Charles Barkley enjoys gambling. A lot. He had a fairly significant gambling problem for awhile (he says he’s much better about gambling now) and has lost a lot of money in his time, but even he can’t believe how much money Michael Jordan bets on golf.
Barkley went on the Dan Patrick Show on Thursday, and the conversation turned toward playing golf with Jordan. Patrick asked Barkley if he played Jordan for money, which elicited a very funny response from Chuck.
“Oh, I used to play him all the time [for money],” Barkley said. “Why would you play golf if you don’t play it for money?”
Then Barkley explained the ridiculous amount of money that Jordan used to have on the line, while Barkley would be playing for a few hundred bucks.
“I tell you what, I’ve never been under more pressure — and I apologize to Michael for saying this — so we’d be playing golf with certain people, and we’d be playing for a couple hundred dollars a hole, nothing crazy. And he’d be playing some guy for $100,000. And he’s like, ‘Charles, pick that up.’ And I’m like, ‘This putt is for $200.’ He’d be like, ‘Pick that up Charles, get out of my way. You’re in my line.’ I’d say, ‘How much is that putt worth?’ And he’d say, ‘300,000.’ I said, ‘let me get out of your line.’ It was crazy man. They were playing for like hundreds of thousands of dollars, it was crazy.”
Barkley said he never understood why the bet that much money on golf, but did note that $100,000 is nothing to Jordan. Chuck also explained his own gambling issues and what his friends had to tell him to get him to be smarter when he gambles.
“I think, I developed that problem a few years ago,” said Barkley. “When I went to Vegas I won a million dollars. I probably won a million dollars five times, and I probably lost a million 25 times. So I developed this thing where I had to win a million. So I quit gambling for like two years, and I was talking to my close friends and I said, ‘Man, I sure miss gambling.’ And they said, well you should gamble, you just shouldn’t be an idiot.
“My friends have carte blanche to tell me honestly….My friend says, ‘Dude, you’re just an idiot when you gamble. You’ll be up like $600,000 and we’re like, Charles quit let’s go have fun, and you’ll say, naw I need to get to a million. And then you lose that 600 and you lose your credit. So now when I go gamble I just go to have fun.”
It’s good to know that Barkley has learned to gamble without losing millions at a time, but the biggest takeaway from this interview is that you should never try to gamble with Michael Jordan while golfing, because he might bankrupt you.
