WESTERN CONFERENCE PREVIEW : ROCKET FUEL : Barkley Figures to Make a Lot of Noise for Houston This Season

First he takes over your locker room, then your team, then your town.

Oops! There goes the first frontier.

“I need two tickets!” bare-chested Charles Barkley announces to his new Houston Rocket teammates in the San Diego Sports Arena’s tiny visitors’ dressing room before an exhibition. “I’ll pay you back in Sacramento!”

The other Houston players duck their heads. This used to be such a quiet team: mild-mannered Hakeem Olajuwon, soft-spoken Clyde Drexler and about eight guys out of the CBA happy to be anywhere. Who parked this sound truck in here?

“Bill!” Barkley yells to assistant coach Bill Berry, who is foolish enough to flash his two complimentary tickets. “Who those for? If they’re not for your wife, can I have them?”

“They’re for my wife’s friend,” says Berry, looking unhappy, a moth hoping this forest fire leaves him alone.

“That’s not important,” Barkley says. “What’s your wife going to do, leave you?”

They might as well get used to it. Everywhere they go, Mr. Sociability needs tickets. Everywhere he goes, he makes more friends. In New York the week before, he went to the China Club with the Yankees’ Cecil Fielder and Derek Jeter. Here he took in Junior Seau’s restaurant. He drinks with the athletes he identifies with, the sportswriters he reviles and the general public; if he gets into trouble, it’s because he’s out where trouble can find him and because he’s Charles.

As usual, he’s surrounded by reporters. Not only do his teammates have to listen to him, they have to watch him monopolize their press. If anyone wants to ask them anything these days, it’s something about Barkley. Dressing next to him is even worse, with the overflow around him stepping on their toes and Barkley using them for props in his jokes.

“First of all, Clyde should take that personal,” Barkley booms to the inevitable question about the team’s advanced age, making sure Drexler, 34, dressing next to him, can hear. “Man, that stuff don’t bother me. . . .

“It ain’t no big deal! We do have an old team! We got old-ass Clyde Drexler! We’re not sure how old Dream is!”

Olajuwon is 33, but the Rockets still picture him riding lions in the jungle rather than buses in Lagos, Nigeria, and joke about his age. Until Barkley came, they didn’t often do it to his face, but it’s a new, funnier day. They may have won titles in 1994 and 1995, but they’ve laughed more in a month with Barkley than they had in the ‘90s.

“Charlie’s a unique personality but a very nice guy,” Drexler says, amiably. “He’s very loud and boisterous in the locker room, but when it comes time to play, he’s right there.”

When Drexler was the franchise in Portland, he dressed in a cubicle with a pillar in front of it so the press couldn’t circle him if it tried. What’s he doing next to this human stereo speaker?

“They just put me there,” Drexler says, smiling. “Nobody else would go there.”

*

Then, he takes over your heart.

In case you missed it, there has been a change in this saga. In a league with Dennis Rodman and Isaiah Rider, with Jason Kidd and Jim Jackson feuding over a woman, et al., it’s hard to remember when Barkley was the reigning Bad Boy, when his forays into stands and misadventures in bars seemed to result in monthly invitations to the NBA office.

After four seasons in Phoenix, which started so well and ended so typically, it’s a different Barkley--a mellowed (for him, anyway), appreciated, establishment Barkley.

Who could have imagined after Barkley’s 1992 Angolan-elbowing incident that David Stern would invite him back to the Olympics? Who could have imagined as bad reviews cascaded upon the U.S. team at Atlanta that Barkley would become the elder statesman, laughing it off, holding his tongue and making it possible for the NBA players to escape with most of their dignity intact?

At 33, he’s a sure Hall of Famer and the last invariably accessible NBA superstar. Michael Jordan often doesn’t talk before games, even Magic Johnson took an occasional day off in his comeback, and forget the young players. But here it is, 1996, and Barkley still holds court every night before and after, entertaining the media, blasting the media, denying he’s outspoken, whatever it takes, until the notebooks are full and the tapes have run out.

Do you need a reply to the Lakers’ Cedric Ceballos’ assertion the Rockets are too old? Who you gonna call?

“I said, ‘Good, that’ll give the . . . reporters something to bug me about,” Barkley says. “I swear to God, that’s what I thought because y’all love . . . like that. Instead of writing about the game, you write about . . . like that.

“I swear to God on my momma’s life, that’s what I said, they’re going to run to me, trying to get me to say something about Cedric and go back and forth. When you been around long as me, you learn how the game works.

“I mean, Cedric’s got a good point. We got an old team. That ain’t no big deal to me. . . . But we’ll be there, brother. We won’t take no spring breaks in the middle of the season.”

He says NBC has promised him a job in which his free-wheeling sense of humor could make him bigger than he is now. Of course, he’s still a force on the court. His 23.2 points and 11.6 rebounds last season match his career averages. Without him, the Suns are over. With him, the Rockets, swept by Seattle in the Western Conference semifinals last season and about to be tossed on the junk heap of history, are embarking on a last hurrah.

The price was four players--Sam Cassell, Robert Horry, Chucky Brown and Mark Bryant--or half of last season’s eight-man rotation who accounted for almost 34 points and more than 19 rebounds a game. But Coach Rudy Tomjanovich, who made the deal, considered himself fortunate to get it.

“You look at the age of our remaining superstars,” Tomjanovich says, “and there’s a window.

“I just thought it was the right philosophy or the right reasoning to try to go out and get back in the championship run again.”

