Michael Jordan & Charles Barkley Are Ready To End Their Beef
Charles Barkley Explains How He’s Ending Decade-Long Beef With Michael Jordan - Page 4
Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley both spent the 80s and 90s dominating the NBA, were Dream Team teammates, had successful sneaker lines with Nike, and have remained popular throughout the 2000s in their own ways. Yet they’ve been on the outs for years.
But now, it appears the ice has thawed, and they may reconcile over something else they have in common, their love for golf.
Barkley was on Chris Russo’s Mad Dog Unleashed on SiriusXM on Friday when he was asked if he was willing to patch things up with Jordan.
“We had a conversation,” Barkley answered. “We’re going to get together and play golf as soon as basketball is over.”
Russo is ecstatic that they’re squashing their beef, but Chuck insists it was never really that deep.
“We’re not like Prince William and Prince Harry,” said Barkley, referencing Britain’s royal brothers who have been at odds. “We always had a lot of love for each other. But we talked, actually, in the last probably 72 hours. We decided to get together and play golf as soon as basketball is over.”
The two retired NBA legends haven’t spoken in over a decade, thanks to Barkley’s infamously sharp tongue. In 2012, he spoke publicly on ESPN Chicago’s Waddle & Silvy show about how bad Jordan was at leading the then-Charlotte Bobcats.
“I think the biggest problem has been I don’t know if [Jordan] has hired enough people around him who he will listen to,” Barkley said. “One thing about being famous is the people around you, you pay all their bills so they very rarely disagree with you because they want you to pick up the check. They want to fly around on your private jet, so they never disagree with you. I don’t think Michael has hired enough people around him who will disagree.”
To be fair, the Bobcats did have a 7-59 record that season and are considered the worst team of all time.
“I love Michael, but he has not done a good job,” Barkley said at the time, but he later revealed that Jordan went “ballistic” on him over the phone, and their relationship never fully recovered.
Now that they’ll try to make amends sometime this summer, see social media’s reaction to the lightweight beef below.
