What is Charles Barkley’s beef with San Francisco — and is it finally squashed?

Perhaps the first question that elbows to the front of every Warriors fan’s mind each time Charles Barkley comes to town is this: Is it a bit? 

Ten years ago, amid the shocking initial ascent of the Golden State Warriors’ 2015 title run, Barkley — the Hall-of-Fame NBA forward, provocateur, and Emmy-winning co-host of TNT’s “Inside the NBA” — pejoratively called the Warriors a “jump-shooting” team that would never win an NBA title. Of course, the Warriors went on to become the most influential basketball dynasty of the modern era; today, almost every team in the NBA could be rightly called “a jump-shooting team.” But this did little to temper Barkley’s antagonism. In fact, it conflagrated it. 

In the years that followed, Barkley proceeded to make jauntily hating on the Warriors — as well as, pointedly, the region and people the team represents — a tentpole of his TV persona. He likened San Francisco to “hell” and labelled it a city of “homeless crooks” that you can’t visit without “a bullet-proof vest.” In January, ahead of the 2025 NBA All Star Game — held over the weekend at events across the Bay Area — he called San Francisco a “rat-infested place.” 

“San Francisco is not a beautiful city,” he continued. “Y’all are not gonna make me like San Francisco.”

Yet, as recently as the Thursday before All-Star Weekend, he told an audience inside Pier 48 that he actually likes San Francisco but asserted the city needs “to do something about the homeless. They need the help.” The crowd booed, and Barkley promptly betrayed what scanned like a more honest sentiment. “See?” he said. “I said, ‘Help the homeless,’ and these people are so stupid they booed me.”

Residents are told not to take all this too seriously — because, indeed, it’s just a bit. “Come on,” David Aldridge, the sports columnist and longtime friend of Barkley, told me the Saturday morning of All-Star Weekend, when I pressed him on the matter during practice in Oakland. “I think everyone needs to relax a bit. Chuck likes to have fun. You think what he says about San Francisco is bad? Look up what he’s said about San Antonio.”

The problem, of course, is that labeling something “a bit” does little to lessen its psychic impact — or its reputational toll. “When you do something 10 years running, it goes from being a bit to something you believe,” Dan Dibley, a sports talk radio host at 95.7 The Game, told me. “San Francisco, like any other major city, has struggles, but for him to go up there and say what he says, it makes people mad. It makes me mad. He distorts reality.” 

Like all good insults, Barkley’s caricatures of San Francisco contain kernels of truth. But coming from a figure so charismatic and influential — and aren’t all the most effective bullies charismatic and influential? — they reinforce bad-faith stereotypes about the city, which corrode its reputation and stick maddeningly in the residential craw.

“It hurts my soul to hear Charles Barkley criticize the city,” Joe Shasky, one of Dibley’s colleagues at 95.7, professed several weeks ago. He was interviewing San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, who concurred. “You know it, I know it: we’ve got our issues,” Lurie said. “We’re working day and night to clean up Sixth Street, to get people the help they need. When I hear outsiders talking smack about us, it gets me worked up. They don’t know us like we know our city. I’m sick and tired of outsiders telling San Franciscans what we are and what we aren’t.” 

So it is that many Bay Area residents have rejected Aldridge’s advice. It doesn’t matter if Barkley’s joking; he’s a jerk for the joke. 

Still others have taken it a step further. This was clear Saturday outside Chase Center. Behind the makeshift “Inside the NBA” stage where Barkley and his co-hosts were shortly to be filming, a bloodthirsty crowd of locals had assembled, buzzing and eager to exercise their grievances. As the show’s co-hosts appeared, just before Barkley took his seat, the crowd broke into a loud, hard-angled chant of “Fuck you, Chuck! Fuck you, Chuck!” These were not the complaints of the bullied about a bad joke. Rather, they revealed the true role that Warriors fans have cast for Barkley — not just a bully, but a preeminent cultural villain. 

I’ll admit to empathizing with the horde. I grew up a Warriors fan. I have lived in the Bay Area most of my life. And I love it. However my family didn’t move here until I was 6. Before then, we lived in Phoenix. We were Suns fans, and we loved Barkley, who led the team to the 1993 NBA Finals. We loved him for his playing style, which combined pit-bull ferocity with a kind of pinball fearlessness. (Barkley, who is 6-foot-6 — short for a power forward — and preternaturally chubby, played with a dynamism that felt somehow populist, like he was playing for the misshapen little guy everywhere.) But we also loved him for the traits that would make him so effective on TV and as a troll: his outspokenness and honesty, which he harmonized with his natural humor and charm.

As his biographer Timothy Bella describes it, Barkley — who grew up poor in Leeds, Alabama — can “befriend anyone from anywhere, from Ric Flair and Guy Fieri to Lin Wang.” (Wang, a cat-litter scientist from Iowa, met Barkley in a bar in Sacramento. Wang was in town for business; Barkley for a charity event. Wang asked Barkley for a picture. Barkley invited Wang to join him at the bar. They ended up hanging out for four hours and were friends until Wang died in 2018.) 

What we loved most about Barkley, however, was that he was all these things — fearless athlete, audacious firebrand, truth-teller — for us. Sure, he said and did things that people elsewhere found uncouth. Sure, he could be a bully. He was also ours. In Phoenix, which had not had many sports heroes before Barkley, that went a long way. 

