Like the fire-breathing Pat McAfee before him, Charles Barkley is not going to tone down his rhetoric or make claims that he doesn’t believe for the benefit of ESPN.
Barkley already is daring ESPN to fire him before his first appearance on the network that will take over “Inside the NBA” next season.
“I’m not going to change my personality,” Barkley said during an episode of Outkick’s “Don’t @ Me with Dan Dakich,” according to Awful Announcing.
“Ain’t nobody — they can’t fire me. I make too much money to get fired. So, they can’t fire me. First of all, if they fire me, they got to pay me for seven years, and I’m going to quit way before then. But if they want to fire me, I would love for them to do that. The only decision we’ve been making is how long I’m going to work… I’m not worried about getting fired. And nobody at ESPN is going to tell me what to say or do. Period.”
ESPN will begin licensing “Inside The NBA” next season after TNT Sports lost its NBA broadcast rights. Barkley reportedly signed a 10-year, $210 million contract in 2022 to be an analyst on the best basketball pregame and postgame show.
But Barkley doesn’t sound like he is interested in doing appearances on “Get Up,” “First Take,” “SportsCenter” or any other ESPN programming once he joins.
Especially not if he is sharing the airwaves with ESPN’s NBA analyst Kendrick Perkins.
“I’m going to do what I want to do,” Barkley said. “Nobody’s going to tell me what to say, or what to do. I get upset. [ESPN] is like, ‘The Lakers are contenders.’ I’m like, ‘No, they’re not.’ They know they’re not contenders.
“Kendrick Perkins, who don’t know his ass from a hole in the wall, he’s like, ‘The Lakers are contenders. The Lakers are contenders.’ And I said, ‘They’re not contenders.’ And, clearly, if you lose in the first round [of the playoffs], you aren’t a contender.”
Barkley said he was going to retire after this season but is sticking around “to make sure the people I love and work with for the last 25 years (at TNT) got a job” after the network change.
“That’s one that’s been very interesting and frustrating for me; we actually have no idea how this is going to work,” Barkley said. The notion that I’m going to work more as I get older, that’s just not going to happen.”
