I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It (10 page)

Making a Difference . . .
Politics and Business

Politics seem like such a scam sometimes, because our system is supposed to be inclusive and it’s supposed to represent everybody, right? Okay, so how many black U.S. senators are there? There are no black or Hispanic governors, even though black and Hispanic people make up about 20 percent of the population in the United States. You have to wonder if making an impact is easier to do through private enterprise than it is working through politics in a lot of cases. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to do it through the political process because we should, of course. But look at Earvin Johnson, for example. He’s making a difference. Look at the impact he’s had since he retired from his playing career. He’s partnered with Starbucks to go into communities that would never otherwise have a Starbucks. And not only did he put a brand-new Starbucks in the ’hood, he took a Borders Books in there, a Subway sandwich shop. He’s got movie theaters in several cities. All those businesses represent full-time jobs, part-time jobs. They represent hope, too. A lot of these communities don’t have anybody investing in them. They’re just forgotten communities. I know in some of those cases there was nothing there but vacant buildings or some empty strip mall. I’ve read where each one of his Starbucks is one of the top-grossing stores in the whole country.

I can’t say enough about how proud I am of Earvin and what he’s doing.

See, this is part of my disagreement with Jim Brown. Earvin has done this since retiring. That’s what I’m trying to do now in retirement: find the best way to make an impact and improve people’s lives. I don’t think you can devote enough time to these types of efforts and do it properly while you’re still playing. A playing career now is a full-time job. Yeah, we get some downtime and some vacation time. But it’s not like it was in the 1960s when the NFL season was twelve games and the NBA playoffs ended in early May, and guys went out and got jobs in the off-season because their sport lasted only half the year. These days, the club owns your ass almost year-round.

To be fair, we can never know all the stuff guys in Jim Brown’s era went through and the battles they had to fight and frustrations they had. If you’re in your thirties or forties you can only imagine what it was like, so I understand what he’s calling for. I don’t know what it was like to have to stay in a separate hotel from my teammates or have to enter the back door of a restaurant to eat in certain cities. I understand why he wants people to be active socially. He was involved in a lot of stuff from what I can tell. And he still is.

But we can only fight the battles that we are presented with now. Earvin is doing a tremendous job. People say they don’t see famous black athletes using their platform, using their influence to impact change. Jim Brown has said that about today’s athletes. But again, look at Earvin. You think a poor white or poor black person could have gone to the chairman of Starbucks and said, “Hey, man, I want to start putting Starbucks in urban neighborhoods where they don’t have any coffee shops.” He couldn’t even get his call through.

Earvin is using his celebrity and his wealth to do something serious as an entrepreneur. There’s so much pressure on black athletes today, black famous people period. And I hope people can use their stature to make a difference. But if a guy does that, give him credit. Maybe people will get some inspiration from what Earvin is doing.

There are various ways to go about it. People ask me all the time, “Charles, are you going to run for governor of Alabama? Are you going to run next term?” And I say, “That’s next year!” I just retired. I’m relaxing now, enjoying myself, trying to figure out what life holds for me. There are a lot of things I want to do, and I have to identify the important ones and identify what I’ve got the best chance to get done. I do know I want to help rebuild downtown Birmingham, which is essentially vacant. I’m trying to help rebuild my hometown, Leeds. I’ve been meeting with people for the last two, three months and it’s interesting that none of those people are closely involved in politics.

It’s more daunting for the simple fact that you think you can run for public office and you have this enormous power. But unless you’re part of the larger process with a state legislature, it doesn’t mean anything. That’s the thing that’s caught me off guard the most, how many people you have to have moving in the same direction with you. If you don’t have that army of people, what you do is irrelevant.

