Charles Barkley 1963–

Basketball player, sports commentator, author

Charles Barkley, the talented and controversial star of the Phoenix Suns and later the Houston Rockets, was voted the 1992-93 Most Valuable Player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). For years the outspoken, combative Barkley languished in relative obscurity as his former team, the Philadelphia 76ers, failed to advance in NBA playoff competition. But his inclusion on the 1992 United States Olympic Team and his 1992 trade to the Suns provided Barkley with a national audience for both his fabulous basketball talents and his legendary attitude. Eight years later Barkley retired from professional basketball as one of just four NBA stars ever to reach the statistical milestones of twenty thousand points, ten thousand rebounds, and four thousand assists.

At six-foot-five and 250 pounds, Barkley was short and stout by NBA standards, but that did not stop him from becoming one of the premier power forwards in the league. Known in his early years as the “Round Mound of Rebound”—a cunning allusion to both his weight and his ability—Barkley progressed through a decade of professional basketball while appearing to become stronger and more dominant each year. In 1991 New York Times Magazine reporter Jeff Coplon wrote that Barkley had “reached the stage where he can outrun, outjump, outwork, outsmart or outmuscle anyone who lines up against him.” At the same time, “Sir Charles” developed a vast reputation for speaking his piece and exercising his temper both on and off the basketball court. Coplon described Barkley as “a wild child who will say or do whatever crosses his trip-wired mind.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Bill Lyon characterized the volatile player as “a newly cork-popped magnum of champagne [who] spills all over the court, frothing and foaming.”

In an era when sports superstars found it fashionable to shun the media, Barkley was a sound-bite darling. After any game, win or loss, he could be counted upon to offer opinions on just about everything from his performance to his teammates' abilities to current political events. From time to time his comments caused a tempest, but he rarely apologized or reconsidered anything he said. Barkley was adamant on one point: He did not consider himself a role model for youngsters. Political correctness was for government officials, not basketball players, in his opinion. “I believe in expressing what you feel,” he told the New York Times Magazine. “There are people who hide everything inside—and it's guys like that who kill whole families.”

Came From Humble Beginnings

Charles Wade Barkley was born in rural Leeds, Alabama (population under ten thousand), ten miles outside of Birmingham. At birth he weighed just six pounds. He suffered from anemia and required a complete blood transfusion at the tender age of six weeks. Barkley's parents were very young when he was born. They separated and divorced while Charles was still a baby. He was raised by his mother, grandmother, and stepfather. When Barkley was in grade school, his stepfather was killed in an automobile accident.

The emotional and financial setbacks the family faced did nothing to dampen Barkley's childhood ambitions. Coplon wrote: “In the 10th grade, when Barkley stood a chunky 5-10 and failed even to make his high school varsity, he vowed to anyone who'd listen that he was bound for the NBA. He shot baskets by himself into the night, seven nights a week; he jumped back and forth over a 4-foot high chain-link fence, for 15 minutes at a stretch.” Barkley's mother, Charcey Glenn, told the Philadelphia Daily News: “Other kids were getting new cars and nice clothes, but Charles never complained. He'd say, ‘One of these days, mama, I'll buy you everything you want.’ I'd ask him how and he'd say, ‘Basketball.’ Other boys signed on at the cement plant down the road, but Charles said he wasn't gonna do that kind of work. He said he was gonna make it in the NBA, nothing was gonna stop him, and he meant it.”

As a high school junior, Barkley was named a reserve on the varsity team at his high school. Then, during the summer before his senior year, he grew from five-foot-ten to six-foot-four, from 220 pounds to 240 pounds. As a senior, Barkley starred for the Leeds High team, averaging 19.1 points and 17.9 rebounds per game and leading his team to a 26-3 record and the state semifinals. Nevertheless, his only college scholarship offer came from tiny Snead Junior College.

Began Attracting Attention

Heads began to turn during the state high school semifinal, when Barkley scored twenty-six points playing against Alabama's most highly recruited player, Bobby Lee Hurt. An assistant to Auburn University coach Sonny Smith happened to be at the game. The assistant quickly phoned Smith to report his discovery—"a fat guy … who can play like the wind,” Smith was quoted as saying in the Washington Post.

