Philly Jocks: Where Are They Now?: The Continuing Adventures of Charles Barkley
But their angst goes beyond the course. Barkley’s arrest threw everything up in the air. It even led Haney, who’s been clean and sober for more than 20 years, to publicly worry about Barkley’s drinking. One suspects the show will deal with the arrest and Haney’s concerns head-on, in keeping with Barkley’s personality, but no one knows for sure.
That summer night at Chops, in a quiet voice, talking about the show, Barkley confided, “I’ve never failed at anything.” He sounded vulnerable and small, and it made me flash back to a summer night in 1992 when my phone rang. It was Charles, calling to thank me for having left him a copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, about whom we’d been talking — or “intellectually conversatin’,” as he put it. He had recently been traded to Phoenix; the next day, he’d be heading west. He sounded pensive, even glum. “I’m just driving around, thinking,” he said. “This has been home for eight years. I don’t know what to expect somewhere else.”
The normally booming voice had become faint, barely a whisper. Oh yeah, I remember thinking, he’s still just in his 20s. Maybe that shy fat kid who perfected his vertical leap by hurtling a four-foot chain-link fence every day, the one who grew six inches his senior year of high school, the one who came into the NBA just hoping to score 10 points per game, maybe that kid was still in there after all.
So it was that night at Chops. As Charles talked about the issues of his middle age — the fight against the considerable paunch, the need to elect his by-now old friend Obama, the desire to test his limits on the golf course — I couldn’t help but be reminded of what critics like the Times’s Araton miss: that, alone among modern-day celebrities, and in an era of dour-faced, cliché-spouting jocks, here sat a living, breathing, no-holds-barred real human being, someone who, for 25 years, has asked questions, questioned answers, and insisted on engaging the world around him. Foibles and all.