This past spring and summer, I had some weeks where I had two and three meetings a day with home builders, community planners. There are some ways, I believe, to help bring about some serious changes that don’t have anything to do with the political process. One of the things I have to figure out is, do I want to pursue a job with one-tenth the money, 1,000 times the stress and aggravation 365 days a year? I had a resident of Alabama come up to me the other day and say, “Please run for governor.” And I said, “Hey, slow your roll. Let me do some things over the next few years that let people know my heart is in the right place. Let me be involved in this effort to rebuild parts of Alabama. Let me take some small steps first.” It’s important to me, because without economic opportunity, all this other talk is irrelevant. I can talk about all the grand plans in the world, but until we do something about a school system that’s tens of million’s of dollars in debt it’s just a lot of talk. Let me see if I can help attract some businesses to move into our state, so we can increase the tax base. There used to be a Parisians, a Sears, those types of big huge stores. But now they’ve moved. They’re not downtown anymore. I’m not saying Birmingham is the only place where this has happened, but Alabama is my home, so this is close to me. There’s a community called Hoover which is like our own little Buckhead. There are beautiful developments all around it, which is great. But the businesses left the downtown area, and now we’ve got too damn many vacant buildings and the downtown isn’t viable anymore.

I’ve just started getting involved, but the support has been phenomenal. I think the business and political leaders at home want to do better. They’ve been beat down for so long, the image of the state is so poor. But you know what? The image of the state is deserved. We always say, “Thank God for Mississippi and Arkansas or we’d be dead last in everything.”

I’m not about to rule out politics. But I don’t know yet how it’s going to turn out. The National Republican Black Caucus sent guys from Alabama and guys from D.C. to talk to me back in April. I understand how the game works. They want me to be involved. They need black Republicans in Alabama. President Bush wants to use me in different ways nationally. I understand and appreciate that. I want to play the game. But the party has to give to get. I’m not a dummy. They’ve got certain issues they want addressed and need addressed. And I’ve got certain needs I’d like to see met, like refurbishing my hometown, Leeds, and downtown Birmingham, which are both ghost towns now.

Leeds is the story of every small town. When Wal-Mart went up across town, so many of the small businesses went away. It’s a complete ghost town. I’m serious about this. I’m not going to let them not take me seriously. Whatever I do next should start at home. I’m not looking for anything for myself. We’ve got a lot of black people, poor white people and Hispanic people who need the playing field leveled, who need jobs. They just need a chance, a job, a place to start. The school system in Alabama is so far in debt. That situation has to improve. It’s great that we just got Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz. But new businesses got $700 million in tax cuts, barely paid taxes for twenty years. Rich folks gave away so much money that was intended for poor people.

The South is still such a good ol’ boy network—still is—that if you have any influence or any standing you need to stand up and be counted. I guess I could just keep my TV job, make a couple of million a year and be happy. But there’s no way God allowed me to make all this money, meet all the people I’ve met and rise to this status just to sit around, count my money and not try to help people improve their lives.

These are some of the things I talked with the Republican Black Caucus guys about. I’m not going to be a token. They talk about all these appearances they want me to make, because there are a lot of big elections coming up, particularly in Alabama, where the gubernatorial election is in November. I said I’ll meet with the candidates and see what they’re talking about.

I was asked for years about being a Republican, probably because most black people are Democrats. My mother heard it once and called me and said, “Charles, Republicans are for the rich people.” And I said, “Mom, I’m rich.” But the workings of politics are so strange that I’ve decided in recent months not to be worried about party affiliation as much as about trying to help the best candidates get things done, and that may involve being independent and keeping my options open.

I think the biggest misconception is that the Democratic Party does so much to help poor people. In a whole lot of cases the Democratic Party keeps people poor. Just about every single person in my hometown is a Democrat. And they are living exactly the same way they lived when I left there twenty years ago. Their lives have not been financially improved in any substantial way in all that time. My high school, Leeds High School, is closing. And the whole area has been vacated. Their lives are not any better.

I asked my mother and grandmother about why things never got any better under the politicians that ran things for so many years, and they kept voting for ’em. And they’d say, “We’re Democrats.” And I’d say, “Why? All these people vote this way every single election and things are still the same.” What did they do in exchange for all that loyalty for all those years? I don’t see any new economic opportunities in my hometown. You have to go to Birmingham to get a job. Part of what initially attracted me to the Republican Party is that I see—whether I’m right or wrong—what the Democratic Party has not done where I’m from.

