I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It

by Charles Barkley

  By 1996, when the Summer Olympics were in Atlanta, we had guys bitching about playing time, guys who made life miserable. It was so frustrating. There were two games where I just said to Lenny Wilkens, who was the head coach of that team, “Coach, don’t play me tonight. I don’t want these guys bitching about playing time.” By 1996, you could also see the other countries really coming up. The only real advantage we had now, and it was only four years later, was depth. In 1992 those teams could put three or four quality NBA players out on the floor, but no more than that. And we won those games by an average margin of 44 points in Barcelona. Even the best European teams would have to bring some young upstart who wasn’t ready off the bench. By 1996, they were putting five, sometimes six quality players out there. And the average margin of victory was down to something like 30 points per game. And you could see certain European teams catching up with us in depth and athleticism. And you know we could have, probably should have lost that game to Croatia in 2000 in Sydney. Now, we may not lose a game in the next Olympics in Athens in 2004, but we could lose a game and really struggle in 2008. The only way the teams around the world had any chance of getting better was to play against us in international competition. And they knew that, and they were willing to take their lumps at the beginning.

  In ’92, the games were easy, but there was stress because we didn’t realize when the competition first started that we were that much better than everybody else. We’d never played against those guys before. We knew we had better not lose, so we were on guard. Once the game started, we realized those guys couldn’t beat us, but we still wanted everybody to know Americans were the best in the world at basketball so we gave it everything we had.

  But with all that competitiveness going on, even with guys trying to beat each other’s brains out in practice, for the most part we put it aside at night. Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing became great friends, and we called ’em Larry and Harry. That’s the great thing about sports. You make friendships that people never could have predicted and half the damn time they don’t understand how it happened. Me, Scottie, Michael and Magic played cards every night, all night. We’d start playing cards around eight o’clock, go until five in the morning, get three hours’ sleep and then go to practice. Every day. Every single day. And I’m not talking about just in Barcelona, or even Monte Carlo, but starting back when we started practicing and having those exhibition games all around the country. I can remember the Tournament of the Americas, staying up all night every night.

  One night though, and I’ll never forget this, we had the most uncomfortable moment. But it also tells you how much respect I have for Earvin Johnson. Remember, Earvin had announced he was HIV-positive in November of 1991, which just stunned us all.

  We’re playing cards late one night, watching HBO in whoever’s hotel room it was. And a comedian starts crackin’ on Earvin, saying, “Can you believe that Magic Johnson has the AIDS virus? Man got all that damn money and too cheap to spend $2 to buy a box of condoms.” The guy was pretty funny and you wanted to laugh, but you couldn’t because you’re sitting in the room with the guy he’s cracking on, and he’s your close friend and your teammate, and just the greatest guy in the world. The comedian goes on and on and says more funny stuff. And it’s just so uncomfortable. Finally, Earvin says, “Man, that’s some funny shit, isn’t it? You guys go ahead and laugh.” And we were all like, “Whew!” It’s something that we had never talked about that summer; you can’t bring it up. It’s just so difficult to talk about. But at that moment I thought, “This is going to be uncomfortable sometimes, but it really could be all right.”

  Every Minute of

  Every Day

  Cannot Be Serious

  Not long ago, I was in Australia and somebody for some reason had a tableful of rubies, between $750,000 and $1 million of rubies just sitting on a table. And I said, “Damn, must not be any black folks in Australia. You can’t just leave $1 million worth of jewelry lying around in the ’hood.” And of course, somebody got mad and pretty soon the NAACP was calling me, upset and angry about what I’d said. I told whoever called me, “Man, I’m silly like that sometimes. Every minute of every day cannot be serious because you’d go crazy.” I’ll say to white folks at a party, “Man, there’s nothing in the world that makes me as nervous as seeing white people dance.”

  I’m going to have fun with everybody. Anybody who knows me also knows that nobody is spared. You can never make the case that I’m picking on one group. You’ve got to lighten the mood sometimes, whether we’re talking in the locker room before a big, important game, or whether we’re talking about some real-life issue. Humor should make people feel a little better.

  Shannon Sharpe, the NFL tight end, and I are similar in a lot of ways. We both try to do it with humor. Everybody’s sense of humor isn’t the same, we know that. But if you don’t try to deal with sensitive shit by making it funny, they’re going to call you militant. I’m thinking, “I’m trying to put some stuff out there to get us talking.” But you better make it funny or some people just won’t be able to stand it. It goes down better with a little humor, and people tend to see that even though you’ve got these concerns, you’re still a human being and you can share a laugh.

  Of course, it’s gotten me in trouble. There was the night during a Turner broadcast, at the time when the PETA people were in the process of forcing the NBA and NCAA to use synthetic basketballs instead of leather, that I said that the only thing animals were good for was eating and wearing.

