I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It by Charles Barkley Page A

balance are kicking your ass.
    I don’t want to hear anybody say, “Charles, why do you care since you’re not poor?” I used to be poor. I’ve been rich less than half my life. There are just so many scams out there and this is one of them. I guess scams and double standards are things that I’m very disturbed by. I’ll tell you another double standard, and this is a very sensitive issue to deal with but it needs addressing. People just sit in judgment and decide who gets a pass and who gets hammered.
    Darryl Kile, the Cardinals pitcher who died of heart-related issues this summer in his hotel room at thirty-three years old, was a really good guy by all accounts. I mean, anybody who knew him said he was a really good guy. And it’s tragic when a man with a wife and young children passes away in the prime of his life. It’s just sad whether the guy is a professional athlete or a plumber.
    What I’m wondering about, though, is why it was so glossed over that marijuana was found in Kile’s room when he died. I mean, it was reported, and pretty much just dismissed. It was reported that the marijuana had nothing to do with his death, and there’s no reason to think it did. But man, if that happened to a guy people didn’t like, it would have been a week’s worth of news. If someone judged to be a “bad guy” had died with marijuana in his room, the hammer would have come down on his ass.
    Why is it that Patrick Roy gets arrested for spousal abuse and very little is said about it, but Jason Kidd is involved in the same situation and is just hammered? I mean, I don’t know Patrick Roy and it shouldn’t be important whether I know him. Yes, Patrick Roy’s case involved property and ultimately it was dismissed, but it’s not like nothing happened. So who makes up these rules on who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy? And is that how we want to decide how people are treated publicly? Who decides who gets a pass on this stuff? I just think we’ve got to be really careful about double standards and how they’re applied. Wrong is wrong, and if we’re going to hold people accountable for actions, then let’s be evenhanded about the punishment—even if the person in question is a priest.

The Worst Thing About
Playing Professional
Sports
    The only time professional athletes are ever completely healthy all year, and by that I mean feeling their 100 percent best, is the first day of training camp. After that, it’s sprains and muscle pulls and tissue damage and bruises and dislocations the rest of the season. After the first few years of my career, I was taking injections once every couple of weeks and/or pills every few days. And I wasn’t the only one taking anti-inflammatory agents. Although there’s no proof of what exactly led to Alonzo Mourning’s kidney problems, there’s a whole lot of fear in the basketball community—particularly among players—that anti-inflammatories had something to do with it, that taking them in order to play took a toll on a vital organ. And if that turns out to be true, there are going to be a lot of terrified professional athletes out there, and a whole lot of people needing organ donations because we’ve all done it.
    People who haven’t played professional sports cannot understand the physical demands pro athletes are under, and the amount of discomfort, aches and pains guys endure just to put on the uniform and play. I would never try to diminish guys who played at the semipro level or the college level. But a college basketball player, for example, plays thirty games a year, while a guy in the NBA plays a hundred if his team goes deep into the playoffs. There’s nothing like the physical demands on a pro athlete. Unless you’ve run into Karl Malone’s body or been slammed by Bill Laimbeer, you just can’t have any idea. When I would drive to the basket against the Detroit Pistons in the 1980s when they had the “Bad Boys” I would say to myself, “Just close