Charles Barkley: 'I'm Just Doing the Best I Can to Try to Make a Difference'
NEW YORK — Charles Barkley's goal was a simple one.
"I wanted to do positive programming," the NBA Hall of Famer and current TNT broadcaster said Thursday at the Paley Center for Media in midtown Manhattan. Barkley was there to promote his new show, American Race, a two-night, four-hour documentary that will air on TNT on Thursday, May 11 and Friday, May 12. The network will also preview the show Sunday following its coverage of the NBA playoffs and make all episodes available on its online app the next day.
"Doing stuff like this is a big deal to me. I don't take it lightly," Barkley added. "I'm just doing the best I can to try to make a difference. This is right up there with my role model commercial as far as the most important thing that I did in my life."
The four-part series will feature Barkley traveling around the United States and meeting with different individuals of different backgrounds and races. In the first episode, Barkley is filmed discussing the tensions between Baltimore's police and the city's African American community.
In one clip, which was shown to a group of reporters on Thursday, Barkley is confronted by the mother of Tyrone West, a Baltimore citizen who was killed during a confrontation with police in 2013.
"I spent the day with the cops," Barkley is seen saying, "the split-second decisions they have to make...they get 95 percent of things correct and five percent screw-ups and we spend all our time talking five percent screw up."
"I don't know you, I don't like you," West's mother angrily responds. "You said it takes them only a split second to make a decision—tell me, why it took 15, 20 minutes to beat my son to death?”
On Thursday, Barkley said conversations like those were some of the hardest he's had in his life. For example, he added, that back-and-forth with West's mother was the first time he'd ever spoken to a mother of a person killed at the hands of the police.
"It's a hard show," Barkley said. "None of the conversations were pleasant. They all have to do with some form of discrimination, exclusion, none were happy go lucky. I needed beer after every interview."
Three other clips were previewed on Thursday. One showed Barkley speaking with Peter Jae Kim, an Asian-American actor and activist from Los Angeles, about the way Asian-Americans are perceived throughout the country. Another featured Barkley having a conversation with a Muslim woman in Texas in a burger restaurant she owns.
The finale featured a surprising guest: Richard Spencer, a noted white supremacist who serves as the president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist think tank. Barkley's meeting with Spencer, which he does alongside Atlanta attorney Gerald Griggs, airs in the show's final episode.
"We talked to him for two hours," Barkley said. "It was the most disappointing, frustrating, angry I could ever probably envision myself in my life, especially while you're sitting right next to me."
Barkley said he had to keep reminding himself that he couldn't hit Spencer.
Barkley also acknowledged that he expects to receive some criticism for that show. But it's a role, he added, he's quite familiar with.
"I just want to do positive stuff and I'm going to keep doing positive stuff," he said. "That being said, I'm old enough now, there's going to be some backlash. But I'm a big boy, I can take it.
All quotes obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
Yaron Weitzman covers the NBA and other things for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.
