NBA Hall-of-Famer Charles Barkley has announced that in two years he will depart as host of the long-running TNT TV show “Inside the NBA” due to cancel culture, the Washington Times reported.
“It’s gotten so out of hand right now, I couldn’t imagine having to watch myself,” Barkley said on on Washington, DC-based sports-radio station WJFK. “You can’t even have fun nowadays without these jackasses trying to get you canceled and things like that.”
Barkley also articulated his frustration with the over-sensitivity of partisan activists and social-justice warriors around the league—and in the sports world generally.
In his opinion, cancel culture has sapped the joy out of his job, harming the chemistry between the hosts of the show.
According to Barkley, people who were once friends with each other now try to get each other fired.
“All we ever talk about behind the scenes now is, ‘Yo man, be careful going in this direction.’ We can’t even have fun any more,” Barkley said. “We’ve had fun all these years, and now all of a sudden in the last year and a half, everybody’s trying to get everybody fired and it really sucks.”
The “Round Mound of Rebound” also claimed that “a lot of our bosses are cowards” who bow to social pressure so that they, themselves, can avoid cancellation.
For example, studio executives have shut down Barkley’s decades-old and repeatedly used joke about obese women in the city of San Antonio, Texas, saying that they should “ease up on them churros.”
“They won’t even let me talk about San Antonio any more! You know, when I’m always talking about them big ol’ women down in San Antonio?” he said, referring to a city whose fans regularly mocked him when he was with the Phoenix Suns.
