#OLYMPIC CHARLES BARKLEY SHOES FREE#

He led the East to a 116–114 win over the West with 17 points and 22 rebounds, the most rebounds in an All-Star Game since Wilt Chamberlain recorded 22 in 1967. His fifth straight All-Star Game appearance proved to be his best yet. His exceptional play continued into his seventh season, where he averaged 27.6 points on. Barkley averaged 24.7 points and 15.5 rebounds in another postseason loss. He helped Philadelphia win 53 regular-season games, only to lose to the Chicago Bulls in a five-game Eastern Conference Semi-finals series. He was named to the All-NBA First Team for the third consecutive year and earned his fourth All-Star selection. He averaged 25.2 points and 11.5 rebounds per game and a career-high. He was named Player of the Year by The Sporting News and Basketball Weekly. The two developed something of a bond in the years that followed, as the elbow made Coimbra a big deal in Angola.During the 1989–90 season, despite receiving more first-place votes, Barkley finished second in MVP voting behind the Los Angeles Lakers' Magic Johnson. The same went for Coimbra, who had refuted Charles’s claim that he elbowed him before the incident, but still got a photo with him afterward. “He was right because you remember that some of these guys were literally asking to have their picture taken while the ball would go out-of-bounds, and they would want to put their arm around Charles Barkley, Michael Jordan, or Larry Bird and have their pictures taken with them.

“His answer was it would be almost disrespectful to them if we didn’t play at the level that they expected,” Costas said. Charles brushed aside the coverage on Coimbra, someone who he guessed “hasn’t eaten in a couple weeks,” as nothing more than “a figment of the American media’s imagination.” When asked by Bob Costas about whether the elbow was keeping with the ideals of the Olympics, Charles, who had joked how he thought Coimbra was “going to pull a spear on me,” said the hit was more like the ideal of the playground. Then, the hit on Coimbra turned into the talk of that first game. “Do you get the idea that, one way or another, he might cause an international incident?” Albert said of Charles.

#OLYMPIC CHARLES BARKLEY SHOES FREE#

In the early minutes of that first game against Angola, Marv Albert asked a question to Mike Fratello while Charles was at the free throw line.

“He was the most memorable person of the 1992 Olympics,” said Michael Wilbon. Two weeks later, he had taken over Barcelona.

It wasn’t even halftime of the first game and Charles Barkley had become the Ugly American of the 1992 Olympics, with all the aggression, arrogance, and entitlement that accompanied the decision to allow NBA players to compete at the Games. You Think You Know Bo? A New Book Shines a Light on the Legendary Athlete. The fact that Angola was at the Olympics at all was a stunning triumph. The nation’s unrest proved to be one of the more prominent proxy wars of the Cold War, which meant the United States had a keen interest in funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry and aid to the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola to help offset the Soviet Union’s funding of the ruling power, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. Angola, which was nearly twice the size of Texas, was eagerly awaiting its first multiparty elections as part of its democratization and peace process. Still, the question asked to Charles Barkley had to be answered: How much do you know about Angola?Īfter gaining independence from Portugal in 1975, the country, a prominent producer of oil and diamonds in sub-Saharan Africa, had been entrenched in a years-long civil war at the time of the 1992 Olympic Games. The Dream Team might have been, as commissioner David Stern put it, a legendary combination of the Kirov Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, and the Beatles. The following excerpt about Charles Barkley’s time with the Dream Team at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona is from Barkley: A Biographyby Timothy Bella and is reprinted courtesy of Hanover Square Press.

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