More than a hurrah is at stake. Rocket owner Les Alexander wants a new luxury box-lined arena and needs the negotiating leverage of a winning team. If Barkley keeps the Rockets among the elite teams, his impact in Houston could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

In Phoenix, the building was up and sold when Barkley arrived in 1992, but he kept it full and rollicking for four seasons. In his first, the Suns came within a last-second John Paxson jumper of forcing the Bulls into an NBA-final seventh game in America West Arena. By Barkley’s last season, Kevin Johnson was an occasional player, Danny Ainge was retired, Dan Majerle was in Cleveland and the Suns were at .500. When Barkley heard the team was shopping him, he was offended (he says) or eager to leave (they say). Both are probably right.

He announced a list of teams he’d go to and ripped Sun owner Jerry Colangelo for breaking up the team. Of course, this was mild compared to what Barkley put the 76ers through in his final days, when callers to Philadelphia talk radio shows split on racial lines. Wisely, Colangelo found the best deal he could and pulled the trigger.

“I just said don’t shop me around all summer and expect me to come there and everything’s fine,” Barkley says. “I understand it is part of the business, but they could have handled it differently.

“Like even Danny Ainge was telling me, he said, ‘I agree with you. Hey, when I was in Sacramento, they came to me and said we’re going to trade you to a contender, we just got to get something in return.’ You know, if the Suns would have come and did that, it would have been fine.”

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

“Look,” Sun Coach Cotton Fitzsimmons says, “Charles did his job. I don’t want anybody saying he didn’t. He came and only Michael Jordan wouldn’t let him win the title. Only Jordan. But it was a different team, it was Ainge and Majerle with Charles posting up, so we had great shooters. At the end of Charles’ career, it was not the same team. The shooters were not there. . . .

“Charles wanted to leave, you all heard him on national TV, you know the Suns, you know Jerry Colangelo, you know he runs a good franchise. Charles wanted to leave and we gave him his wish. . . .

“He did that in Philly. I know Charles. What did I read yesterday? He’s going to do two more years, do NBC and then be governor of Alabama. [Reaching into his pocket for his money clip.] Now, I don’t know how much I got in here--but I think there’s some hundreds in there--and if Charles Barkley’s the governor of Alabama, if you’ll bet me $1 against that, you’ll have all that some day, OK?

“But I love him. I love to hear him talk. That part, I miss about him. That part I miss. But it was time for him. It was time in Philly; it was time here.”

*

Of course, Barkley has never played with a center like Olajuwon or a peer like Drexler, so even if the Rockets are old and thin and don’t know who their point guard is, this could be his chance.

Or maybe his best chance has come and gone. There is a convention in sport that says an athlete is unfulfilled if he hasn’t won a championship. This is nonsense--what are fame and riches, nothing?--but it gives everyone a question to ask and the athletes generally play along.

Except for this athlete.

“You know,” Barkley says, “I’ve been reading about how much a championship means to me. Hey, it’d be great to win a championship, don’t get me wrong. But God, c’mon! I have to look at the big picture.

“When I try to tell people that, they won’t believe me. For some reason, they think they know what I’m thinking. . . . I mean, I’m a little kid from Leeds, Alabama, and I have to look at everything I’ve accomplished in my life. My life is an accomplishment. Me winning another few games and getting a ring, that won’t be an accomplishment to me. That will be a team accomplishment, but I have to look at my individual accomplishment as my life. Your life is your accomplishment, not trophies and rings and money and things like that.

“I mean, you think about this: I’m a little kid from a town with a couple hundred people, and I grew up to be Charles Barkley.”

Maybe he’ll never be governor (he’s not deeply enmeshed in the process yet; he didn’t register to vote in Arizona), but it’s not just a joke. He’d like to be able to go on television and tell black children in Alabama about the big, wide world waiting for them beyond their little towns. Maybe there’s one like he was 20 years ago, a chubby kid raised by his grandmother in a hamlet of a few hundred, figuring he’ll make it through high school and get a job like everyone else, who’ll wake to his voice.

Imagine that, Charles Barkley at 33, reflective and thankful.

Who needs to be governor? Who needs an NBA title? He grew up to be Charles Barkley! Who could have imagined any of it?

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Charles in Charge

A look at Charles Barkley’s career statistics:

*--*

YEAR, TEAM FG% FT% REB AST PTS 1984-85, Phila. .545 .733 8.6 1.9 14.0 1985-86, Phila. .572 .685 12.8 3.9 20.0 1986-87, Phila. .594 .761 14.6 4.9 23.0 1987-88, Phila. .587 .751 11.9 3.2 28.3 1988-89, Phila. .579 .753 12.5 4.1 25.8 1989-90, Phila. .600 .749 11.5 3.9 25.2 1990-91, Phila. .570 .722 10.1 4.2 27.6 1991-92, Phila. .552 .695 11.1 4.1 23.1 1992-93, Pho. .520 .765 12.2 5.1 25.6 1993-94, Pho. .495 .704 11.2 4.6 21.6 1994-95, Pho. .486 .748 11.1 4.1 23.0 1995-96, Pho. .500 .777 11.6 3.7 23.2 Totals .550 .738 11.6 3.9 23.3

*--*

* 76ers in the three years before Barkley: 175-71 (.711)

* 76ers in first three years with Barkley: 157-89 (.638)

* Suns in the three years before Barkley: 162-84 (.659)

* 76ers in first three years with Barkley: 177-69 (.720)