Can someone be the reincarnated spirit of a person who isn’t dead yet? Because there are five reasons I think my son is Charles Barkley.
#1 Roundball
My two-year-old is round. Adorably round. Like any toddler, he wobbles between the weeks and months, alternately stretching and squishing, but he is always round. The button nose. The rosy cheeks - little circles. Round head. Pillowy lips. A barrel belly. And his butt – oh my goodness, how my wife and I adore that round little butt. We see a lot of that butt. And there are his knees, which are round.
My son is so indisputably round that Kyrie Irving thinks he’s a hoax.
That roundness is the first reason my son might be former NBA power forward Charles Barkley, who has also stretched and squished over the years, thanks to Weight Watchers. Nonetheless, the legendary baller is also always round.
Did I mention my baby’s butt?
There’s a good amount of butt talk around Barkley too. In a 1993 Sports Illustrated article, former Orlando Magic power forward Horace Grant said, "What made Charles so tough was, first of all, his big ass."
Charles Barkley is, and has always been, the subject of butt talk. And he’s round, at one point earning the nickname “The Round Mound of Rebound.”
He’s so round that the first time SI profiled him, in Barkley’s second season, the writer devoted the opening pages to describing Barkley through the lens of the player’s relationship with lunch.
“Charles Barkley was ready for lunch. Breakfast was hours behind him, and as he walked out of the gym where the Philadelphia 76ers practice, dinner still lay somewhere over the horizon. Everything seemed to suggest lunch… For the Sixers' irresistible new force, there is no such thing as an immovable object. Especially when lunch is waiting.”
The guy likes to eat.
There’s no getting around it.
And let’s make sure we take a second to inform or remind everyone that Barkley isn’t just a guy who says messed-up stuff on television, though he does a lot of that in his current career as a broadcaster. However, he first gained fame for being a historically great power forward who said messed-up stuff on television. In fact, an ESPN panel named him the the 4th best power forward of all time.
He reached those heights as a relative shrimp at his position. Barkley is 6’6”, while the rest of the top five measure 6”11, 6’9”, 7’0’, and 6’11”. Prime Barkley was a compact figure of destructive grace. He was Zion Williamson with an attitude. He was the second-best player on the 1992 Dream Team, the all-star team of all-star teams, where he outperformed past and future MVP’s Magic Johnson and David Robinson. He exceeded Michael Jordan’s point total, in fewer minutes, during USA Basketball’s Olympic run. Larry Bird’s last functioning vertebra had ten fewer points per game in Barcelona than the stocky power forward. Charles Barkley was an otherworldly basketball player. And he is, essentially, a sentient circle, just like my son.
#2 No Chips
“Chip” is shorthand for “championship,” and the absence of one is considered a major blight on Barkley’s resume.
For those of you who don’t care much about basketball: first, thanks for reading this far; second, know that diehard fans endlessly debate who is the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT). A vocal majority of these debaters see a one-to-one relationship between individual brilliance and team success. For these simpletons, “Michael Jordan is the all-time best because he got six, blah, blah, blah…” There are lots of reasons to be a Jordan Stan, and plenty of great arguments to make. This one is not strong.
If you make championships the centerpiece of your rubric, then how do you ignore the eight Celtics with more chips in their basket, including the legendary Bill Russell? Is Robert Horry in the conversation? He shouldn’t be. And, somehow, it seems that Barkley is a proponent of this asinine reduction , even though he only stands to lose by comparison.
My son also has no championship rings, though I’d like to believe he still has a shot. That’s just me, thinking positive.
#3 Crazy Talk
There’s a great tradition of jester athletes. They invent logics all their own, and often their own languages. New York Yankee great Yogi Berra is probably the standard bearer with his myriad Yogi-isms, like, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
Barkley has some winners in the same vein:
“I think that the team that wins game five will win the series… unless we lose game five.”
“The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not.”
“Stevie Wonder could make 1 of 23 shots.”
When my son speaks, it’s slightly less likely to offend - at least the stuff he says out loud. And his sentences are significantly shorter. But he does call crackers “ta” for no apparent reason. And that’s the kind of nonsense we’re looking for. Mark it.