Since then, I’ve gotten to meet and know some of the important Republican leaders. Living in Arizona, I got a chance to get to know John McCain. People act like Republicans haven’t had a full range of life experiences. I think McCain’s seen it all. The guy earned a Purple Heart, he was a prisoner of war, he relates to all kinds of people. I think he probably got slapped around a little bit in the last presidential election. A lot of people really liked him, his platform and the issues he campaigned on. But the Republican Party said, “Hey, George Bush is going to be the guy.” I bet he was probably a bit disillusioned. In fact, he was totally disillusioned after the election. Money changes a lot of things.

People ask me if politics will ever excite me like sports. The answer is no. Absolutely not, no way. There’s nothing that can excite you like sports. Athletic competition is its own rush. But after you have to stop competing in sports, there are other areas where competing can help a whole lot of people who need help, and business and politics are two of them.

Home and Away

One of the great benefits of making a career out of professional sports is the travel. On the most basic level, road trips are business trips: you’re going to a place in order to make your living, a place that you probably wouldn’t be visiting otherwise. But once you’re there, it can be so educational and rewarding if you only allow yourself to experience the people and the culture.

One of the cool things about travel is finding places you want to visit over and over again when you hit town. If you’re going to Milwaukee, you’ve got to go to Perkins, the soul food spot. There’s another spot I love in Phoenix, Johnson’s. Houston is one of the best restaurant cities in America, maybe the most underrated. A spot named Ruggles is one of my favorites. South Philly has a ton of great restaurants.

I’ve also found living in different places—Philadelphia when I first left Alabama, then Phoenix and then Houston—fascinating. Take Philadelphia. Philadelphia is just a real tough city. A lot of people in the news media can make it difficult to play there because a bad game or a bad series isn’t treated as a bad game or a bad series. It’s treated as though you’re a bad guy and you meant to play poorly, like you’re personally trying to cheat the team and the fans. Even if you’re a star player it can be difficult to live in Philly because of that. And if you think you can separate living in a place from how you’re treated publicly, you’re crazy.

Now, I know the fans can be tough, too. But I always thought the fans treated me great. And that’s not to say that there weren’t some tough nights and difficult stretches. But overwhelmingly, I thought the fans were great to me. And what I find really interesting is that once I was traded, after playing in Philly for eight years, the fans showed how much they appreciated me when I returned for games. From what I could see, the same was true for Randall Cunningham once he was traded from the Eagles after a great run, and would come back to town to play against them. It seemed to me as if, regardless of what had happened before, the fans tried to really show Randall they appreciated all the effort he put forth to help make that team a contender every week for years.

But when it does go sour, it really goes sour. When it does, I think it’s largely because a columnist or talk show host or somebody prominent in the local media puts the hammer on somebody, and then the fans just run with it and it becomes a huge local issue that just hangs around for days and weeks. When Eric Lindros first arrived in Philadelphia to play for the Flyers, I was playing golf with him and I told him early on, “Eric, you have to watch your back. This can be a really enjoyable city but it can also be very tough and you have to know that going in.”

He was just a kid at the time, and he thought, “Hey, this is going to be okay.” And I understand that, because you can’t know another city until you experience it, until you know what the people are like and what makes them tick, what gets them inflamed. And it’s very hard to appreciate how frustrated fans might be about a certain team’s performance historically. I do know that about five years later, I saw Eric someplace and he said, “Man, you were so right years ago.” See, when things go bad, they really go bad.

I will say this, though I know a lot of people in Philly will see it as criticism: They were wrong to boo Kobe Bryant the way they did at the 2002 All-Star Game in Philly. It was ugly, mean and totally unwarranted. From what I understand, the people who have a beef with Kobe in Philly are upset that he said going into the 2001 NBA Finals that he wanted to come back and “cut Philly’s heart out.” He was referring to the 76ers, not the city of Philadelphia, and everybody should have been able to see that. The context was clear to me. And for that, people booed him unmercifully. But what else is he supposed to say when he’s playing against the 76ers for the NBA championship? You expect him to say, “We’ll come there and have a big love fest”? You’d better have the attitude that you’re going to cut another team’s heart out when you’re playing for the biggest prize in your profession. In 1993, I wanted to cut the Bulls’ heart out, even though I love the city of Chicago. To feel anything less would be disappointing to me. To boo a player that great, when he’s from the town where you live, and he’s never done anything to embarrass himself or his family or his city, that’s just not right, I don’t care what anybody says.

