Charles Barkley has never been one to shut his mouth. He’ll speak his mind on anything, even sports outside of basketball and the NBA. Barkley might not always be right, but you gotta respect someone for talking a side like the Chuckster does. With BountyGate becoming the larger, uglier cousin of SpyGate, you knew there’d be some backlash from both sides, and Barkley isn’t disappointing.
Courtesy of NBC’s ProFootballTalk, Barkley absolutely went OFF on the Dan Patrick Show recently:
“You have to be a punk to snitch that out,” Barkley said. “That’s like giving a reporter an anonymous quote. That makes you a punk, if you do anonymous, but also, you don’t bring that out x amount of years later. I mean you don’t compete in it if you don’t want to be in it. But I’ve seen at least three or four well-known NFL players say all teams have bounties. So I’m glad they came to Gregg Williams’ defense. Because I’m pretty sure all teams have that.”
What was actually more interesting was what Barkley said about bounties in the NBA. He admits they exist – or at least they did exist when he was playing. He remembered one particular blowout where he asked his teammates to put a hard foul on a guy trying to run up the score:
“I’m a firm believer, if a guy shoots a three, that you knock his ass as far in the stands as you possibly can,” Barkley said. “We were getting beat by 30 or 40, I can’t remember, and the guy was shooting threes, running up and down the court, and I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to hurt that guy right there.'”
Is this all that unusual? Not at all. It happens, maybe not so much anymore since Stern started handing out pacifiers. But it still happens… at all levels too.
I remember one year in college when we played intramurals. All of my boys and I had been in the basketball program, but for one reason or another (injuries, getting kicked off, being stupid) we weren’t there anymore. Our team was so stacked we tried to put the mercy rule, which was a 30-point lead, on everyone we played. Naturally, we nearly started brawls two or three times that season because of this. Did we expect a reaction? Yeah I think so. Was it stopping us from doing it? No.
I guess what Barkley is saying is slightly different than the “bounty” problems with the Saints. But Sir Cumference did say he knew of players getting paid for this in the NBA.
“I think it was $5,000,” Barkley said on the show. “We get paid better in the NBA.”
What do you think of what Barkley said?
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