  Another time I said to a white reporter I know, “I hate white folks.” I was talking to a writer I’d known for years and years. And I asked him later if he had taken offense, and I believe he wrote a piece in his newspaper that said he was never offended. He was actually offended that somebody who wasn’t involved in the conversation in the first place had come in and interpreted something without knowing the relationship between me and the reporter. So where’s the context? If you just put that on the air and you don’t know the relationship of the two people, what was being discussed, what the mood was, are you informing the viewer of anything or just inflaming?

  If you know the people involved, can you not tell an off-color joke anymore? Are we that screwed up? The media has us so screwed up right now that we think every sentence that comes out of everybody’s mouth has to be politically correct. That’s bullshit. I tell you what; if the politically correct police ever came into a professional locker room . . . oh my God . . . we could start World War III every day in there. I wish I was on a team right now with a bunch of Catholic guys, with everything that’s gone on recently in the Catholic Church. Damn, I’d be killing them guys, just killing them. And, of course, I know there’s a very serious element to the charges of sexual abuse. The priests guilty of sexually abusing those kids—they’re minors—ought to be put in jail as far as I’m concerned, as I’ve said. It’s a serious story. But don’t tell me that’s going to be off-limits in a locker room, because it isn’t. If I was playing with my man Joe Kleine, who is Catholic, right now, oh, he would never catch a break.

  Thank God for Jerry Springer’s show. I thought only black folks were that screwed up until I watched Jerry Springer. The beauty of that show, of all those daytime shows, is that they show how screwed up everybody is, regardless of race, ethnic background, gender or anything else. If you can sit back and get a good laugh from that stuff . . .

  But one of the reasons I need to be really careful about what I say on television is that I know people are going to believe it and take everything so literally. And you know how I like to joke and have fun and poke fun at certain things or institutions. But somebody sitting out there in South Dakota who has a different sense of humor may say, “That guy is an asshole.” That’s why on the basketball show, I’ll try to stay away from personality a whole lot, especially when I’m being critical. Now, I’m going to take on things I think are wrong or people in big places. But I have to remind myself about how people are go
ing to take things.

  But I still think we need to be able to poke fun at one another. I told somebody not too long ago who is short that little people shouldn’t be riding in first class during flights. Little people should ride in coach. You know if you’re little. I don’t fly first class because I need better meals. I do it because of size. I hate when you walk through first class and you’ve got little two-foot people filling up the first class seats while all the tall people are walking to the back of the plane. It’s about comfort. Those two-foot people can be comfortable in coach. If you’re 6-2 you can’t even get your damn knees inside the seat in front of you. I don’t know how anybody taller than 6-4 can sit in those seats. And the airline executives don’t give a damn ’cause they never walk back there in the first place. I don’t fly first class because I’ve got a lot of money. I do it because I need the room. But sometimes, it’s not available, so I have to sit in coach, next to a person who’s going to talk my ear off and ask me, “How did it feel to play against Michael Jordan?”

  Young Players

  Don’t Get It

  People ask me all the time, if I was coming out ofhigh school today and was a great player, would I even go to college? And the answer is yes, I would go to college.

  Realistically, none of these guys are ready for the NBA the first couple of years they come out, not professionally and not personally. The best-possible-case scenarios were Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady, and it still took them three years to become real NBA players. Jermaine O’Neal is a nice kid and a nice player but he’s not The Man yet, and it took him four years plus, and the team that initially invested all that money and time and tutoring in him didn’t even get to reap the benefits. The Toronto Raptors invested everything in McGrady, and he’s in Orlando now. So what kind of sense did that make from a competitive standpoint? You’re not only counting on that guy panning out, but still being with your team when he pans out.

  Then there are the guys who get drafted out of high school and don’t make it, like Korleone Young and Leon Smith. And they have no eligibility left to start in college, where they should have started in the first place. Guys now just can’t wait to get to the pros, or even spend the time to make themselves really good players, which is really the best way to guarantee you get paid the maximum amount of money.

  It all starts very early now. When I was young, we didn’t have AAU teams. Now, these kids are playing in AAU leagues and they’re in competitive situations all the time. They travel and play on the road. They’ve got adults telling them how great they are all the time. We weren’t getting attention and praise and, in some cases, money from AAU coaches. We didn’t have shoe companies giving us shoes. We didn’t have none of that stuff. So they’re just spoiled rotten from the very beginning. Most of them don’t even know that fifteen years ago NBA teams flew commercial.

  But the problem is very, very complex because most of the kids who do go to college aren’t getting what they’ve been promised. There is no significant graduation rate among Division I college athletes anymore, at least not in men’s basketball. Didn’t I just hear during the 2002 NCAA men’s basketball tournament that something like twenty-four or twenty-five out of the sixty-five schools in the field hadn’t graduated a single player within the last five years? That’s ridiculous. What graduation rate? Not giving money—at least a stipend—to these kids who produce all this revenue is a scam anyway. That’s what I’ve always thought. CBS just paid more than $6 billion for the right to televise the games. Who do we think made the tournament worth that much money? Those kids who play made it worth that much. That’s why the NCAA and the networks, and whoever is involved with putting on these games and making all that money, need to figure out a way to give them at least a stipend.

