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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Charles Wade Barkley was born Feb. 20, 1963, in the small industrial town of Leeds, Ala. His father bolted early on, and Barkley was raised by his mother, Charcey Glenn, who cleaned white people's homes, and his grandmother, Johnnie Mae Edwards, who worked in a meat factory. Later, Barkley would become the first athlete since Ali and Bill Russell to question the predominantly white sports media's insistence on conferring "role model" status upon young black athletes who comport themselves deferentially, and, after arguing that parents and teachers should be role models, he'd always point out his: "My mother and grandmother were two of the hardest working ladies in the world, and they raised me to work hard," he'd say. Barkley was not an athletic prodigy. He was, by all accounts, a shy, fat kid. Yet he always harbored a brash ambition. In 10th grade, pudgy and merely 5-foot-10, he failed to make his high school varsity squad. Still, he insisted to anyone who would listen that he was going to play in the NBA. He shot baskets every night, sometimes all night (if he could escape his grandma's strict, watchful eye) and cultivated his leaping skills by repeatedly jumping back and forth over a 4-foot chain-link fence.
A 6-inch growth spurt his senior year led to a scholarship at Auburn University, where he became known as "Boy Gorge" and "the Round Mound of Rebound." At 6-4 and close to 300 pounds, he'd rumble the length of the floor, dribbling behind his back, while taller, more sculpted opponents ran for cover.
The Barkley who was drafted fifth in the 1984 NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers bears little resemblance to the confident public man who addressed that Houston crowd in April. Joining legends Julius "Dr. J" Erving and Moses Malone, Barkley was awed by them and by the big, Northeastern city itself. Outside of going to practice and games, he rarely left his rented apartment. He even called sportswriters "sir." He was thankful to be where he was, and not so sure he belonged.
"When I got drafted, I knew I had a God-given ability to rebound," Barkley recalls. "But I never averaged more than 14 points a game in college. So I was just hoping I could score 10 points and get 10 rebounds a game for a few years and make some money to take care of my family." Within three years, he was leading the league in rebounding, and scoring more than 20 points per game.
And Barkley was changing in other ways as well. I first got to know him in 1991, when he'd already morphed into sports' preeminent anti-hero, the flip side of Michael Jordan's crossover-era accommodating persona. The rap group Public Enemy had paid homage to Barkley in song ("Throw down like Barkley!" Chuck D wailed on "Bring the Noise"), seeing his in-your-face game and demeanor as the hardwood manifestation of rap. During a game in New Jersey, a courtside heckler, yelling racial epithets, was turned upon by Barkley, who promptly spit upon his tormentor. Only, as he'd later describe, he didn't "get enough foam" behind the loogie, and, lo and behold, he'd mistakenly spat on a little girl.
It was a national story, of course, and Barkley was vilified. For months prior, Barkley had been persuasively arguing that athletes shouldn't be considered role models. "A million guys can dunk a basketball in jail, should they be role models?" he'd ask, offending the sportswriter crowd who, as he saw it, demanded that he know his place and be a "credit to his race." (His argument would prompt national news when he wrote the text for his "I am not a role model" Nike commercial, a carefully worded polemic that none other than Dan Quayle called a "family-values message" for Barkley's oft-ignored call for parents and teachers to quit looking to him to "raise your kids" and instead be role models themselves.) But with what came to be known as "the spitting incident," Barkley had indeed been found guilty of conduct unbecoming a role model.
I was a law-school dropout at the time, a sports fan who was fascinated by Barkley's ballsy media critiques. I wrote a column in a city alternative newspaper, saying that, of course, Barkley ought not to have spat on someone -- but that he was saying some things we should hear, too.
On the day the piece ran, my phone rang; Barkley was calling to thank me and to invite me over to talk about topics nonbasketball. He was distraught about the spitting incident, shattered even, because one constant over the years has been Barkley's affinity for children. He has long been one of the nation's most generous celebrities, often focusing on children's charities, though it's always been done with one caveat: that no publicity attend his good works (a rule he finally broke last year when he gave $3 million to Alabama schools).
Children don't judge with the venom of adults, he'd explain. And it was that venom he was trying to understand then, in the fallout of the spitting incident: "I think the media demands that athletes be role models," he told me, "because there's some jealousy involved. It's as if they say, this is a young black kid playing a game for a living and making all this money, so we're going to make it tough on him. And what they're really doing is telling kids to look up to someone they can't become, because not many people can be like we are. Kids can't be like Michael Jordan."
