Charles Barkley’s remarkable Hall of Fame career is enough to make a lot of players jealous, but one of the most fascinating things about him is that he was one of the best power forwards of his era despite being undersized. At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Chuck wasn’t your typical power forward.
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Barkley didn’t start out as a Hall of Fame-level player. He wasn’t considered elite in school either, at least not according to his coach, who thought he was only good enough to be a backup point guard.
On the Pardon My Take podcast, the Philadelphia 76ers legend was asked about his miraculous growth spurt between his junior and senior years. He laughed and joked that the spurt single-handedly changed the position he played on the court.
“Yeah, I was a bad, a 5’10 backup chubby point guard, and I grew from 5’10 to 6’5 in one year,” he joked. Funnily enough, despite gaining six inches in a summer, Chuck didn’t actually feel that much taller. “I knew I had grown a little bit, I didn’t know I had grown that much. So I went from being a chubby backup point guard to a 6’5 All-State player, so it was a great time,” he added.
Barkley will always be remembered as an MVP-caliber power forward, but some of the best parts of his game came from the experience of being relatively undersized for his position. His early years as a point guard helped him become one of the better passers among forwards. In 2021, he even spoke about how his sudden growth spurt led him to play center for a while, which in turn sharpened his post-game.
“I moved to the center position and had to learn more about the angles because I was going against guys who were taller than me. I had to go lateral to attack them,” he said, which does explain a lot about his prime years.
Chuck wasn’t scared of attacking big guys. Because he had learned from an early age that they simply did not have the lateral movement speed to keep up with him.