  Now, the good old boys used to take the position that these kids were getting tuition, room and board and a good education. But if you look at these graduation percentages, low as they are, you can’t even take the position that they’re getting an education anymore. They’re not graduating. They’re not graduating at all, and the ones who don’t make the pros—which is most of them—are screwed. We’re sending a bunch of dummies out into the real world with no education, with no real way to make themselves attractive candidates for employment, and they’re screwed. That’s all they are. The biggest schools seem like they’re graduating about 10 percent of their players, so this whole thing needs to be reevaluated.

  Those kids who go to big schools to play sports but are only reading at fourth- and fifth-grade levels shouldn’t be in Division I colleges in the first place. The recruiters and the admissions people knew every one of their test scores and their GPAs and reading levels before they recruited them. Seriously, how fair is this to the kid? This kid is struggling to make it in high school and he’s going to do college course work and play Division I sports at the same time? And he’s going to do it for nothing, in a lot of cases while his family has zero money? All this because he can help put 100,000 fans in the stands on Saturday afternoon?

  A whole lot of these kids who are turning professional out of high school should go to some form of minor leagues. Every NBA team should have multiple affiliated minor league teams. These kids aren’t ready when they come out of high school, but most of ’em also aren’t interested in going to college. And anybody who tells you these kids get better sitting on the bench in the pros than they do playing in college, they’re lying. You’re not getting better sitting on the bench.

  The reason I want to see the pros make better use of a minor league or this new developmental league the NBA started, or whatever you want to make available, is that it just isn’t fair, it ain’t moral, to just use a kid to make millions of dollars for a school and just turn him loose on the world uneducated with no chance to succeed. If you bring a kid into school you know has little chance to graduate just to help you make money by appearing on television and helping you fill your stands every week, and then say after four years, “See ya!,” well, what the hell is that?

  I know that not every kid who goes to college is interested in an education. A whole lot of ’em are trying to get to the NBA or NFL and that’s their only goal. But the entire big-time college athletic system encourages this stuff.

  My first day at Auburn—and I’m presuming this happens at a whole lot of other schools, too—they asked, “Do you want to stay eligible or do you want to graduate?” Hell, you’re eighteen years old and you don’t want to flunk out of college after one year so you say, “Yeah, I want to be eligible.” I’m just tired of hearing that if you go to these schools you’re getting something, that you’re getting a college education. You’re not getting a college education if the graduation rates are what we’re being told.

  And what makes it really bad is they’re not graduating and they’re not making themselves great basketball players either. But they come into the pros and think they are. Young guys now aren’t nearly as accepting of criticism from coaches as we were. I’m talking about even the mildest criticism. They’re not even receptive to their parents’ criticism. Basic coaching is something they consider criticism. I guess it’s like that for kids of this era no matter what they do. I have friends in the media who tell me the same thing about young reporters. But society has done this. Mainstream society has made every single thing about money. Basketball, football, network TV, it’s all the same. When I look at a show like Fear Factor, what the hell is that but some quickie, gimmicky way to make money? And a network will put that on, which encourages young writers to turn out a piece of junk ’cause they’ll make some money right away, instead of putting on quality programming. That would reinforce the idea of working harder to develop something of higher quality. People don’t want to work to develop skills if they see some quickie, gimmick way to make money. All these reality shows on TV now, that’s all they are about, instant money and instant notoriety and becoming some celebrity wannabe.

  I know I sound like an older guy now just attack
ing young guys, and I know it sounds like jealousy. But damn, we’re right. The older guys are right in this case. In terms of basketball, the game is not the same. It’s entirely money-driven. It was always like that for the owners and networks and sponsors. But it’s become like that for the players, too. The owners have always been greedy, but the players have turned into the same people as the owners, and that’s amazing to me.

  To me, the whole process just screws the fans. You know if you draft a high school player he isn’t going to help your team for three years. Kobe Bryant, great as he is, didn’t help the Lakers until his third year. But that’s not the way drafts are designed in any sport. The purpose of a draft is for the worst teams in that sport to get immediate relief from losing by drafting the best player available. The worst teams draft first for one damn reason: immediate help. What the hell is immediate about waiting three years on a high school guy to develop and mature? When you do that you’re telling your fans publicly, “Hey, we’re getting better. We just need you to keep paying $75 a game for those season tickets for the next three years. We’re going to make money, we’re going to be bad in the meantime, and that’s just the way it is. Just hold on.” What a scam. It’s just not right.