Barkley grew even bolder, more in-your-face. He'd inherited leadership of the 76ers from the courtly Erving, and distanced himself from what he saw as just so much kiss-ass demeanor. He began conferring with Jesse Jackson and labeled himself a "'90s nigga -- we do what we want to do." Visits to the Philadelphia locker room were the stuff of great theater, as Barkley continued to castigate the 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. "Y'all don't want me talking about this stuff, but I'm going to voice my opinions. Me getting 20 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 told the press to "kiss my black ass -- even though your lips might stink." He vowed, "I'm a strong black man -- I don't have to be what you want me to be," echoing an Ali line from the '60s after he read Thomas Hauser's oral history of the boxing great. 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."

By 1992, Barkley was the NBA's second-best player, behind Jordan, but he'd grown frustrated with Philadelphia's management for surrounding him with a rotating cast of mediocre players. Management, in turn, had tired of Barkley's outspokenness. He was traded to the Phoenix Suns, and the night before he went West, my phone rang. It was Charles, calling to thank me for leaving for him a copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," about whom we'd been talking. He sounded pensive, even glum. "I'm just driving around, thinking," he said. "This has been home for eight years. I don't know what to expect somewhere else." His voice, barely a whisper, made him sound vulnerable. Oh yeah, I remember thinking, he's still in his 20s.

It was further proof that, for all his loudmouth faults, Barkley often exhibited a greater potential for growth than any other athlete on the public scene. He was always answering questions, questioning answers and -- often -- lapsing into introspection.

Such iconoclasm was on display in 1988, when he told his mother he was considering voting for George Bush. "But, Charles, Bush is only for the rich," she said. "Mom, I am the rich," he replied. Or, three years later, when his friend Magic Johnson tested HIV positive and other players, like Malone, were calling for uniform testing in the NBA. Barkley simply stated: "I'm disappointed in myself that I haven't felt the same compassion for other people stricken with AIDS that I now feel for Magic."

In Phoenix, Barkley became a superstar. He was the league's MVP and took his Suns to the NBA Finals in 1993, where they lost to Jordan's Chicago Bulls in six hotly contested games -- arguably the toughest challenge to Jordan's dominance in six championship seasons. On court, basketball fans finally saw that Barkley was the consummate team player; his five assists per game, often on eye-popping behind-the-back passes while double-teamed, gave lie to the conventional wisdom that permeated his last years in Philadelphia: that he was a talented player who couldn't make his teammates better.

Off the court, Barkley continued to evolve. He entered a Republican makeover phase. His worldview began to mature; he became more focused on class and less virulent on race. He also grew close to Rush Limbaugh and Dan Quayle (a frequent golf partner), dined with Clarence Thomas and endorsed Steve Forbes in the presidential primary. Though exit polls showed that his imprimatur sealed Forbes' primary win in Arizona in 1996, Barkley didn't necessarily sign on to any particular ideology.

He's become impossible to pigeonhole. He regularly lambastes liberalism, to the proud applause of Limbaugh and Quayle; two years ago, he told me, "Welfare gave the black man an inferiority complex. They gave us some fish instead of teaching us how to fish." In the next breath, though, he's liable to skewer 1994's Republican revolution as "mean-spirited" and denounce Pat Buchanan as a "neo-Nazi." A junkie of CNN's political gabfest "Crossfire," Barkley became convinced, after reading Jonathan Kozol's "Savage Inequalities," that the way we fund public schools -- through local property taxes -- is designed to produce good schools in good neighborhoods and run-down schools in run-down areas. "My daughter goes to a private school because I can afford it," he once told me, giving voice to his natural inclination toward populism. "But shouldn't everyone have great education available to them?"

He may read about failing schools, but Barkley hasn't exactly become a nerdy policy wonk. Throughout his time on the public stage, he's reveled in his fame, as when he had a brief, much-publicized tryst with Madonna, prior to a reconciliation with his wife. Then, as now, he insisted on livin' large: "We ain't here for a long time, we here to have a good time," he often says.

Indeed, while Jordan became a reclusive prisoner to his iconic status, Barkley lived to be out among the masses, and his nightclub hopping led to more than one mano a mano face-off with loudmouth fans. "Let there be no conflict in America," Barkley said in 1997, after he tossed an obnoxious heckler through a plate-glass window in an Orlando, Fla., bar. "If you bother me, I whup yo' ass." His career has been dotted with such run-ins; they are the collateral damage of a personality that, as on the court, simply plows ahead, rarely stopping to consider each and every move.

Barkley never made it back to the Finals. His body had been badly beaten through so many years of being manhandled by bigger players, not to mention the ill effects of his legendary hard-drinking, late nights. When it got out that the Suns were fielding trade offers for him in 1996, he exploded: "The days of cotton picking are over," he told the Phoenix media. "They disrespected me by shopping me around like a piece of meat."

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