I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It by Charles Barkley Page B

were happy for Tiger that day, or in awe of what he did. I know black people who do backbreaking work every day of their lives, work like that for forty, fifty years trying to make a better life. But sadly they never get the chance to be successful on a big stage or even on a small stage doing something they love to do. And sometimes they can’t completely identify with what some successful black people have gone through just to reach that level.
    I looked at Lee Elder, having been the first black man to play in the Masters, with tears in his eyes and I was trying to imagine just how deep his happiness was for Tiger. You know Lee Elder knew better than probably anybody else what Tiger had to go through, and he probably had more of an appreciation for what Tiger did than anybody else. That was so significant to me, just unbelievable. All the brothers in the Houston Rockets locker room that Sunday were just entranced sitting there watching the final round of the Masters. I don’t think we knew where we were or what we were doing for those few hours. Tiger had what seemed like a 50-shot lead and stayed perfect on every shot. But we were hanging on every swing and every putt, like he was clinging to a one-shot lead.
    You relive it when you’re around other people and the topic comes up, Tiger and the Masters. And people who may not feel the same way have asked me, “Why were you so nervous when Tiger had such a big lead and nobody was threatening to challenge him?” And I remind them that this was 1997, one year after Greg Norman lost his final-round lead at the Masters. Every single shot that day, I’m thinking about Greg’s collapse the previous year. Man, I almost cried for Greg Norman. It was so hard to watch. Some of my friends at CBS told me Ben Crenshaw broke down and cried watching that. Oh man, that broke my heart that day for that to happen to Greg Norman.
    If that had happened to Tiger . . . man . . . I can’t even think about it now. It would have been . . . just terrible . . . too terrible to even think about. But it didn’t. We couldn’t take our eyes off the TV, just sat there and watched every shot, and soaked up every moment of it as if it were happening to one of us. What a great day. That set a whole lot of stuff in motion, didn’t it?

If You Don’t Win a
Championship . . .
    When Ted Williams passed away in the summer of 2002, it brought about a lot of fascinating reflection and it made me think about how people perceive athletes’ careers.
    Obviously, in retirement Ted Williams was simply a very good guy. Even though he retired three years before I was born, I appreciated him because of his support for Negro League players who had been banned from playing with him in the major leagues. I’ve read excerpts of interviews and seen clips of speeches that showed he was about inclusion and integration and recognizing everybody’s talents back when baseball didn’t want any part of black and Latin players. And even beyond that, in recent times, you knew Ted Williams had to be a really good guy because of the way modern-day players embraced him, and the way he embraced them. The way they surrounded him at that All-Star Game in Boston a few years ago told you how much the people in his profession thought of him.
    What’s interesting is that in his retirement, when he became the elder statesman of the game, people hardly ever mentioned that he never won a championship with the Red Sox. I had forgotten he hadn’t won one until I started reading and watching the obituaries after he died. I mean, I know the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series since 1918, and Ted’s career went from 1939 to 1960, so obviously he didn’t win a World Series. But I’d forgotten about it because nobody tried to diminish him because he hadn’t won a World Series. I’ve read that people brought it up during his career, when he was perceived by a lot of people as being a bad guy, but since he was clearly a good guy for