HOT CORNER

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, heard, observed, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed.

*

What: “I May Be Wrong, but I Doubt It”

Author: Charles Barkley (edited by Michael Wilbon)

Publisher: Random House

Price: $22.95

If you like Charles Barkley, you’ll like this book. If you don’t like him and read this book, you’ll probably change your opinion of him. Besides being outspoken, Barkley, an 11-time NBA All-Star who now appears regularly on TNT, comes across as genuine and someone who handles his celebrity status well.

Washington Post sports columnist Michael Wilbon edited Barkley’s words so the book reads smoothly. Wilbon also wrote the introduction.

One story Wilbon passes along is about Barkley’s changing a stranger’s tire, then driving him home and waiting until the man’s children came home from school so they would believe it was really Charles Barkley who changed their daddy’s tire.

Then there is the other side of Barkley, the person who said he wasn’t a role model, who has been arrested several times for public altercations, who spat at a heckler in Philadelphia, missed and hit a 14-year-old girl. Barkley addresses all of these things. He explains his “I’m not a role model” Nike commercial. He points out that he never started the public altercations and that he has always been acquitted. But he does admit he was at fault for the spitting incident. He calls it “the turning point of my adult life.” He ended up becoming friends with the girl, Lauren Rose, and her parents.

In the final chapter, Barkley, who turns 40 Thursday, says that in retirement he wants to help people, that he wants to fight poverty, illiteracy and racism.

“If the playing is all you’re going to do, you’ve missed the boat,” he writes, adding, “I may be wrong, but I doubt it.”

-- Larry Stewart