We’ve gotten to know a lot about Charles Barkley and his personality over the years from his time as an NBA player to his current role as an NBA analyst and television personality on TNT. However, there are still some nuggets to be uncovered about the Chuckster, and Wizards coach Scott Brooks knows many of them.
Brooks lived with Barkley at the beginning of his career in Philadelphia with the Sixers, and he recounted his memories of those times to Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post recently, with Barkley confirming those stories separately. The two became unlikely roommates after Brooks was trying to find an apartment during camp, and Barkley overheard him and didn’t want him to get locked into a lease if he might not make the team.
For whatever reason, Barkley, who had never done that before with a young player, liked Brooks and invited him to live in his house at least until he was certain he wouldn’t be released.
So, Barkley and Brooks became roommates and Brooks noticed a strange quirk about Chuck early on in his time living with him.
Scott Brooks didn’t want to make waves, so the first time he heard the buzzing sound in the middle of the night, he didn’t mention it to his roommate. A few weeks later, though, he heard the noise again, a loud vibrating hum out in the darkness. By the third time, he screwed up his courage and asked his roommate what was going on.
“What the [bleep] do you think it is? I’m vacuuming!” Charles Barkley told young Brooks. “I can’t sleep if the lines in the carpet aren’t straight.”
“Well, I’m a clean fanatic,” Barkley said in a phone conversation, confirming Brooks’s 30-year-old tale. “If I get up in the middle of the night and all my lines aren’t going in the same way, I always vacuum.”
Who knew that Barkley was a neat freak who had to have the lines in his carpet going the same way? I love the idea of Chuck waking up in a cold sweat and turning on a light to realize the carpet’s not right, and breaking out the vacuum at 2 a.m.
That wasn’t the only story Brooks told Steinberg about his time with Charles in Philadelphia. He also talked about being given $100 by Barkley regularly to pick up Popeyes for the two and he would get to keep the change, and how Barkley also used to buy tons of groceries and pass them out to the homeless. The story offers some incredible insight into Barkley, the man, but I can’t get over the Round Mound being insistent on carpet lines facing the same way.