Smith recruited Barkley, who majored in business management at Auburn. With his unusual shape and style, Barkley was an immediate sensation. “People concentrated on how much I weighed, not how well I played,” Barkley remembered in People. “I led the conference in rebounding for three years, but nobody knew it. I was just a fat guy who could play basketball well.” The relationship between Barkley and Smith began amicably enough but became rocky as the budding star rebelled against the coach's strict discipline. When Smith scolded, Barkley pointed to the bottom line: As a junior he was named Southeastern Conference Player of the Year while helping Auburn to its second-best win-loss record in twenty-five years.

At a Glance …

Born Charles Wade Barkley, February 20, 1963, in Leeds, AL; son of Frank Barkley and Charcey Glenn (a domestic worker); married; wife's name, Maureen; children: Christiana. Education: Attended Auburn University, 1981-84.

Career: Professional basketball player, 1984-2000. Selected fifth in first round of 1984 National Basketball Association (NBA) draft; member of Philadelphia 76ers, 1984-92, Phoenix Suns, 1992-96, and Houston Rockets, 1996-2000; announced retirement from professional basketball, April of 2000. Member of U.S. men's Olympic basketball team, 1992, 1996. Spokesperson for Nike (spots include mock opera segments and one-on-one game with Godzilla); international endorsements include Japanese instant noodles; also lent his image to Claymation figure for public service ad. Commentator for Turner Network Television (TNT) show Inside the NBA, 2000—. Established the Charles Barkley Foundation for philanthropic ventures.

Awards: Recipient of Schick Award, 1986, 1987, and 1988; member of All-Star team, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1992; named to All-NBA first team, 1988, 1989, 1990, and 1991; named 1989-90 player of the year by the Sporting News; named Most Valuable Player of the 1991 All-Star game; Olympic Games, gold medal (with U.S. men's basketball team), 1992, 1996; named NBA Most Valuable Player, 1993; Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, inductee, 2006.

Addresses: Office—c/o Turner Network Television, 1050 Techwood Dr. NW, Atlanta, GA 30318.

In 1984 Barkley was invited to the Olympic trials, where he earned a spot on the preliminary squad before it was cut from twenty to sixteen players. His flashy style and his 360-degree spinning dunks did not entertain Olympic coach Bobby Knight. Barkley was cut before the team left for Los Angeles and the Olympic games. At that point he decided to leave Auburn one year early to turn pro, applying for the NBA's hardship draft.

Signed to the NBA

The 1984 NBA draft was one of the best in years. The first four players picked were Akeem Olajuwon, Sam Bowie, Michael Jordan, and Sam Perkins. The Philadelphia 76ers took the All-American Barkley with the fifth pick. At the news conference announcing the pick, Sixers General Manager Pat Williams joked of Barkley, “He's so fat, his bath tub has stretch marks.” More seriously, Williams told the Los Angeles Times: “We were concerned about his weight and his work habits. He had a reputation for being hard to coach. He should have made the Olympic team, but he couldn't get along with Knight. There were people who said he'd eat himself out of the league. But we went for the bottom line. We asked one question: ‘Can this guy play?’ The unanimous answer was yes. Fine, we'd start with that. The other stuff we could deal with later.”

Barkley joined a fine, competitive 76ers team with a veteran core of Moses Malone, Julius Erving, and Maurice Cheeks. He was thrilled at the opportunity to play with such renowned superstars. Their talents deflected pressure and publicity from Barkley's first season, when he averaged 14 points and 8.6 rebounds in part-time play and exasperated coaches and teammates with his aggressive on-court antics. Within months of his arrival Barkley was feuding with 76ers coach Billy Cunningham and alienating all but Philadelphia's fans with his nonstop commentary during and after games. Even then Sir Charles firmly asserted his right to be himself. “I don't have to please the public to win, I just have to do my job,” he said in the Philadelphia Daily News. “Like [Larry] Bird. He's the most obnoxious man I ever played against. I never saw a player so cocky, but he backs it up. I can respect that. Even the fans who get on me, I think, respect me as a player. If they don't … well, you know, some people are just ignorant.”

Barkley's insistence on freedom of expression soon marked him for controversy. As the 76ers slid toward mediocrity in the late 1980s, he made headlines for lashing out against his teammates. In 1987 he called the Sixers “a bad team that has to play perfect to win.” Enraged management fined him $3,000 for the remark. He was also fined—for a slightly more substantial amount—after he spit on a young fan during a game. On that occasion, Barkley had been heckled from the stands by opposing fans until he retaliated by spitting in their direction. He missed the hecklers and hit a girl, to whom he later apologized. Barkley answered his critics in the Sporting News: “If I play with emotion I'm a hotdog. That's okay, because I know if I don't play with emotion, I won't play anywhere near my ability. If I play nonchalantly, I can't play right. Am I not supposed to play with emotion?”

