'Social Expert' Charles Barkley And 'GAC': Chuckles Strikes Again With Talk Of 'Tila Tequila,' 'The Kardashians' And ... The Mavs' Shawn Marion?!

   So Randy Galloway is hosting his legendary 103.3 ESPN Radio talk show and he’s got himself a guest … It’s Charles Barkley! Now, I swore off Chuckles as a social commentator worth being taken seriously last winter, when he was arrested for drunkenly chasing what Mr. Randy might call an “Arizona road lizard.’’ So as Barkley talked about Jerry Sloan and the Hall of Fame and about traveling Australia with Russell Crowe and such, I barely paid attention.

   But when “NBA expert’’ Barkley broached the name of new Dallas Mavericks player Shawn Marion – and somehow found himself bumdling The Matrix with “those nutty Kardashian people’’ and “that bisexual girl Tila Tequila’’ – I listened more closely. …

   “Hold on,’’ Barkley said, jumping into a question. “I want to make this point. … It’s never (acceptable) with (singer) Chris Brown. It’s never acceptable to put your hands on a woman. I just got to say that you know when you read the ‘crawl’ on the dude? Shawn Marion? Oh man, you can’t do that!

   The expert Barkley kept rambling on: “And I am like, ‘I have heard that name Tila Tequila before.’ And I asked my daughter; she loves the trash TV. She watched Flava Flav, she watched those nutty Kardashian people. I asked my girl, ‘Who is Tila Tequila?’  She said, ‘Dad, she is a bisexual girl on that show where she dates men and women.’

    And he kept going: “You are kidding me, right? He went for that? I wanted to say, ‘Bro, you are Shawn Marion!’ ‘I’m Shawn Marion and I don’t have to get my girls off of reality TV!’ Bro, you don’t get woman off of reality television!’’

   Well, it was all very Chuckles. Irreverent and passionate and innately funny.

   But it was also all very Chuckles because, of course, this “expert’’ in all matters NBA and beyond … lacked either the care or the knowledge to draw a verbal distinction between the basketball player Shawn Marion and the football player Shawne Merriman.

   At one point, one of the GAC boys skillfully corrected Barkley, but the irresponsibility was out of the bag … and Chuckles rambled on to explain how much better Merriman is than Reggie Bush and what Australia is like when Russell Crowe is your guide and who is the best NBA player ever and why Sloan chose him to give his HOF induction speech. …

   But I really didn’t pay attention to any of that. Barkley’s judgmental track record on all these stories and all these opinions is, for me, less than weighty and less than reliable.

   We all love Chuck. Right? I don’t trust him to know Reggie Bush from Barbara Bush, I don’t trust him to know Australia from Austin, I don’t trust him to know Jerry Sloan from Jerry Mathers and now, officially, I don’t trust "NBA expert'' and "social commentator'' Charles Barkley to know Shawne Merriman from Shawn Marion.

The DB.com Store: New designs, "The UberMan,'' "Fish For Lunch'' and "The DUST Chip''!

Follow us at twitter.com/fishsports

Discuss this story at DB.com Boards

929am sept 18 2009