The Life of Party Has Left the NBA

“The difference between Charles Barkley and a lot of other great athletes is most athletes are bad guys who want you to think they’re good guys. He’s a good guy who wants people to think he’s a bad guy.”

--Philadelphia 76er Vice President

Dave Coskey

I fell head over heels for Charles Barkley the first time I saw him, a Round, 282-Pound, Mound of Rebound who was having a great time, terrorizing Bobby Knight’s 1984 Olympic tryouts in Bloomington, Ind.

Not that it was easy. In Barkley’s case, love meant always having to say you were sorry, or at least wincing a lot.

He was the best player in the Olympic camp, since Michael Jordan was on cruise control, but Knight cut him anyway, on general principles, although he waited until the press corps left town. Barkley reportedly precipitated it by asking His Highness why he was late for a meeting, insisting later he didn’t care, he had already impressed the pro scouts, which was why he had come.

So we were off, on one of the more memorable NBA careers anyone ever had, with or without championship rings.

There were lots of embarrassments: the child Barkley spat on accidentally when he aimed at a heckler; the man he threw through a plate-glass window on purpose in a bar fight; the Angolan whose skinny chest he elbowed at the ’92 Olympics, after which he claimed, “I thought he had a spear.”

Mostly, however, he was fun, which made him a beloved throwback in the ‘90s when everyone got so rich and started taking themselves so seriously. Barkley had his demons, but he had a sharp wit and a rollicking sense of humor and for 16 seasons, the NBA rollicked with him.

He was fun to the end, limping into his news conference Wednesday night after blowing out his knee in Philadelphia--find me another superstar who attends a news conference hours after suffering a career-ending injury--and announcing:

“Well, guys, I guess sex is definitely out of the question tonight.”

Hundreds of schleppers have championship rings, but the man who just bade us farewell was irreplaceable.

“Charles has made it better for everybody. He’s a great player, an unbelievable player and I don’t think people will recognize that until they start going over the things he accomplished. . . . The only guy I ever compared him to was Wes Unseld . . . an undersized guy who was a phenomenal player. Charles is the same. We may never see another like him.”

--76er Coach Larry Brown

We never saw anything like Barkley before, so it would be an upset to see another.

Unseld was a 6-foot-7, 300-pound sumo wrestler who could hip-check an opposing player into the parking lot. Barkley was 6-4 1/2, he used to note proudly, and trimmed himself down to 255 in his early years.

Like Unseld, Barkley was immensely powerful. Unlike Unseld, or any other mortal with their body type, Barkley could fly. It’s one thing to see a gazelle like Kobe Bryant jump, but when a human safe like Barkley boinged off the floor, jaws dropped.

Barkley could also handle the ball and make plays like a point guard. You hear people saying things now like “He redefined the power forward position,” but like Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, he was beyond positions. He did it all, tearing the ball off the board, dribbling it up, going in for a dunk. (People tended not to try to take charges on him, or as a guard named Steve Colter noted in the ’84 Olympic camp: “That’s a pretty big unit.”)

From the beginning, Barkley had a thing about authority (his father abandoned the family when Barkley was young) but he was also a prankster on a lifelong crusade. I can remember being in the 76ers’ dressing room his rookie year when he was looking at a stat sheet, clamoring to see if he had outrebounded center Moses Malone, knowing Malone hated the competition.

In later years, when he became the team leader, Barkley kidded teammates so hard, some--Mike Gminski for one--seemed to shrivel up in games.

At Barkley’s peak, some people thought he was, heresy of heresies, as good as Jordan, whom he idolized. But Jordan was a better shooter and winning was everything to him. Barkley didn’t have a jump shot when he turned pro, and to him, a game was only a game. Once it was over, there were other places to go and people to see.

Jordan and Barkley became close friends. Jordan once said he thought the same things Barkley did, but only Barkley dared to say them.

Of course, the usual pecking order seemed to hold. Barkley, recently musing about the possibility of buying a team with Jordan, noted Jordan would have to be the boss.

Why?

“Because he’s Michael,” Barkley said.

Barkley loved bringing beat writers along when he went out at night and told them everything that was happening on the team. Not surprisingly, he enjoyed a terrific press, his outrages and diatribes against the press notwithstanding.

(Writers went, or else. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Bob Ford took a night off in Milwaukee once. The next morning, the cabdriver taking him to the airport told him Barkley had been in another fight, the cops had been called, etc.)

“Chuck needs to look at it when he came into the league. He played with Julius Erving and Moses Malone. . . . I can imagine Dr. J and Moses Malone said the same thing about him when he came out of college.”

--Rocket center Kelvin Cato

Charles Barkley, elder statesman?

If you stick around long enough, you’ll see everything and sure enough, at the end, Barkley was complaining about young players’ beepers, cell phones and lack of focus. Somewhere, Malone must have been laughing his head off.

Typically, Barkley played the string out in Houston because he liked it, rather than leave for a better team and a shot at a championship. It was a down-home place and Coach Rudy Tomjanovich ran a loose ship. Before last season, Seattle SuperSonic stars Gary Payton and Vin Baker invited Barkley to Las Vegas for a big recruiting pitch, but Barkley was happy where he was.

When the sportswriters asked, as they do when they can’t think of anything else, if his career would be complete without a ring, Barkley would be incredulous.

What were they, nuts?

He was a poor boy from the dirt streets of Leeds, Ala., who became rich and famous. Not winning a championship was supposed to cancel that out?

“I have nothing but 16 years of great memories,” he said Wednesday night in Philadelphia. “I’ve been all over the world. I’ve met some of the greatest actors. I’ve met some of the greatest athletes. I’ve met presidents. I met Bishop Tutu. I exceeded all my expectations.”

He was the life of the party for 16 years, and even NBA Commissioner David Stern, who fined him so often, will miss him, as will we all.

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Charles Barkley by the Numbers

Charles Barkley career statistics, with category, total and overall rank, if in top 15:

Points: 23,755

Rebounds: 12,545 (15)

Offensive rebounds: 4,259 (5)

Steals: 1,648 (15)

Turnovers: 3,376 (8)

Rebounds per game: 11.7 (15)

Field goal %: .541 (15)

Assists: 4,214

Blocks: 887

Blown-Out Knee

Charles Barkley’s career came to an end Wednesday, when he ruptured the tendon that attaches the thigh to the kneecap in his left leg.