That image was by and large sustained, even after my family moved to the Bay Area and Barkley transitioned from star athlete to international celebrity. But then Barkley started up his grudge against the Warriors, and started turning his every mention of the Bay Area into a lukewarm Jesse Watters impression, and the image cracked. Watching him on TV I found newly bewildering. It felt a bit like catching a childhood hero in repose, out of costume, revealed suddenly as ugly and dim. I found it easy, in this way, to switch tack and take up arms in defense of team and town — as a citizen and a fan.

Even at our most aggrieved, however, a rankling uncertainty remains. Is Barkley really deserving of all this mental energy and scorn — is he actually a jerk, a bully, a villain — or are we taking all this just way too seriously? 

That, in my view, was one of the chief journalistic opportunities of All-Star Weekend: the opportunity for someone to find out for real. As it would happen, Barkley would reveal much on his own. 

***

Friday afternoon, I received a phone call from Gina M. Fromer, president and CEO of Glide Memorial Church, one of San Francisco’s biggest providers of services and assistance for the homeless. Several weeks earlier, I’d accepted a challenge from my editor at The Standard to be the journalist who pinned down Barkley’s motivations. I had, by that point, tried everything I could think of to get in touch with Barkley and had failed spectacularly. 

Through shameless begging, I’d managed to obtain Barkley’s number and sent him several obnoxious text messages. I’d stalked the “Inside the NBA on TNT” sets inside Pier 48 and Thrive City. I’d asked NBA executives and certain All-Stars themselves, in all the moments they were made available to the media over the weekend. I’d asked The Standard’s Kevin V. Nguyen, who was reporting on the many sponsored parties the NBA and its affiliates were hosting over the weekend, to let me know if he spotted Barkley at any of them, so I could dash over and try intercepting him. None of it had been any help. I had no idea where Barkley might be. 

Then I got that call from Fromer. It turns out, Barkley had spent the day at Glide, touring the foundation’s facility, serving meals, and meeting with staff. 

“He was so curious about Glide’s history,” Fromer told me. “He saw all the work we were doing. He served food in the kitchen. He spoke with people in line. It felt warm. It felt authentic. It didn’t feel phony. He asked so many questions. It wasn’t the Charles Barkley you see on TV. He seemed authentic and was taking pictures with everyone. Before he left, he asked: Dr. Gina, if there’s one thing I can do for you, what would it be? I said help me buy this building so I can house 80 families. He said he’d think about it and would be following up.”

Fromer’s depiction of Barkley — externally acerbic but warm, authentic, friendly, and generous in person — tracked with others provided by people close to Barkley.

“He’s definitely not a jerk,” Bella, the biographer, told me Friday inside Harmonic Brewing. “When you learn more about who he is and where he comes from, you understand why what he says might come off as a little harsh, but you also see how he always shows up for his people, and always puts his money where his mouth is.” 

Shirley Wang, daughter of Lin Wang and a journalist who wrote a viral article about Barkley’s friendship with her father, told me the same thing. So did Aldridge. 

“Most guys are assholes who want you to think they’re good guys,” Aldridge said. “Chuck’s a good guy who wants you to think he’s an asshole.”

By Saturday afternoon, ahead of that evening’s live taping of “Inside the NBA,” I’d begun thinking that maybe I had the wrong impression of Barkley. I’d learned that after volunteering at Glide on Friday afternoon, Barkley had spoken at length with Lurie at a fundraiser hosted by TNT’s Kenny Smith; they’d talked about other things Barkley could do to help the city. 

Still, I wasn’t completely convinced — or, rather, I wasn’t ready to forgive Barkley for his decade of denigration — until the taping began. I’d camped outside the “Inside the NBA” stage for several hours awaiting his arrival. I’d waited as the mob of Warriors fans — most without the means to buy the $500 ticket to that evening’s Slam Dunk Contest, meaning they were there solely to harass Barkley — assembled around me. But near the end of the show, over the chorus of hecklers, Barkley shared what he’d been up to: meeting with Fromer, the mayor. He reiterated for the second time that weekend that he in fact thought San Francisco was a great city. And he revealed that, to help the city, he’d decided to donate $250,000 to Glide and was committing to working with the organization and Lurie to effect change here. 

It was the first time most in the crowd had heard any of it, and slowly at first, but then seemingly all at once, the jeers and chants stopped, replaced by applause. 

Minutes later I got a text from Glide’s PR team. They hadn’t known Barkley was making the donation; they’d learned of it on TV. 

“We had no idea,” the text read. “We are so surprised and honored.”

I didn’t end up talking to Barkley after the show; he was whisked away too quickly for that. But it no longer seemed to me as essential. He’d offered enough. And I had, as a reporter and as a fan, some re-evaluating to do. 

That project is ongoing. I still believe it the duty of the diehard to stand up for their team and city when someone assails the character of either. But Bella was right; Barkley had put his money where his mouth is. And as All-Star Weekend wrapped up — unceremoniously, by all reports — I found his actions did much to recontextualize the beef he’d carried on with my team and city over the past decade. He’s not a jerk, and even if he’s been playing one for 10 years, he appears ready to play something else now.

If All-Star Weekend was his last performance, it was arguably his best. The climax might have been his announcement of the Glide donation, but the best part had come earlier, before he’d reiterated his newfound understanding of San Francisco, when the horde assembled outside Chase Center had been at its most violent and hungry. 

Barkley, not missing a beat, slowly swiveled in his chair so that he was facing the crowd, and so that the television cameras could not see his hands, and slowly presented two middle fingers — his lips curled devilishly at the corners. It was, in retrospect, pitch perfect. You finally had to give it to him. It was a hell of a bit.