The effort play - one that Barkley had executed thousands of times in 16 seasons - was signature Chuck, taking on a player, in Hill, almost a half-foot taller. 'I guess the Big Fella in the Sky wanted me to finish where I started,” Barkley would put it in his very Barkley way.Īctually, after surgery, he came back to play one final game that April.īut a Hall of Fame career, as an undersized rebounder and outsized character, effectively ended Dec. 'God doesn't make mistakes,' Mickens, Barkley's grandmother, said afterward. The irrelevant details: Hill missed the 3-footer but scored on a follow tip-in. After the play, Barkley summoned help from the Rockets' bench, but not before calmly putting his mouthguard in his sock. He collapsed to the floor, grabbed the knee that was bulging curiously because that’s what knees do when a quadriceps tendon ruptures. “Barkley's heart always was bigger than the rest of his body,” Bill Walton wrote in The Sporting News soon thereafter.īarkley’s left knee buckled as he went up. Those questions, fashioned one more way: How could you ask Chuck to not be Chuck? He didn't want to contest Hill’s shot, he HAD to.

Take a beat and ponder this: In an NBA career covering 16 seasons and 1,072 games, how many times would you, could you guess Charles Barkley jumped? To a finer point, how many times did Barkley execute exactly this kind of defense? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just concede to the taller foe? In it, a boyish Barkley laughs and cuts up, dunks, jaws and rebounds - always rebounds - during his glory days with the 76ers.īut 10 minutes, 51 seconds into the game itself, Tyrone Hill, working to 3 feet from the basket, goes up for a shot and Barkley leaps to defend. On the scoreboard high above the First Union Center floor, a video played.

MORE: Barkley voted the 21st-best player in NBA history The Sixers - who flew his mother, Charcey Glenn, and grandmother Johnnie Mickens from his hometown of Leeds, Ala., for the celebration - honored Barkley before the game. This Wednesday night in Philadelphia would be a celebration in the city where his career began, part of a season-long swan song. 8, 1999.īarkley, 36, already had announced that the 1999-2000 NBA season, his fourth with the Rockets, would be his last. Charles Barkley sat on a training table in the visitors’ locker room, his left knee wrapped in ice, and began to cry as he talked to his wife on the phone.īut, first, the farewell in Philly - on Dec.

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