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

when the season’s over, ’cause you can’t change it today. If you can play, if you go out there and perform and we play and have a good season, you’ll always get your money in the end.” All this “I’m a free agent, let me see what I can get on the open market” stuff, or “I can get the max if they’ll let my agent work out a sign-and-trade.” When you’ve got your best players talking about that stuff, you’ve got a problem.
    And Michael probably deserves more credit for keeping that stuff out of the mix than anybody, because he was a guy who was clearly underpaid for the first ten years of his career, but never bitched or talked about any of it. And guys had to fall in line behind him on that issue. How are they going to bring that up in a locker room if Michael didn’t? If the best player in the league handles that privately, and sends a signal publicly that he’s going to give them—the fans—their money’s worth first and foremost, then guys around the league have to pretty much follow his lead. I think that’s an important part of greatness, believing that if you make yourself the best you can be, you will be compensated. And not the other way around.
    Johnny Miller said something real crazy during an NBC golf telecast one day. He said that Tiger’s under no pressure out there because he already had his financial life set, everything in place. I think it’s the total opposite. Look at all these young boys now, in every sport, individual and team sports, who play a few years and get out. They get all the money early and they lose their obsession and after a few years they just don’t have it in ’em to go out there and work as hard as they did earlier. Money isn’t what Tiger’s playing for. Hell yeah, he wants it and deserves it. But it can’t be what he’s playing for. His motivation runs so much deeper than that. The pressure on Tiger, like the pressure on Michael, is to be the greatest ever every time he steps to the tee or stands over a putt.

Scams and Double
Standards
    The punishment for priests who confess to having had sex with minors, and for priests proven to have had sex with minors is really simple:
    They ought to be put in jail.
    I want to make sure I’m clear on my position on what should happen to grown men who have sex with children. They should be convicted and thrown in jail.
    Thrown.
    In.
    Jail.
    What we seem to do best now is hold hearings or convene meetings. We don’t need meetings to figure this out. The Catholic Church shouldn’t spend another minute or another dollar gathering bishops together in Rome or flying cardinals in from all over the world. If you’re having sex with little kids, you need to be taken not only out of the church, but off the streets. We, as a society, can’t spend one minute hiding behind political correctness on this one. If your ass is caught having sex with a minor, you’re a pedophile and you’ve got to serve jail time.
    I guess if R. Kelly had become a priest he’d be fine because then he’d be protected from the laws that any other pedophile is subject to.
    We don’t need to adopt any more policies. We don’t need to have any more conferences. The Catholic Church needs to stand for children and decency and the U.S. government ought to start prosecuting people and putting their asses in jail. The people who knew about children being sexually abused by priests and protected them ought to be prosecuted as accomplices and be subject to jail time. Law enforcement officials shouldn’t even be leaving punishment up to the church. When did the United States start letting criminal acts against little kids go unprosecuted? The same church that opposes gay marriages and abortion rights has priests who sexually abuse children and does nothing but hold conferences?
    I’m sorry, this is a zero-tolerance situation. How can you claim the moral authority any church needs if the people who are supposed to be leading the church are violating