I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It by Charles Barkley Read Free Book Online Page A

when the Phillies were in a similar situation. Those guys might make observations about their team that were really similar to what I said about my team. But the stories would say that Dykstra or Daulton was right, the team had to go out and get better players to get in position to win a championship.
    What we were saying wasn’t any different. In each case a leader on the team was making an assessment of what was necessary to win a championship. But I’d pick up the paper and say, “Damn, the spin on this makes it look totally different, when in reality we were pretty much saying the same thing about our teams.” And after a while I had to say to myself, “Damn, there’s going to be a double standard for me. This apparently is the way it’s going to be all the time, that two guys—one white and one black—can make pretty much the same observation, but it’s going to be perceived differently. They perceive that the white player is a team guy only concerned with team goals when he speaks up about what the team needs, but they perceive that the black player when he speaks up about the team’s needs is a malcontent.
    It’s very subtle, and sometimes done in a very sophisticated way. I felt like, “Okay, I’m dealing with a much more sophisticated bigot here. No matter what I say, especially about complex issues, I’m going to be wrong, according to them.” You feel that you’re saying one thing, but they’re hearing another. It’s really frustrating, and it was a learning process, that’s for sure. At first I said, “Okay, I can’t say what I want to say because they’ll rip me apart.” I was going to deal with it that way. But, number one, that would have been taking the easy way out. And number two, once I realized most of the mainstream press was going to kill me either way, I adopted the philosophy that I’m just going to do it my way and they’ll like me or dislike me based on my doing it the way I want to do it. I wanted to please everybody in the beginning and I couldn’t. It doesn’t work that way because you’re going to get slammed. So I drew a line, decided to always tell the truth, be straightforward and say exactly what was on my mind, and damn the consequences.
    Moses Malone’s influence helped me figure out what was right for me, too. Moses is eight years older than me, and he was the first guy to come straight to the pros out of high school and have a Hall of Fame career. I really hated it when the Sixers traded him on draft day in 1986. He and Doc had led the team to a championship in 1983 over the Lakers, and Moses had been through it all, seen it all, understood what was needed to survive in the league and keep your sanity intact. He said, “Look, these folks aren’t your friends in most cases. So stop trying to please everybody because you can’t do it anyway.” He and Doc were so different in a lot of ways, which was a great benefit to me because I could get great advice from two guys who sometimes saw the world differently. Doc wanted to please everybody. Doc is just one helluva nice man, and he had built a great life in Philly and had a near-perfect image, and I’m not about to say that’s a bad thing. But Moses had the attitude of “To hell with y’all.” And in the end, when they tried to trade Doc and they did trade Moses, it was obvious that no matter what you did and no matter how great a player you are, in the long run you’re still just a piece of meat to them. It’s a realization that you have to come to, that it’s a hard business and people can make it harder with their own prejudices even if they don’t know they’re doing it. And here I was, a little kid from small-town Alabama, naive. I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me and around me.
    The real turning point for me was when I just got killed with criticism for answering a question on my own radio show. We were in camp—I think it was preceding the 1991–92 season—and we had one cut