So, yeah, when things go bad for a guy in Philly they really go bad. Scott Rolen of the Philadelphia Phillies found that out the hard way in the summer of 2002. Once he turned down a contract extension, it was just a matter of time until they ran him out of there because so many guys in the press and people in Phillies management treated that as a personal rejection of them. And then the fans run with it, and all of a sudden it’s just miserable. When the work environment is difficult, living wherever you live is going to be difficult, no matter how wonderful the city is, especially when you’re living a public life.

The sad thing is sometimes you don’t really get to enjoy a city the first few years you’re there simply because making friends is so difficult. There are just too many balls to juggle at one time. You’re trying to find a place to live in a community you know nothing about. You’re trying to learn a new city. You’re trying to practice and play as well as you can as a rookie, or as a guy just signed or traded to a new team. You have new teammates to learn and adjust to. And half the time, you’re not even there, because you’re traveling.

Obviously, though, I think the fans in Philadelphia have been great to me, and it was a great place for me to be those eight years, because I still live part of the year in the Philly area. My first culture shock was coming to Philly from Alabama. I had my first cheesesteak my first or second day there. I didn’t like it. There was too much meat and it was messy. It just wasn’t my thing. So that was my one and only cheesesteak. But that’s one of the few things in Philly that disagreed with me: I met a lot of wonderful people there.

And the turning point of my adult life came in Philly. Winning had become so important, so consuming, that it was okay in my mind at the time to spit on a heckler. By now many people know the story, that I missed the guy I was spitting at and hit a little girl named Lauren Rose who was attending the game that night and sitting near the heckler. The thing that really struck me the most when I talked to Lauren two days later was her demeanor, how calm she was, how nice and trusting. I haven’t talked to her in a while, but she and her parents were such nice people. I knew then and there I would never do anything like that again. There are things that happen in the heat of battle with players, but they’re combatants in that arena with you. There’s
nothing
that should make you do what I did that night. I told myself, “Calm your ass
down
.” That’s the one thing I really, really regret.

My second culture shock came when I was traded to Phoenix before the 1992–93 season. Being from Leeds, Alabama, and living my first eight years in Philly, I had never in my life had much contact with a large Hispanic community or Hispanic culture. So I got there, and obviously the Phoenix metropolitan area has a large Hispanic population, and it was eye-opening for me.

The people I met in the Hispanic communities in Arizona were incredibly hardworking. They’d come to a new place, where the language was a second language, and their mission was to educate their children and make their families’ lives better and be able to enjoy both their own culture and the mainstream culture in America. It makes me so damn angry to hear people say, “We’ve got too many immigrants coming into the country,” as if that’s the biggest problem we have.

The Hispanic people I met came into a new country, did the most menial jobs in a lot of cases, took whatever work they could get without bitching or complaining, and did everything with honor and pride. And sometimes you have to wonder if the economy might collapse without them taking some of the jobs they take, and gradually accumulating something for themselves. A whole lot of people who’ve been in America for generations could do the same thing if they didn’t consider it beneath them.

When I was living in Philly, for those five winter months it was pretty much just going from practice to home, games and back home, the airport and back home. It was cold out and I was pretty much locked down indoors from November through March. But I got to Phoenix, and suddenly I could wear shorts to practice, play golf after practice, get outdoors and experience mountains and desert. But to have a whole new culture to be introduced to was for me an entirely different thing. Wherever you live, it’s about the people in the end.

•  •  •

I can’t imagine my life without travel. It’s just cool to go to so many different places. Growing up in Alabama, in a segregated environment where the black people lived on one side of town and the white people lived on another, there was a tense feeling about everyone different—folks didn’t like blacks, didn’t like Jews, didn’t like Yankees, didn’t like foreigners. And to travel—and I was lucky enough to do it when I was young—is to experience that the country can be better than that, and the world can be better than that.

