It's Halloween, and Charles Barkley starts his career as a talk-show host today.
I'm not sure which is scarier.
The live, half-hour interview show (Thursdays at 5 p.m. on TNT) isn't just about sports. As a matter of fact, Sir Charles' first guest is comedian/sitcom star Bernie Mac.
And Barkley won't be going solo. Apparently, the powers-that-be at TNT knew he'd need more than a few assists, so longtime sports studio host Ernie Johnson is on the team. Which finishes off the show's title — "Listen Up! Charles Barkley with Ernie Johnson."
"It's going to be fun," Barkley said. "We just have to make sure it works."
What will either make it work or not work is Barkley's always out-there personality. And he's promising he won't hold back on the air.
"Most people know that everything I say I'm trying to get a direct response," he said in a teleconference. "I never look at myself as wild or out of control. The only people who are scared think I'm going to offend them. I'll stand by anything I've ever said in my life. I'm happy with my personality."
And there seems to be little chance that we're going to get anything other than the always-opinionated Barkley on "Listen Up!" As he proved when asked to respond to being described in the New York Times Magazine as "a wild child who will say or do whatever crosses his trip-wired mind."
"You can't believe anything you read from those idiots in New York," Barkley said. "All of them are idiots. . . . Lots of idiots up there. Most of the guys in New York, they treated Patrick Ewing badly, so I can't stand them anyway.
"But I'm not going to censor myself ever. I'm not saying that I'm right all the time, but they don't censor anybody else. They don't censor the guys they have on CNN. . . . Bill O'Reilly can say what he wants to, why do they have to censor me? I'm not going to let them censor me. I'm going to say what I think is important, and people are either going to like it or dislike it. We don't censor all these other people who are on television. Patrick Buchanan — every time he speaks, I shudder. But for some reason if people get offended when I say certain things, I guess maybe I make them nervous because I might be telling the truth."
OK, we get it. There will be no censoring Charles Barkley. I, for one, wouldn't want to be the person to try to get him to tone down.
As for opinions, Barkley has no lack of them. Including:
On politicians: "Right now we have the Democrats and Republicans acting like idiots, trying to figure out should we or should we not attack Iraq. . . . Most people don't care about Iraq. We want good jobs, we want our kids to go to good schools, we want to stop crime, and these guys who are paid to run the country, they get on TV every night."
On getting into politics: "I'm not sure I want to be governor anymore. I've been doing some research. You only make $88,000 a year as governor of Alabama, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I don't need the headache of working 365 days a year. It's not worth the headache for that type of money."
On Alabama diction: "I like to ask people the questions the way I like to ask, so they can't give me any B.S. answers. Ask, not ax like everybody in Alabama says. Use the 'k,' because I'm not country anymore."
On former President Bill Clinton, who he'd like to have on his show: "People care more about his sex stuff, which I don't care about. The man is brilliant and I enjoy listening to him, it'd be a pleasure to talk to him."
On politics and the media: "We all know that JFK fooled around, and he's considered a great, great president. For some reason, whatever Bill Clinton did, that's his own business, and he's considered a bad guy. I want to know how the media and the public have the right to dictate, if they both did the same thing, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy?"
On corporate scandals: "All of these people work their entire lives, then lose their life savings and are unemployed, we want those CEOs to go to jail. . . . Why don't we seize all their assets? To me, these guys are worse than drug dealers or killers because they ruin people's lives to a way greater extent. . . . Regular criminals don't get to go to Congress. They put your (butt) in jail. I know first hand. They didn't ask me if I wanted to plead the Fifth before they put those handcuffs on me a few times. They took me right to jail."
On the driving/legal problems of the Vikings' Randy Moss: "The best way to say this is it's just idiotic. That situation that just happened is idiotic. . . . Nobody can defend Randy Moss. If you defend Randy Moss, you have to look in the mirror and say, 'What am I doing?' "
On the U.S. basketball team losing at the World Championships: "It was a disgrace, they played terrible and are typical young guys."
On a certain tennis star he'd like to have as a guest: "Anna Kournikova, because she looks good. She's not worth (expletive), but she looks good."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com