“From Friday afternoon to Sunday night, it was gambling, fights, drinking. It was a fight every weekend.” This isn’t Charles Barkley referring to the off-court controversies that embroiled his NBA career. It’s his memory of the unique side hustle that ran out of his childhood home in Leeds, Alabama.
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“I’m like a very young kid at this point when this thing first started… Me and my grandmother, we were kind of like pseudo-bartenders,” the Hall of Famer shared on former NFL linebacker Tim Green’s podcast ‘Nothing Left Unsaid‘.
The makeshift bar running out of his home was a means to supplement income for the family. Sir Charles would make runs to the liquor store for beers while his grandmother, Johnnie Mae Edwards, poured cocktails and shots for their local patrons.
Though the early introduction to this lifestyle would impact Charles during his NBA career, he holds no regrets or contempt about his family’s creative solution to making ends meet. “I always say my grandma is the greatest person in my life, but this is how cool she was,” he added on the podcast.
“So, one weekend, my idiot damn friends talked me into stealing a six-pack. So, I put six beers in my pants and I get, about, 20 yards away from the house and I hear my grandmother say, ‘Charles, bring your a** back here.’ And then, it was about 9 o’clock at night so I pushed the beers down my pants leg,” the 1993 NBA MVP revealed.
Much to Chuck’s chagrin, the cans wouldn’t remain there. “You can hear beer rolling on asphalt,” Barkley described. “But this is how cool my grandmother was, guys. She says, ‘Now, go enjoy those beers. And I’m gonna beat the hell out of you when you get back home.’”
He added how those six beers were the best drinks of his life because of the beating he had to endure for them.
Charles Barkley’s grandmother played a pivotal role in his life
Johnnie Mae Edwards lived to see her grandson’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. By Charles’ own account, she was a big part of the reason he ever became the player he was. “My grandmother, man, she was father, general, soldier. She was hard… And she thought she was a coach,” Barkley told Eli Manning on his podcast in 2023.
“I’d get a phone call, whether it was in college, even in the NBA, ‘Boy, you embarrassing this damn family. How in the hell can you play a whole basketball game and not get 10 rebounds?’,” he recalled.
Since her passing in 2009, Charles has frequently credited her for the various ways in which she influenced his life. But her biggest legacy might be in her grandson’s dominance on the glass.
“That was her motto, ‘Hey, you get at least 10 rebounds every single night. That’s what got you to the NBA. If you don’t get double-digits rebounds every night, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.’”
It’s a good thing Barkley listened to his grandmother. In 1,073 regular season games, he grabbed 10 or more rebounds 729 times. That means that if he was suiting up, there was a 68% chance Chuck would end the night with at least 10 boards. During his 16-season pro career, Barkley would end up grabbing 12,546 rebounds. It’s the 19th highest mark in NBA history, achieved in large part, due to the insistence of Johnnie Mae Edwards.
