I used to love Charles Barkley.
And I will again, for the reasons I loved Charles Barkley are many and wondrous and varied, and the reason I have temporarily corked my love flow is ant-brained and skid-marked and horrid. But before we reach this essay’s toxic core, first a look at why I and all right-thinking humans should love Charles Barkley.
1) He is the only professional athlete to ever ass-butt his way into the Hall of Fame. Barkley used his ample bottom (and elbows, intelligence, anything handy, but mostly his bottom) to create enough space to grab 12,546 NBA rebounds—most ever by a player 6’6” or shorter. He’s listed at 6’6”, is closer to 6’4”, but has a 6’10” wingspan and an absurd vertical leap for a man with that ass.
2) He is funny and smart on television. He takes his job but not himself seriously, an increasingly rare quality in sports blatherers. This is the man who said, among many, many other great things, “I don’t hate anyone, at least not for more than 48 minutes, barring overtime.” He’s honest and impulsive and human and famous, and so has said and done a bunch of dumbass things, but on balance he’s a national treasure.
3) He was the first black baby born in the previously all-white hospital in Leeds, Alabama (pop. approx. 4,000 in 1963), presumably because his grandfather was a janitor there, but was also part of a group that integrated his elementary school. He still owns a home a few hundred yards from where he grew up and stays in touch with his hometown friends. You don’t have to love that, but you should.
4) He owns one of the best mean nicknames in sports history—The Round Mound of Rebound—and a peerless career list, including The Chuckwagon, The Incredible Bulk, and the Crisco Kid. Unique among celebrities, Barkley takes it as well if not better than he dishes it out.
There is much more to say in praise of the man they call The Wide Load from Leeds, but if I hear him say “Knock knock, Capital One Bank guy” in that onset-of-puberty crackling alto one more time I will lose my shit. It’s partially my own fault, as after chasing my beloved Washington Capitals around the cable/streaming universe, from cable to Fubo to YouTube TV, I gave up and now stream from the mothership, Monumental Sports Network, an inaccurately named company if there ever was one.
So at present I have no access to video news outlets, a first-world problem of the first order and one I partially solved without getting up by turning to TuneIn, which calls itself free internet radio and, in an odd turn of events for something internet-related, that’s actually what it is. Since it’s free it has commercials, which normally I don’t mind as they often tickle the anthropologist in me. These commercials, however, are less aired than carpet bombed.
I’ve long had an illicit fascination with advertising, understanding early on its position as one of capitalism’s most deadly cancers, and yet as an art form found it pretty damn compelling. Then Mad Men did for advertising what West Wing did for politics and my fascination deepened. But now, whatever soulless, Voldemort of an ad scheduler responsible for the torturous repetition of such synapse-sapping sludge has murdered that illicit fascination.
TuneIn often airs four identical 30-second ads in a three-minute break, and I don’t think it’s out of line for me to find this an odd business strategy. What possible good could come from smashing the same whiny, nonsensical balls of poop into my ears until I’ve reached a level of hostility I’ve never before felt toward something inanimate. After seeing Tom Brady—who admittedly I pre-disliked—jump onto a couch 30 times during one basketball game, I made a solemn vow never to rent from Hertz. And now Capital One has at least temporarily cut the heart out of my love for Sir Chuck.
I’m kind of like a four-year-old with all my whys these days, but thankfully there’s one place on the internet I can go for reliable answers to even the oddest of inquiries: Reddit. Reddit is the New York City subway of the internet, where brilliance, madness and everything in between rides shoulder-to-shoulder in an endless stream of “help.”
After an exhaustive 45-second search I think bestiebuyboy put it best, and in the interest of ever-elusive authenticity, I quote him here in his entirety: “So, I have a marketing degree and they do it for primarily three reasons: the ad is cheap and targeted to the demo of the channel so it plays constantly. The ad also should be annoying and obnoxious because at some point you might buy a similar product, when that happens you’ll probably have forgotten about the contents of the commercial and only remember the name. The idea is that you’ll remember it and then buy it because we like things that are familiar. The final reason is that they want to weed out smart people. We are not the demo because we actually put thought and effort into deciding on a product. If sales go up they will keep playing it and renewing it until sales go down. It’s all bs and I hate it.”
I do not have a marketing degree, and unless you do I think we both should listen to triple-B, if only to save time. I could pony up for TuneIn’s commercial-free version, but 1) while I’m no longer cheap, I am still thrifty; 2) the ads are so annoying I spend less time listening to the news; and 3) I don’t know why but it seems like cheating. Also, and hopefully bestiebuyboy will learn this, if you say there are three reasons for something and you then detail them, please show the reader you care by enumerating them as I did in the previous sentence. It’s the little things that make one’s prose addictive.
And it took me less than 45 seconds of googling to fall back in love with possibly the most fun analyst in any sport. First, I found out he gave $1 million each to eight HBCUs. Then I learned he named his daughter Cristiana after a Delaware Mall I’ve seen the sign for a million times. And then I read what he said to a cheering crowd at the 2022 American Century Celebrity Golf Championship Tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. “I want to say this: If you’re gay and transgender, I love you. And if anybody gives you shit, you tell them Charles said ‘Fuck you!’” Drop the mic, Chuck.