I don’t know that I would want to live in Portland, but it’s a great town. And the fans make it probably the best place to play in the NBA. I imagine it would be a great place to play an entire career because the people are so welcoming. I loved going to old Chicago Stadium. It was so intimate and loud and the people were right up on top of you. The Chicago Stadium and Boston Garden certainly had their similarities, but they were mean at Boston Garden. The people in Chicago always seemed to have a real affection for me when I went there. It was probably because of my relationship with Michael Jordan. When Michael’s father was murdered in 1993, he asked me if I would host his golf tournament in suburban Chicago. I did, and that just seemed to make my relationship with people in Chicago even warmer.

I hate all the new arenas, although I never played in the new building in Indiana. But these new arenas are just too big, they’re filled with luxury suites because of the owners’ greed. The fans are much too far away from the action. They’re nothing like the old Chicago Stadium and the old building in Portland, Memorial Coliseum. Those were great buildings.

Domestic travel is a big part of your life because you’re playing forty-one road games a year plus playoff road games. But there’s plenty of opportunity for international travel, which is hands down to me the most educational thing you can do. For my first ten years in the NBA, Nike put together international trips. The first couple of times I went on these trips, I figured we could be pretty anonymous. When you’re young and you’ve never been anywhere really, you just don’t think anybody overseas knows who you are. Then we’d go to Germany or France and have thousands of people come to exhibition games.

I was never worried about language differences. They weren’t barriers, they were just differences. You could still communicate despite the differences. Probably, Germany and Japan have been my two favorite countries to visit, although I did go back to Spain two or three times since the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. A lot of people have made a big deal out of me walking around Barcelona in ’92 and mingling with people. To me, one of the great things in life is to get out and meet new people, people whose experiences are different from your own. It has nothing to do with being recognized and well known. To me, that’s what you’re supposed to do, get out and enjoy a new city. I loved Barcelona. Loved it. Maybe some people don’t enjoy doing that, but I do. I know there are times I’ve been walking around a city overseas, 10,000 miles from home, and I’ve thought, “Here I am, this little kid from Leeds, Alabama, and I’m in Barcelona . . . or Paris . . . or Tokyo.”

At the same time, though, I’ve been riding around in one of those cities and been through a neighborhood where the houses on a particular street looked exactly like the houses on a street back home. Parts of Munich, to me, looked exactly like parts of New York City. Germany might be the country I’m most surprised about liking so much. I just didn’t know what to expect, knowing what we know about the atrocities of World War II. . . . You just don’t know a place until you go and see for yourself.

One of the things I find different about Europe is that the people tend to honor their athletes. There seems to be a different relationship between the people and athletes. And one of the things I really like is when you walk down the street and interact with people, nobody’s trying to borrow money, and there’s no player hating. I’ve been asked if my enjoyment of international travel is enhanced by being well known internationally, and if as a black American I’m treated differently. And it’s difficult for me to answer that because I didn’t travel before I became so recognizable. You’d be naive if you think people don’t react differently to you because in their eyes you’re a celebrity. But I’ll say this: even when people haven’t known me overseas, there’s a lack of what I perceive as the racial tension you feel when you’re at home in a lot of different parts of America. I don’t have a definitive answer as to why that seems to be the case, and there are probably a thousand reasons for it. Mostly, I think it’s just ignorance, and that causes the tension. It’s ignorance tension. But I don’t dwell on it, I just try to enjoy people wherever I am because what travel should teach anyone is that people can socialize and relate and rise above the tension. I really feel bad for the people who never get the opportunity to broaden their horizons, take themselves out of a place that’s limited. So many people just have no chance to do that.

Obviously, there are differences whenever you go to a new country, or even a new city, and that’s what makes it so appealing in the first place, being able to experience something that’s not like what you have at home or eat at home or do culturally at home. But ultimately, we’re more the same than not. I don’t see that as a contradiction. Anything that’s going to hold your attention is probably going to be complex and include contradictions. Travel reminds you of that, too, that the similarities between us, the ways we’re all kind of the same, are as fascinating as the differences.