That “emotion” enabled Barkley to evolve into a power forward who could muscle past much taller opponents, a player who remained among the league's top rebounders through several seasons. Even the declining fortunes of the 76ers did not mask Barkley's stunning ability to dominate games. He was determined to play his very best, both for his team and for himself. Esquire correspondent Mike Lupica wrote: “There will always be a lot of mouth to Charles Barkley. But there is also a lot of talent, the kind of talent only a handful of players will ever have.”

Stirred Controversy at Olympics

In 1992 Barkley was given a second opportunity to represent America at the Olympic Games. He was a member of the first U.S. Olympic men's basketball team that featured professional players. The so-called “Dream Team,” composed of the NBA's top stars, was the premier attraction in the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, and as usual Barkley drew the lion's share of publicity. As Jack McCallum noted in Sports Illustrated, Barkley was “the only member of the Dream Team to have elbowed an Angolan, drawn a technical [foul] for talking to the crowd, received gentle yet unmistakable rebukes from his teammates, been called on the carpet by the [U.S. Olympic Committee] and gotten alternately cheered and jeered in the pregame introductions.” McCallum added: “Barkley has earned a difficult and quite curious double distinction in Barcelona. He has become, at once, America's greatest Olympic ambassador and its greatest potential nightmare, a man who can turn a grimace into a smile—or vice versa—in an instant.” Barkley was a scoring leader for a Dream Team that easily captured the Olympic gold medal.

The controversy continued in Philadelphia when Barkley returned to his pro game. He was unhappy with the lackluster 76ers and was anxious to be traded to a team that might qualify for high-level playoff action. At the same time, the 76ers front office had grown wary of the volatile superstar, whose statements were beginning to have embarrassing repercussions for the entire team.

The Sixers might not have advanced far in post-season play in the NBA in the 1990s, but most Americans recognized Charles Barkley. He drew the wrath of feminists by describing one particular game as the kind that “if you lose, you go home and beat your wife and kids.” Statements like that—as well as his outspoken views on racism in sports, front office management, and his own worth—assured Barkley plenty of ink in the nation's newspapers.

Signed With Suns

At the end of the 1991-92 basketball season, Barkley was traded to the Phoenix Suns. Nearing the end of his own career, he was overjoyed to find himself on a talented squad with real championship potential. Asked what he planned to contribute to the Suns, Barkley gave his characteristic blunt answer in Sports Illustrated: “I'm not as good as I was … but nobody is as good at 30 as they were at 27. I mean, I'm the only guy I know who could be top 10 in scoring, top 10 in rebounding and top 10 in field goal percentage and have a bad year.”

Barkley meshed well with his new team and earned his first Most Valuable Player citation for the 1992-93 season. McCallum suggested in Sports Illustrated that Barkley won the MVP award not only because of his considerable talent and his stellar 1993 performance, but also because of the impact he had on the Suns as a team. Barkley proved to be the pivotal player Phoenix needed to advance to the NBA championships. He helped to motivate the other players, and he himself performed like a man with something important to prove. According to McCallum, Barkley took “a successful team and made it a championship contender.”

But even as the Suns made their push to the finals in 1993, Barkley was suggesting that he was ready to retire. “I feel the end coming,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I've had enough limelight, and I've got enough money.” No one seemed to take Barkley's threats very seriously. Suns coach Paul Westphal said in 1993 that he hoped Barkley would play at least until 1996 and perhaps longer.

Fought for NBA Title

The Suns faced the Chicago Bulls in the 1993 NBA playoff finals, with the spotlight on Barkley and his friend and opponent, Michael Jordan—the “bad boy” of the Bulls who is generally considered to be the greatest player in basketball. The Bulls won the first two games of seven and seemed intent on sweeping the championships, but, largely through the efforts of Barkley, the Suns managed to pull off two victories before losing the NBA title to Chicago in game six. The loss, which gave the Bulls their third championship title in a row, was hard for Barkley to take. “It's just really difficult, you just hurt,” he was quoted as saying in an Associated Press report.

Even without the NBA title, though, the Most Valuable Player award served as a high point of Charles Barkley's unusual career. Lambasted for his weight, criticized for his brash statements, feared on court for his aggressive play, and heckled just about everywhere, Barkley emerged as the one thing he never wanted to be: a role model for the rugged individualists of the 1990s. “The majority of people in the world don't do what it takes to win,” Barkley told the New York Times Magazine. “Everyone is looking for the easy road…. I made up my mind a long time ago to be successful at whatever I did. If you want to be successful, can't nobody stop you.”

