Philly Jocks: Where Are They Now?: The Continuing Adventures of Charles Barkley
Valid points, no doubt, but they ignore the larger picture, one we were fortunate enough to see here for eight years. Owing to the string of controversies (remember when he said he’d been misquoted … in his own autobiography?), Philadelphia seemed ready for Barkley to move on by the time he was dealt to Phoenix. In retrospect, however, there’s no doubt that Barkley, for all his flawed impetuousness, showed even then more potential for growth than just about any celeb who has graced our public stage, something The Haney Project: Charles Barkley just might exhibit yet again.
Such three-dimensionality was on display in 1991 when Barkley’s friend Magic announced he’d contracted HIV. While other ballplayers, like Utah’s pickup-driving Karl Malone, said they were afraid to get on the court with Johnson again, it was Barkley who said, “I’m disappointed in myself that I haven’t felt the same compassion for other people stricken with AIDS that I now feel for Magic.”
Through the years, Barkley has insisted on developing a worldview — and broadcasting it. That, too, has evolved. He wrote his own controversial “I am not a role model” Nike commercial, a ballsy media critique that posited, “Parents should be role models. Just because I can dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
Visits to the Sixers locker room in the early ’90s were the stuff of great theater, as Barkley castigated the press and a city he saw as even more divided by race than his hometown of Leeds, Alabama. “Just because you give Charles Barkley a lot of money, it doesn’t mean I’m going to forget about the people in the ghettos and slums,” he said one day, influenced by having just read Thomas Hauser’s oral history of Muhammad Ali. He told the press horde to “kiss my black ass —even though your lips might stink.” (Bob Ford, the then-Inquirer beat writer, deadpanned, “I can’t use that.”) “I’m a strong black man,” Barkley continued, echoing a famous Ali line: “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”
Traded to Phoenix, Barkley became even more of a superstar and entered a Republican makeover phase, playing golf with Dan Quayle, befriending Rush Limbaugh, and emphasizing black self-reliance. “I look at all my old friends in the ’hood, and they’re in the same place they’ve always been,” he said. “On welfare, mostly. All the liberals have done is give the black man an inferiority complex. They gave us a little fish, instead of teaching us how to fish.”
But he was still an independent-minded free thinker. Exit polls showed that his endorsement of conservative Steve Forbes in Arizona’s 1996 presidential primary sealed Forbes’s win, yet two years later, playing for Houston, he blasted the Republican Congress for its witch hunt of President Clinton.