#4 One for the Boys
In that very lunch-focused Sports Illustrated profile, Charles Barkley’s mom, Charcey Glenn, says of her son, “I think he's still a baby in a lot of ways."
I feel you, Charcey. We’re totally aligned. Both of our boys are strong candidates to be infantilized.
Of course C.B. did some work of his own to shrug off responsibility, famously starring in a Nike commercial where he declared, “I am not a role model.”
So, it’s no surprise when journalist Phil Taylor writes, "Barkley is like the kid who takes your hand and leads you to where he colored on the walls with Magic Marker—you're so disarmed by his honesty that you can't stay mad at him."
Mr. Taylor, I think you meant “where he colored on the stairs with Sharpie.” Correction accepted, this happened at our house, and my son is Charles Barkley, the historically terrible three-point shooter.
#5 Splash Brothers
This is where the twinning really locks in, because I am convinced that my son is the Charles Barkley of toilet training.
A 2014 Bleacher Report article declared that Barkley was the worst high-volume shooter from long distance in the history of basketball.
He not only has the lowest three-point percentage (.266) of anyone with at least one thousand attempts, he also has the most attempts (2,020) of anyone with a three-point percentage below .300.
He is without question the worst three-point shooter in history. You would have figured after the 1,000th missed three that he would have realized that, but his willingness to continue to lob up bad shot after bad shot makes this one of those records that will never be broken.
Has this analogy properly illustrated to you that potty training is not going perfectly?
My son’s teachers definitely take the fall on this one. “He’s letting us know when he wants to go. He’s ready!”
Was I ready for regularly scheduled deliveries of real human turds onto our floor? (So glad we don’t have carpet!)
Was I ready for my own personal Groundhog Day hell, stepping into eerily similar puddles over and over and over again?
Based on the “advice” of these “experienced” “professionals” who “educate” our child, we put together a potty-training plan. We got a dry erase board and made four columns: I Pooped, I Peed, I Tried, and Oops!, with a reward strategy based on doling out one sticker after each appropriate bodily function (or try).
My wife got a packet of 1200 Frozen stickers to get us through the ordeal, and if he keeps oops-ing at this Barkley-esque rate, we’ll have 881 marks in the column when the sticker pack is done. Or this might happen first.
Ah, but progress is being made, however painfully, however slowly, and at a great cost to the environment. I don’t know which is worse for the planet, the non-stop loads of laundry to provide fresh cleanup rags, or the crates of paper towels we go through while said rags are being washed. Either way, everyone’s going to die.
And sure that sounds pretty negative, but there are moments of elation too. When an adult-size turd gets deposited in the kid toilet – and I mean a poop as tall as an adult – that merits an actual celebration. We don’t have to fake it, because he made it.
Also, I’m not sure what’s funnier than receiving deep eye contact from a half-naked human while they pee on the floor right in front of you. If the real C.B. did that, I’d probably be less amused. Someone might need to call his doctor.
But we’ll keep on trying, just like Barkley, damn the odds. And I’ll keep looking at that cute little baby behind and smile and wonder if maybe one day it’ll become a world-class wrecking ball used to box out for rebounds. We’ll keep trying to pee in the toilet, and we’ll especially focus our aim when mini-C.B “goes for two,” something advanced analytics suggest his predecessor should have opted for much more often.
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And here are some closing thoughts…
What I’m Up To
I got some excellent notes from my buddy Danny Caporaletti about the spec screenplay I’m working on. Also working on revising an adaption I wrote of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
And this week Mirrorbox is doing a free reading of In the Southern Breeze by Mansa Ra. It’s a poetic piece about the history of violence against Black men in America. It has echoes of Waiting for Godot and Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy. Pre-register by clicking the title.
What I’m Into
There’s only one episode left for this season of American Ninja Warrior. I love American Ninja Warrior so much. Really. A lot.
If this fact leads you to believe I am either a nerd or a trash-human, then all I can say is, “How were you not paying attention before?”
And when it comes to politics, I love the work of Maggie Haberman at the New York Times. She’s an essential worker.