BASKETBALL

Charles Barkley: Terrorist or Teddy Bear?

From "Keepin' It Real: A Turbulent Season at the Crossroads with the NBA" (1999). Reprinted by permission.

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by Larry Platt

Charles Barkley, statesman. It is just the latest incarnation of one of the most singular athletes of our time; for the last thirteen years, the evolution of Charles Barkley has been a riveting work in progress. Like his hero, Muhammad Ali, he is always in a state of becoming, a consummate showman who, despite appearances, is never in the final act.

<i>He is expert at makeover.</i> When he broke into the league in 1985, Barkley was an anomaly, a fat jumping jack in a world of sinewy athletic hardbodies. He was also a shy "country bumpkin" in the words of one who knew him well then, a backwater Alabama kid who rarely ventured out of his Philadelphia apartment, so intimidated was he by the big city.

Within a few years, though, he would grow into the first hip-hop hoopster, serving as a symbolic rejection of crossover, that prevailing ethic for black basketball stars. He had, after all, inherited leadership of a team from Erving, who, toward the end of his illustrious career, was championed by the press and league alike as the game’s "great ambassador," a hardcourt Cosby.

"I grew up listening to Motown – Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, the Supremes," recalls Erving today, now a vice president with the Orlando Magic after an inauspicious stint as a hoops commentator on NBC. "’Crossover’ was an important word to me. It became important to be able to be accepted in all different kinds of neighborhoods. These kids today don’t feel the same."

In fact, Erving, bespectacled and graying now, is critical even of Jordan. "Closing your eyes when you shoot a free throw?" he says. "That’s all about ‘Look at me, look at me.’"

And Jordan is the closest approximation in demeanor to Erving among today’s black stars. Barkley, during his time in Philly, was the antithesis. Where Erving was dutifully apolitical, Barkley was brash and outspoken. In the late ‘80s, he began talking to Jesse Jackson and calling himself a "’90s nigga." Visits to the 76ers’ locker room were the stuff of great theater, as Barkley would regularly castigate the overwhelmingly all-white press and a city still divided by race.

"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 lectured. "Ya’ll don’t want me talking about this stuff, but I’m going to voice my opinions, because this stuff’s important. Me getting twenty rebounds ain’t important. We’ve got people homeless on our streets, and the media is crowding around my locker. It’s ludicrous."

He called Philly a "racist city" and the town’s sports punditocracy shot back in kind, beating him up for taking on issues beyond rebounds and free throws. "I don’t have to be what you want me to be," he told them in 1990, echoing an Ali line from the ‘60s, after he read Thomas Hauser’s oral history of the boxing great. "I’m a strong, black man."

Once he pointed across the locker room at a genteel teammate Hersey Hawkins. "I ain’t no pussy black man like Kersey," he said. Hawkins shook his head – Charles was just being Charles after all – and the press nervously giggled. When I told him I was writing a magazine profile of Erving, he dismissed the legend: "Man, I ain’t got no time to talk about no Uncle Tom," he said.

Next page: Barkley vs. Iverson

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