Charles Barkley Is Open for Business

Inside the NBA has almost died twice. This time, the man responsible is Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. Two years ago, the threat came from Charles Barkley. Barkley toyed with leaving Ernie, Kenny, and Shaq for an announcing job with LIV Golf. Barkley’s reasoning was straightforward. He thought LIV might pay him an “astronomical” amount of money to walk.

As the NBA rights have slipped away from Zaslav, Barkley has gone back into free agent mode. “I’m open for business, brother,” he declared. Though Stephen A. Smith might raise a finger to object, Barkley is about to become the most sought-after free agent in sports TV history. If you listen closely, you’ll find that Barkley negotiates deals through the media in the same way he talks about basketball on TNT.

Barkley’s skill as a negotiator relies on two qualities. First, he’s the most finely tuned quote machine in NBA history. A typical Barkley sound bite includes a promise of transparency (“I’m not going to lie to you”), mild-to-heavy provocation, and an approach to accuracy that could be described as “close enough.”

In 1992, Barkley published a memoir that tweaked his 76ers teammates. A sample line about Manute Bol: “Hell, my grandmother could score two points a game, as long as she wasn’t double-teamed.”

When a reporter confronted Barkley, he said, “I haven’t read the book.” Barkley claimed his ghostwriter misquoted him, à la South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Barkley threatened to stop the book’s publication. Then he backed down. “The majority of the book is correct,” he said, “and I stick by it.”

That could be Barkley’s motto on Inside the NBA. After the Timberwolves beat the Nuggets in the second round of playoffs, Barkley told Anthony Edwards he hadn’t visited Minnesota in about 20 years. Edwards’s response was funny enough to float a tourism campaign. But as writer Jess Myers pointed out, Barkley was in Minneapolis five years ago, covering the Final Four for CBS.

The second key to Barkley’s negotiating skill is that he’s extremely available: for articles, TV hits, and podcasts. In the same way Tom Hanks used to bless a new late-night show with a guest spot, Barkley has appeared on the first episodes of Any Given Wednesday, the ManningCast, Get Up, and TNT’s NHL studio show. This week, Barkley gave an interview to The New York Times about Inside the NBA’s fate despite protests from Turner PR and his cohosts.

Barkley has used that combination of quotability and availability to help him score big deals. A decade ago, Barkley began musing about retiring while still in his TV prime. In 2015, Richard Deitsch reported that Turner executives came to Barkley’s house with “two magnums of 2009 Bond Estates St. Eden Napa Valley red, two bottles of 1942 Don Julio tequila, and plates of pasta and meatballs.” After hours of eating and drinking, an executive presented Barkley with a “golf check,” and Barkley could hardly believe the number printed on it. As he recalled: “I said, ‘Oh yeah, Chuck coming back to work!”

In 2021, Barkley announced that he would retire last year. He changed his mind when he saw tech companies like Amazon were ready to pay him lots of money.

Maybe Barkley thinks a lot about going fishing. He can be moving when he talks about the physical toll of basketball on ex-players. It’s also true that every time Barkley mentions retirement, someone pays him to keep working.

Barkley’s 2022 flirtation with LIV Golf was his greatest public negotiation. As Andrew Marchand explained at the time, Tom Brady and Troy Aikman had reset the announcer pay scale, making Barkley’s $10-million-a-year Turner salary seem low. When LIV’s Greg Norman called about a job, Barkley wanted to see if he could score a Phil Mickelson–sized payday. “Listen, if somebody gave me $200 million, I’d kill a relative,” Barkley said of the golfers who’d signed on.

Barkley didn’t just wave away any moral qualms about working for LIV. His view of Inside the NBA turned out to be less romantic than most viewers’. “I love my job at TNT,” he told a podcast at the time. “I love the people. But you have to take all meetings.”

That July, Barkley told reporters he would take a meeting. He told them he would play in the pro-am at the LIV tournament at Donald Trump’s New Jersey course. On Dan Patrick’s radio show, Barkley issued an ultimatum to Norman to make him a Godfather offer at the tournament. After meeting with LIV, Barkley announced that he was withdrawing from the negotiations. Three months later, Turner gave Barkley a 10-year contract that “could approach $200 million,” Marchand reported. That the number matched Barkley’s relative-smiting price was probably just a coincidence.

The LIV episode led me to formulate the Rule of Wondering Aloud About Your Future. When a famous person wonders aloud about their future plans with a reporter present, they’re not wondering. They’re negotiating.

In 1993, after CBS lost its NFL rights, John Madden had three networks try to hire him. Madden told Matt Millen: “If you got one person who wants you, you get a job. If you got two people who want you, you get a great deal. And if you have three or more, you get a bonanza.”

Barkley has a bonanza. As Dylan Byers wrote in Puck, going to NBC would reunite Barkley with Mark Lazarus, the executive who hired him at Turner in 2000. (Barkley said at the time that he found NBC too “straightlaced.”) ESPN’s Jimmy Pitaro has opened his checkbook when his executives haven’t been able to fix a problem in-house—see Monday Night Football. Amazon, which is trying to elbow its way into the NBA streaming business, has an even bigger checkbook.

As Barkley talks about his prospects, he uses phrases like “to be honest with you …” as if the interviewer is prying information from a reluctant source. But as Turner’s position in the negotiations has deteriorated, Barkley has given interviews to The New York Times, Dan Patrick, Jimmy Traina, SiriusXM’s NBA Radio, The Mike Missanelli Podcast, Phoenix’s 12News, and ESPN Cleveland. On May 1, Shannon Sharpe released a two-part interview with Barkley. This month, not counting his day job, Barkley talked for more than five hours.

You can almost feel Pitaro and other suitors sifting through these interviews for clues about what Barkley might want. In early May, ESPN Cleveland’s Aaron Goldhammer asked how important it was to keep the Inside the NBA crew together. “It’s not that important to me,” said Barkley, a surprising admission for anyone who loves the show. Barkley noted that Ernie Johnson would probably retire soon. He added: “I’ve got to make sure I look out for myself.”

Last week, talking again with Patrick, Barkley said he’d love to keep the hosts together and produce Inside the NBA through his own production company. It’s the kind of leverage Madden never had. In ranking Barkley’s possible destinations, Awful Announcing gave a self-produced Inside 3-to-1 odds of winning out.

The way Barkley talks about his job prospects puts media members in a funny position. What Barkley says is surely newsworthy. As Patrick noted, an interview gets cited in outlets like The Hollywood Reporter. But a Barkley proclamation also has the effect of making a media outlet a part of the negotiation, as if their news story or radio hit is a piece of paper being slid across the table to possible employers.

Since Barkley will sign a huge contract after all of these interviews, I suspect he’s happy to share the spoils of aggregation. It turns out we’re all open for business, brother. On Tuesday, Barkley didn’t make the first episode of Jim Rome’s new talk show on X. He appeared on Thursday instead.