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.
I never had any sense, though, that we were doing without. There were no luxuries, but we had everything we needed. The holidays were cool because the three of us knew our mother and grandmother were going to find a way to get you one really nice thing you really wanted. Now my daughter gets ten things. She gets stuff from people who aren’t her family. Kids now get a roomful of things, and you have to wonder how appreciative they are because there’s no sense on their part that these things were difficult to come by, that somebody had to sacrifice to get them.
My original professional goal was to make $10 million, play in the NBA for ten years, be set for life, and make life better for my mother and grandmother. Remember, when I was coming out of college I had led the SEC in rebounding, but I had only averaged 12 or 13 points a game over the three years I was at Auburn. As hard as they worked, my mother and grandmother saw every game I played in high school and I think they saw every game I played in college, which meant a great deal to me. They’d drive two hours to Auburn to make every game. Even in the NBA, they’d come to about five games a year. My grandmother actually thinks she’s a coach. Kids won’t tell you they like that or they care about it. In fact, I’ve never told them to this day. But I appreciated it. It meant more to me than I can probably ever explain to them.
I bought my mom a car, though I don’t remember what kind. I bought it before I had even signed a deal with the 76ers. I bought my grandmother a car, I think it was a Lincoln Town Car. I think they’ve been through about four cars apiece since then. After the first one I bought my mother, she came to my room three times that night crying. I bought them both houses, and bought my brothers houses beside them.
The one thing I would change is that they still look at me as “Little Charles.” It gets to be a problem when people—even your mother and grandmother—don’t want to treat you as the person you are, but as the person they remember. But I’m grateful they’ve been there every step of the way and that they worked so hard and sacrificed so much.
“You’re Always Saying
Stuff That Inflames
People”
Fighting prejudice is hard. Sometimes I just sit and try to figure out how it came to be in the first place. I don’t have the solution to the problem of racism, because it appears to be a problem in every culture on the damn earth. But I do know where we have to start: by talking about our prejudiced and racist feelings. That’s got to be the first step.
The hardest but most important thing is to get a dialogue going on racial issues. I think people want to do better, I really do. I just think they’re afraid. They don’t know exactly what to do. Nobody wants to make the first move. Guys figure they might get ostracized by their boys if they open up and talk about this stuff. I just try to create conversation because that’s where I think we have to start. . . . People rarely talk about race until something tragic or ugly happens.
Once you have some violent situation, where a black person kills a white person, or a white person kills a black person, neither side can talk sensibly or rationally because everybody’s already angry. You can’t talk about it then; it’s too late. When I get together with my white friends, Jewish or Asian friends, I bring up race when we’re doing nothing more than sitting around drinking or sitting around having dinner. That’s a good time for people to talk and see where everybody’s coming from because it’s not a conversation that’s a reaction to something ugly.
But even then I get both white and black friends saying to me, “Charles, you’re always saying stuff that inflames people.” And I say, “Wait a minute. Why do you look at it as if I’m inflaming anybody?” They say, “Can’t you do it in a nicer way?” And I say, “It’s never worked in the last two hundred years with anybody approaching it in a nice way.” There isn’t anything nice about prejudice, is there? It’s a catch-22. It isn’t a nice subject, but if you address it you’re inflaming folks. There’s no comfortable or easy way to get at it. Because if you accuse somebody of prejudice, you are saying they don’t like somebody because of race or color. It’s some serious shit.
People are so afraid to talk about it, they can’t even get to the real issues, the difficult stuff that
should
make us uncomfortable. We can’t get past worrying about disagreement, so we don’t have enough meaningful conversations to make a difference. Damn, to me there’s a lot worse than disagreeing with each other. What’s worse, people hating and acting on that hate, or disagreeing?
Growing up in Alabama, race was always an issue. It’s just different growing up black in Alabama. I noticed it, I felt it pretty much all the time. It wasn’t something that people just put in a drawer somewhere. It was always out there, if not right up there on the surface, then just below the surface. You think I’m exaggerating? We had a black homecoming queen and a white homecoming queen. At the time, I’m not sure I even noticed or knew the significance of it. And this ain’t ancient history. I graduated from high school in 1981. It’s just the way it was at the time. But I never felt at peace with it until I went to Auburn. Once I was in a place with all kinds of different people and playing on teams with black kids and white kids and making friends with people different from myself, I looked back on where I came from and it was amazing to me.