Barkley helped lead the Olympic “Dream Team” to another gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, which also gave him the chance to meet one of his idols, boxing great Muhammad Ali. That same year, the Suns traded him to the Houston Rockets, but his last years in pro ball were plagued by injuries. He played his final game on April 19, 2000. He retired as one of just four NBA athletes ever to achieve career stats of twenty thousand points, ten thousand rebounds, and four thousand assists, along with Karl Malone, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Wilt Chamberlain.

Found Success After Playing

Barkley's post-NBA career renaissance began when he signed with Turner Network Television (TNT) to cohost its Thursday-night NBA-game show, Inside the NBA. Then, as a follow-up to his 1991 top-selling autobiography, Outrageous! The Fine Life and Flagrant Good Times of Basketball's Irresistible Force, he published another successful memoir, I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It. In 2005 his third book appeared, departing from the memoir genre and instead featuring Barkley's interviews with notable figures from the world of sports, politics, business, and entertainment. The thirteen chapters in Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man? featured his discussions on racism with interviewees ranging from U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and former U.S. President Bill Clinton to rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube and golf pro Tiger Woods, a close friend of Barkley's.

Barkley remains an iconoclastic figure, consistently dubbed one of the most interesting figures in sports entertainment for his comments on Inside the NBA, and he is candid about his personal flaws, including a love of gambling. He once estimated he has lost at least $10 million in the pastime, including more than $2 million in one six-hour blackjack marathon. Yet the former NBA All-Star has also donated heavily to schools back in his hometown of Leeds and other education-related causes through his philanthropic venture, the Charles Barkley Foundation.

Over the course of his long career in the limelight, he has occasionally mentioned a future career in politics, possibly even a run for the governor's office in Alabama. In 2006 he admitted to be looking for a home in the state in order to meet the required seven-year residency period, which would make his earliest campaign the 2014 gubernatorial race. He once dallied with Republican Party politics but has asserted that he feels both the GOP and the Democrats have proved a disappointment, and that if he ran for office he would do so as an independent. “We need influential black leaders,” he said in a 2002 interview with McCallum in Sports Illustrated. “That's what I want to be. I've been given a special gift, and it's not just to have 50 million dollars in the bank when I die. I want to do something else, make a difference.”

Selected writings

(With Roy Johnson Jr.) Outrageous! The Fine Life and Flagrant Good Times of Basketball's Irresistible Force (autobiography), Simon & Schuster, 1991.

(With Michael Wilbon) I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It: Some Things I've Learned So Far (autobiography), Random House, 2002.

(With Michael Wilbon) Who's Afraid of a Large Black Man?, Penguin, 2005.

Sources

Books

Barkley, Charles, and Roy Johnson Jr., Outrageous! The Fine Life and Flagrant Good Times of Basketball's Irresistible Force (autobiography), 1991.

(With Michael Wilbon) I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It: Some Things I've Learned So Far (autobiography), Random House, 2002.

Periodicals

Associated Press reports, June 19, 1993; June 20, 1993; June 21, 1993.

Boston Globe, November 9, 1984.

Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1987; February 1, 1988.

Esquire, March 1992.

Hartford Courant, December 22, 1987.

Jet, May 25, 1987.

Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1985; February 22, 1987; January 10, 1988; January 17, 1988.

Newsweek, May 24, 1993, pp. 64-65.

New York Times, April 24, 1984.

New York Times Magazine, March 17, 1991, p. 26.

People, April 27, 1987, p. 76.

Philadelphia Daily News, May 13, 1986; May 14, 1986; May 15, 1986; December 22, 1987.

Philadelphia Inquirer, June 20, 1984; April 28, 1985; April 18, 1986; May 1, 1986; February 1, 1987.

Sporting News, January 18, 1988.

Sports Illustrated, March 12,1984; March 24, 1986, p. 32; January 11, 1988; August 10, 1992; November 9, 1992, cover story; March 8, 1993, pp. 25-27; April 12, 1993, p. 83; May 3, 1993, pp. 78-89; June 7, 1993, pp. 16-17; June 14, 1993, p. 84; March 11, 2002, p. 32.

Time, June 14, 1993, p. 68.

Washington Post, April 23, 1984; February 2, 1987.

—Glen Macnow, Mark Kram, and Carol Brennan