Michael Jordan called Charles Barkley at three or four in the morning. Barkley’s Houston Rockets had lost the night before, their season was over, and he was sitting at home sulking. Jordan had a plan.
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“I’m coming to get you. We’re going to go play some golf,” Jordan told him, according to Barkley. “The season’s over, you need to get away.”
“And in four hours, he picked me up at the private airport right by my house on his private jet,” Barkley said on GOLF’s Subpar podcast in 2020. “And I get on there, and Darrell Walker’s on there, and he said something I’ll never forget. He says, ‘We can’t mess this up.”
Barkley and Jordan grew close as Dream Team teammates at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and it survived even Jordan’s Bulls beating Barkley’s Suns in the 1993 Finals. For more than two decades, Barkley said, Jordan was “like a brother.”
Which makes what came next hard.
How Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley fell out
In 2012, Jordan was the majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, who went 7–59 that season, the worst winning percentage in NBA history. On ESPN 1000’s Waddle & Silvy, Barkley said Jordan needed to stop “hiring them kiss-a–es, and his best friends.”
He later recalled exactly what he said. “Michael, I love him like a brother, but he’s never going to be successful as a general manager,” Barkley said. “When you’re famous, the No. 1 thing you got to do is surround yourself with people who hold you accountable.”
This could include longtime friends such as Rod Higgins, who was hired as the President of Basketball Operations, or Fred Whitfield, who became COO under Jordan’s reign.
However, the broader critique had more to do with Jordan’s inner circle. Charles Barkley argued that rich and famous players such as Jordan often don’t have people who are “ever going to tell you no.”
Therefore, he recommended that Jordan surround himself with people who had his best interests in mind. However, the basketball legend was deeply offended by his comments on the public broadcast.
Jordan didn’t take it well. “And he is m’fing me up and down… and that’s the last time we spoke,” Barkley said.
It stayed that way for more than a decade. The man who reunited them was former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Vince Coleman. While golfing with Jordan at The Grove, his private course in Florida, Coleman called Barkley and told them it was time to talk.
“We’re both too stubborn to pick up the phone, to be honest with you,” Barkley said on Waddle & Silvy in April. “I got a lot of love for you, and you got a lot of love for me.”
By July, Barkley was even more direct. “We were great friends, brothers for a long time, and both of us [were] being selfish and stupid,” he said on Pardon My Take. He added that he planned to go down to Jordan’s course “and play with him for a couple of days.”
There has been no update on it yet. However, it seems that, after 14 years, Jordan and Barkley are looking to play golf again.