream Team
The worst thing about getting cut by Knight in 1984 was that I thought I’d never get the chance to play for another U.S. Olympic team because at that point NBA players weren’t eligible. There was no reason to think I’d get another shot. Then, of course, the international demand to see the best basketball players in the world—us—was so overwhelming that the people running the basketball competition made the NBA guys eligible for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. That decision, allowing NBA players to compete, changed basketball around the world.
The first real sign of the huge impact the team would have came when Sports Illustrated wanted to put guys on the cover of the magazine. The photo shoot itself was incredible. They got us together at the NBA All-Star Game that February of ’92. And it was like the ultimate confirmation. Just standing there with those guys, knowing I was going to play with them, was incredible. You just get chills and you’re honored knowing you’re going to have the chance to play with players that great.
When people ask me if I have any regrets, I tell them I wish I had gotten to play with an All-Star in his prime for a few years. When I got to Philadelphia, Doc and Moses were older and past their MVP years, and I was very young. And when I got to Phoenix, I had some left, but I was on the downside because I had played eight years in Philly and was starting to have problems with my back. Even though I was voted the league Most Valuable Player my first year in Phoenix, which was the 1992–93 season, I knew I had four seasons better than that in Philly. One year in Philly, I led the league with 14 rebounds a game, and another year I averaged 28 points a game with 11-plus rebounds. Earvin beat me out for MVP honors in one of the closest votes ever at the time. But we didn’t contend the way I wanted, the way we all wanted. We never got over trading Brad Daugherty and Moses. We had one real good year with Mike Gminski and Rick Mahorn, 1989–90, when we won 53 games, and finished first in the Atlantic Division ahead of the Celtics and Knicks. But that was the only year we had a really good team. I had more help in Phoenix with Kevin Johnson and Dan Majerle and those guys. But I was in Philly still when the Dream Team was announced in 1991. I was putting up numbers and doing what I felt was the best I could do, but we didn’t have great teams then. So being selected to play with the Dream Team was an amazing opportunity. And it let me know what basketball people thought of me and my career. Before the team got together, they picked five to be photographed and be on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You’re one of the five who represents the country! I figured, “Damn, I guess all my hard work is paying off.”
No matter what happens in my life, there will be nothing like that. I’ve never been with the Beatles but I don’t know how they could have been any bigger than us that summer. We had 5,000 people watching us get on the bus every day to go to practice or games. Thousands were lined up on the side of the highway just to see the bus roll by. And they couldn’t really see any of us inside. We had two police cars in the front, two police cars in the back, armed guards on both sides of the bus on motorcycles. There were armed guards on the rooftop of the hotel we were staying in. And they moved the front desk of the hotel from the lobby to the very front door. You couldn’t enter without picture ID. I loved every day of it, every minute of that summer, that whole experience. How could you not have fun? I’m in the Olympics, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Here’s how unique it was. We were practicing one day when Bishop Desmond Tutu came to the gym. He met with the team, was talking to us, and started crying. He actually told us, “I cannot express to you how much you men mean to people in my country. They love you guys, they know all of you, and you inspire them.”
Ten years have passed now and some kids are too young to remember, and some folks have forgotten, but at the time we were certainly an international example of proof that black people can do great things. When Bishop Tutu said how much we meant to young people in South Africa, he had tears in his eyes and my heart was racing. I’m like, “Damn, I inspire somebody in South Africa? Bishop Desmond Tutu is telling me I inspire somebody, that I’m affecting people’s lives, that I’m large in South Africa?” It was completely unbelievable. He said, “Please keep up the good work because most of these kids know nothing but heartache.” I’m thinking, “Holy shit!” He brought with him ten, twelve kids who all had our jerseys on. It was very, very inspiring. It’s one of those episodes in life you think back on and it seems like a dream. But even with that kind of attention, guys didn’t walk
around acting full of themselves. I think we were more grateful than anything to be part of something so unique and so important to the sports world. Even though this was the greatest collection of players ever assembled on one team, we never had any ego problems. That didn’t mean it wasn’t as competitive as hell. In fact, it was the most competitive thing you ever wanted to see.
Clyde Drexler, who was still with Portland at the time, wanted to prove he was as good as Michael Jordan, which nobody was. And Michael just wanted to torch Clyde, so Clyde and Michael went at each other. Scottie Pippen wanted to guard Magic all the time, which was a great, great matchup. This was a year after the Bulls had beaten the Lakers in the NBA Finals, and Magic wanted to go back after Scottie. You had David Robinson going against Patrick Ewing in a classic big man matchup. Karl Malone and I were trying to prove who was the best power forward in the world so we were going at each other every day.
The practices were just damn war. Obviously, we’ve all got egos, and we’re all competitive, so that made it as intense as it could possibly be. And Chuck Daly just sat back and said, “Wow!” It was just phenomenal. Chuck had two complete units. There were twelve on the roster, so one guy each day just had to check his ego, plus Christian Laettner, but we didn’t give a shit about his playing time because he was the one college player on the team. People have to remember how successful a career Christian had at Duke. It had to be difficult for any college player, even one who had won two NCAA championships, to come in and try to play with that group. We rode him a little bit, but it was good, harmless posturing. I like Christian because he handled it so well. Some people go back and forth about who should have had that last spot on the team. I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s like the All-Star Game and being voted MVP. A lot of guys have All-Star-caliber seasons, but don’t make the team. Shaq, like Michael Jordan used to be, is always the MVP, but doesn’t always get voted the award. A lot of people say Isiah Thomas should have been on the Dream Team. But the one NBA player who never got the credit I think he deserves was Dominique Wilkins. It’s very much like the naming of the Fifty Greatest NBA Players. I thought that Connie Hawkins should have made it. I thought Bob McAdoo should have made it. I thought Joe Dumars could have made it. Somebody is going to be left out and there are going to be hard feelings. But once that group was together we enjoyed each other and the experience, and we also realized the historical significance.
I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It Page 12