I’ve told people that I found an environment with a lot less racial tension when I got to Auburn, and people have said to me, “Well, it was that way because you were a star athlete and you were treated differently.” That could be true, but for whatever reason I was comfortable there. Out of 22,000 students, which is about the number Auburn had at the time, only a tiny percentage was black. But I felt good there, befriended people, had people of different races befriend me.
It was then that I realized that whites and blacks could not just coexist but get along and live comfortably together. Some people may not think that’s much of a revelation, but growing up in Alabama you just always felt a certain racial tension. And I never had anything overtly bad happen to me, but there was just tension all the time. I felt it throughout high school, people not knowing how to act around somebody of a different race, people not knowing what to say, being afraid. Maybe it was because people didn’t talk enough, didn’t have any real conversation about what they were feeling or about what these differences really meant . . . if they meant anything at all.
How can you know each other when, in most places in Alabama—and definitely my hometown—blacks live on one side of town and whites live on another? We’re talking separate lives. One of my best friends in high school, Joseph Mock, is white. When I think back on it, we didn’t know anything about race early on. Kids don’t know. And that’s the thing about racism and prejudice that is really sick. As kids, we didn’t know. We just hung out. My mother and my grandmother didn’t allow any of that garbage. They told me, “Hey, boy, all white people are not bad.” Between my mother, my grandmother and having Joseph as a close friend, I never bought into any of that hatred. Funny thing is, it’s pretty obvious when two friends are of different races that they aren’t natural enemies, even though we grew up in the midst of all that tension. We had to be taught that BS at some point. Put a little black kid and a little white kid in a room and all they’re going to do, before their minds are polluted with a bunch of BS, is play with each other. That’s all that’s going to happen whether those two little kids are put in a room in Alabama or New York or wherever.
And to me, that’s the proof of just how unnatural prejudice and racism are. It ain’t something natural; you have to be taught it. How sick is that? You go from being naive as hell to having all this tension by the time you’re a teenager. It’s learned behavior, it ain’t something you’re born with. It just makes me sad, that ultimately people teach young people to dislike other people because of the color of their skin. And we do this generation after generation after generation. A lot of people reject that shit and they befriend who they want to and associate with who they want to and date who they want to. But everybody ain’t that strong, to break away from the stuff they’ve been taught.
A whole lot of kids are brainwashed and get fanatical with the stuff they get from adults. You’ve got all these militia groups talking about being mad at the government. About what? Man, if black people aren’t mad at the government for our condition, then who has the right to be mad at the government? What, these militia guys aren’t getting a fair shake?
I don’t want to make it sound like it’s simple, because I know it’s complex. Economics is involved. Poor white people and poor black people have been pitted against each other, even though they have more in common than not. A lot of rich white people will treat you fine, invite you to play golf, pay hardly any attention to race—either it’s that or they don’t want you to know how much they notice. But you go out to a bar with a redneck and he’ll call you “nigger” in a minute, and mean it. I go to a bar in a redneck area down near where I’m from in Alabama and you can feel what I call “nigga-tension.” Poor white people do that. To me, that’s some seriously misdirected anger, because poor white people and poor black people just don’t know how much they have in common. Rich people don’t give a damn about either group.
But I’m not about to sit here and tell you I only experienced prejudice and racism in the south, although it did seem more in the open. I left Auburn after three years there and was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers in June of 1984. Trust me, I’ve had plenty of episodes as an adult in northern cities. I got pulled over when I was behind the wheel of a Porsche in Philly once for what we call DWB—Driving While Black. People ask me all the time about growing up in Alabama, and no question there was racial tension all the time, but in certain parts of Philly sometimes you feel like you’re being subjected to the Klan without the sheets. It’s prejudice that’s expressed in more subtle ways. You don’t get hit over the head with it in the same way. And you don’t find as many situations where people come right out and say what’s really on their minds. For example, I thought much of the news media in Philly exhibited characteristics of racism.
I would be asked a question after a loss or in the middle of a bad stretch about the 76ers’ chances of seriously contending that year or making a run in the playoffs. And I would say, “Our team isn’t good enough,” or “We’ve got to get better in certain areas if we’re going to compete at the championship level.” I guess I could have tiptoed around it and given some vanilla answer, but that’s not me. And besides, I was asked a question and I was assessing the situation as I saw it. The headlines the next day would say, “BARKLEY BLASTS TEAMMATES!” But I’d read similar comments from Lenny Dykstra or Darren Daulton when the Phillies were in a similar situation. Those guys might make observations about their team that were really similar to what I said about my team. But the stories would say that Dykstra or Daulton was right, the team had to go out and get better players to get in position to win a championship.
