“I’m realistic,” Charles Barkley acknowledged to reporter Ian O’Connor, “I’m not getting any younger so realistically this has to be my last year.”
The year was 1993. Barkley, then 30, was coming off of an MVP season with the Phoenix Suns that culminated in a competitive NBA Finals loss to Chicago. The retirement talk began immediately after losing to the Bulls, when he told reporters that he “definitely would have retired if we had won it.” He backtracked shortly after, citing the unfinished business of winning a championship. (“I never thought he was going to retire,” his then-coach Paul Westphal said, “He just wanted some more ink.”).
The discussion heated back up in October, not long after Michael Jordan announced his shocking retirement. Barkley suffered a collapse in training camp that caused him to lose feeling in his legs — a scary incident that he attributed to long-standing back issues — and within days told reporters that he was “99.9 percent sure this is my last year,” even if the Suns did not win the title.
By the next month, Barkley had backtracked again, saying “I’m going to wait until the end of the year.” He then opened December not only pledging again to retire, but doing so ’emphatically,’ to quote the contemporaneous reporting. “I know when I’ll retire — when this season is finally over,” he said, citing not only his back issues but also a recent bar fight. He reiterated his stance in the aforementioned interview with O’Connor.
The retirement storyline continued through the 1993-94 season, with Barkley saying shortly before the end of the regular season that “I’ve made up my mind.” Two months later, after the Finals, Barkley announced that he would return. “Up until the last 48 hours, I was definitely going to retire,” he said, attributing the about face to encouragement from teammate Danny Ainge. “I wanted to change my mind but I couldn’t do it myself. I wanted somebody to talk me into coming back.”
The 1994-95 season played out with none of the retirement drama of the prior year. At season’s end, following a blown 3-1 lead to the Houston Rockets in the playoffs, Barkley returned to the topic. “More than likely, I have played my last game,” he told reporters. “There’s no soul-searching. It’s not even a big deal. I’m not saying it’s 100 percent, but I’m pretty sure about things right now.” He contrasted his new retirement announcement to his prior flirtation: “Last season, my heart wasn’t into it. I didn’t want to retire. … This year is a totally different scenario. My heart is definitely with this decision. I have been talking to my family and friends all season about retiring. It’s just time. I’m tired of working, tired of traveling, tired of getting beat up every night.”
Definitive as that sounded, it was less than a week before Barkley left himself an opening by saying he would not decide on retirement until an offseason surgery and rehab on his knee. In November, he was back in training camp as usual.
The retirement talk slowed to a crawl thereafter. The 1996 offseason was consumed by Dream Team II and a trade to the Houston Rockets. Upon joining Houston, Barkley said he would retire after two more years of basketball, then join NBC and run in the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election.
After the first of those two years, Barkley was involved in perhaps his best-known bar fight, the one in which he pushed a patron into a window (and later told a judge that his only regret was not being on a higher floor). Dismayed by the reaction — the league was considering a suspension and his daughter was being teased about the incident in school — he said he was “leaning toward retirement” but had not made a final decision. He would leave his fate up to the NBA: “If I can’t get support from my league, maybe it’s time to go.” After a meeting with the league, the situation was resolved with no punishment and no retirement (though Barkley was made to hire security for future excursions).
Barkley played out the 1997-98 season without further retirement talk. During the 1998-99 lockout, he said he wanted to play one more season and then pursue a political career. He then returned for the shortened 1999 season, and upon an early first round exit, once again said “I’m leaning toward retirement.” He then came back again for the 1999-2000 season, announcing during the preseason that he would retire at season’s end. “It’s time. That’s it. I’m not going to answer any more questions about it. It’s just time.”
This was the retirement announcement that stuck, though it was not entirely in Barkley’s hands. In an early season game in Philadelphia, Barkley suffered a nasty leg injury that ended his season and would have complicated any possible return. (For a recent example, Victor Oladipo suffered a similar injury at a much younger age and was never the same.) Barkley would play one more game — a largely ceremonial appearance in the Rockets’ season finale — by which point he was already regularly appearing on TNT as a guest studio analyst. He would join the network full-time to start the 1999-2000 season and begin a media career that has been as successful as his playing career, if not more so.
Barkley was barely in the TNT studio a year before he flirted with a return to the league with Michael Jordan and the Wizards, and he continually suggested a run for the governorship of Alabama, but ultimately his first decade with TNT passed without any serious suggestion that he might leave.
The first rumblings to that effect came in 2012, when he told Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated that while he loved his job and the people he worked with, it would be “a struggle” to make it through the remaining four years on his contract. “I really don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this. … I only thought I would do this for three or four years but now I have been doing it for 13 years. When I got to my fifth year of broadcasting I was like ‘OK, I’ll do this a couple of more years.’ But now I’m like, ‘Dude, you have been doing this for 13 years and if I make it to the end of the contract it will be 17 years.’ Seventeen years is a long time. It’s a lifetime in broadcasting. I personally have to figure out the next challenge for me.”
He reiterated his stance two years later, saying in 2014 that he was “leaning heavily … toward finishing my two years and leaving on a good note.” Upon the expiration of his contract, he stayed with TNT.
When asked by Deitsch about his broadcasting future in 2018, the then 55-year-old Barkley said that he was “looking at 60 as the end.” One year shy of that mark in 2022, he was asked by this writer about his future plans and said he would finish the two years left on his contract — which would take him up to 61 — and then leave. That was followed by a highly public dalliance with the LIV Golf during the 2022 offseason, and not coincidentally, a new ten-year deal with TNT, with an opt-out included in case the network lost its NBA rights.
With TNT now on the brink of losing its NBA package, Barkley has been vocal about the network’s situation and how the uncertainty is affecting staff. He has given numerous interviews in which he has given every indication he plans to continue working with a different network if TNT is left on the outside looking in. Then came Friday night, when seemingly out of the blue he said on-air that he is retiring at the end of this season.
It remains to be seen if this time is any different than in 2022, 2014, 2012, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, 1994 or 1993.