What we were saying wasn’t any different. In each case a leader on the team was making an assessment of what was necessary to win a championship. But I’d pick up the paper and say, “Damn, the spin on this makes it look totally different, when in reality we were pretty much saying the same thing about our teams.” And after a while I had to say to myself, “Damn, there’s going to be a double standard for me. This apparently is the way it’s going to be all the time, that two guys—one white and one black—can make pretty much the same observation, but it’s going to be perceived differently. They perceive that the white player is a team guy only concerned with team goals when he speaks up about what the team needs, but they perceive that the black player when he speaks up about the team’s needs is a malcontent.
It’s very subtle, and sometimes done in a very sophisticated way. I felt like, “Okay, I’m dealing with a much more sophisticated bigot here. No matter what I say, especially about complex issues, I’m going to be wrong, according to them.” You feel that you’re saying one thing, but they’re hearing another. It’s really frustrating, and it was a learning process, that’s for sure. At first I said, “Okay, I can’t say what I want to say because they’ll rip me apart.” I was going to deal with it that way. But, number one, that would have been taking the easy way out. And number two, once I realized most of the mainstream press was going to kill me either way, I adopted the philosophy that I’m just going to do it my way and they’ll like me or dislike me based on my doing it the way I want to do it. I wanted to please everybody in the beginning and I couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way because you’re going to get slammed. So I drew a line, decided to always tell the truth, be straightforward and say exactly what was on my mind, and damn the consequences.
Moses Malone’s influence helped me figure out what was right for me, too. Moses is eight years older than me, and he was the first guy to come straight to the pros out of high school and have a Hall of Fame career. I really hated it when the Sixers traded him on draft day in 1986. He and Doc had led the team to a championship in 1983 over the Lakers, and Moses had been through it all, seen it all, understood what was needed to survive in the league and keep your sanity intact. He said, “Look, these folks aren’t your friends in most cases. So stop trying to please everybody because you can’t do it anyway.” He and Doc were so different in a lot of ways, which was a great benefit to me because I could get great advice from two guys who sometimes saw the world differently. Doc wanted to please everybody. Doc is just one helluva nice man, and he had built a great life in Philly and had a near-perfect image, and I’m not about to say that’s a bad thing. But Moses had the attitude of “To hell with y’all.” And in the end, when they tried to trade Doc and they did trade Moses, it was obvious that no matter what you did and no matter how great a player you are, in the long run you’re still just a piece of meat to them. It’s a realization that you have to come to, that it’s a hard business and people can make it harder with their own prejudices even if they don’t know they’re doing it. And here I was, a little kid from small-town Alabama, naive. I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me and around me.
The real turning point for me was when I just got killed with criticism for answering a question on my own radio show. We were in camp—I think it was preceding the 1991–92 season—and we had one cut left to make before the start of the season, and it was coming down to Rickey Green, who is black, or Dave Hoppen, a white guy. And somebody asked me while we were on the air live who I thought the team was going to cut. I said I don’t know who the guys who make that decision will keep. But some people might be offended by an all-black team.
I woke up the next day, and people were saying, “Charles Barkley said the 76ers will keep Hoppen because he’s white.” And that, of course, is not what I said. I still think some people would be offended by an all-black team today. I was asked a question, and just stated my opinion. You mean to tell me people think there haven’t been times when white guys were kept as the eleventh or twelfth man so that it wouldn’t be an all-black team? I remember when the Knicks had that all-black team and people called ’em “the Niggerbockers.” I remember how people around basketball, black guys and white guys, would joke about playing two brothers at home, three on the road, and four or five when you’re trailing in the fourth quarter.
You think there wasn’t some truth to that for some franchises at some points in time? I’m not saying it was that blatant in 1991, but don’t tell me race played no factor at all in decisions like that. It reminds me of a conversation I had not too long ago with Warren Moon. He told me one day that people think race is no longer a factor in being an NFL quarterback. And while it’s a helluva lot better with a lot of coaches starting black quarterbacks now, Warren pointed out that there aren’t any third-string black quarterbacks. And that’s a fascinating observation. You’ve got to be good enough to start, pretty much, to be black and play quarterback in the NFL. There are only a couple of second-string guys, but if you look at it they were all starters very recently and could be starters again. Now, tell me it’s just a coincidence that there are no third-string black quarterbacks in the league? Twelfth man . . . third-string. Don’t tell me this is so far-fetched, because it isn’t.