Culture
Charles Barkley to entertain deals if TNT doesn't honor contract
Charles Barkley will either remain with TNT Sports on his 10-year, $210 million contract or he will listen to offers from ESPN, NBC and Amazon Prime Video as he reconsiders retirement, he told The Athletic on Friday.
“My deal is 10 years, $210 million,” Barkley said in a phone interview. “Turner has to come to me ASAP and they have to guarantee my whole thing or they can offer me a pay cut, which there is no chance of that happening and I’ll be (a) free agent.
“My thing was, ‘Wait, y’all f— up, I didn’t f— up, why do I have to take a pay cut?”
Barkley is in the third year of his deal.
The NBA announced this week new deals worth a total of $77 billion over 11 years with incumbent ESPN and newcomers NBC and Amazon. In the process, the NBA rejected TNT Sports’ matching rights. TNT Sports filed a suit against the league in hopes of taking over Amazon’s deal, it announced Friday.
“I wouldn’t want them to sue,” Barkley said. “The NBA clearly wanted to break up with us. I don’t want to be in a relationship where I have to sue somebody to be in it. That makes zero sense.
“If you have to sue somebody to stay in a relationship, do you think that is a healthy relationship?”
TNT Sports statement on NBA media rights: pic.twitter.com/C14DPCJ65P
— TNT Sports U.S. PR (@TNTSportsUS) July 26, 2024
Earlier Friday, Barkley released a statement through Bleacher Report saying that he didn’t feel the NBA wanted to do a deal with TNT Sports, which has had a relationship with the league for nearly four decades.
“It’s going to all go to streaming in 11 years,” Barkley told The Athletic. “I think this is just a cash grab, but they needed streaming because in 11 years nobody’s going to be able to afford these rights but streaming.
“They’re kind of getting their cake and eating it, too. They got ESPN and NBC and they got streaming.”
During the NBA Finals, Barkley, 61, said he planned to retire. He is not fully backing off those statements, but his ears will be open if he is not paid in full by TNT Sports.
Barkley said he has talked with ESPN, NBC and Amazon for the last couple of months.
“Right now, I’m planning on retiring,” Barkley said. “I’m not trying to do anything.”
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Barkley said he would be “stupid” not to listen and informed the entities of his plans, but he wanted them to have their packages squared away.
“But from a compensation standpoint, I said, ‘I will sit down and see what y’all are going to have going forward,’” Barkley said. “I’ve been straight honest with all the companies.”
Barkely said he is still hesitant to not have his whole “Inside the NBA” team, including host Ernie Johnson and co-analysts Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith, plus the behind-the-scenes TNT people he adores. He expects next year, its final season, to be special.
“We’re going to go out with a bang,” Barkley said.
Barkley said Johnson won’t go to a new network, while he has not checked in on O’Neal’s or Smith’s plans. The Athletic was told from sources briefed on the other networks’ plans that they could offer to let Barkley and the full crew, including Johnson, the chance to remain in Atlanta and do the same show.
“Everything is still on the table,” Barkley said.
Barkley reiterated the people he really feels bad for in this whole situation are the ones behind the scenes who aren’t making millions.
“I feel bad for the people I work with,” Barkley said. “A lot of good people will lose their jobs. I have to give TNT credit, they tried everything to try and stay in the relationship, but the NBA wanted to move on. It’s that simple.”
Required reading
(Photo: Steven Freeman / NBAE via Getty Images)
new video loaded: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
transcript
transcript
‘Flesh’ by David Szalay Wins 2025 Booker Prize
David Szalay became the first British Hungarian to win the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel “Flesh.”
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“I think fiction can take risks. I think it’s one of the things that it can do. It can take aesthetic risks, formal risks, perhaps even moral risks, which many other forms, narrative forms, can’t quite do to the same extent.” “I think all six of the books in the short list really, you know, not — it’s not saying this is the headline theme, but there is that theme of reaching out, wanting a connection.”
By Shawn Paik
November 11, 2025
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights the starting points or destinations of five novels about road trips. (Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, most questions offer an additional hint about the location.) To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
In the midst of the world’s unrelenting horribleness, it’s important to make room for beauty. True! But also something of a truism, an idea that comes to hand a little too easily to be trusted. The proclamation that art matters — that, in difficult times, it helps — can sound like a shopworn self-care mantra.
So instead of musing on generalities, maybe we should focus our attention on a particular aesthetic experience. Instead of declaring the importance of art, we could look at a painting. Or we could read a poem.
A poem, as it happens, about looking at a painting.
Hayden did not take the act of seeing for granted. His eyesight was so poor that he described himself as “purblind”; as a child he was teased for his thick-framed glasses. Monet’s Giverny paintings, whose blurriness is sometimes ascribed to the painter’s cataracts, may have revealed to the poet not so much a new way of looking as one that he already knew.
Read in isolation, this short poem might seem to celebrate — and to exemplify — an art divorced from politics. Monet’s depiction of his garden, like the garden itself, offers a refuge from the world.
But “Selma” and “Saigon” don’t just represent headlines to be pushed aside on the way to the museum. They point toward the turmoil that preoccupied the poetry of Hayden and many of his contemporaries.
“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” was published in a 1970 collection called “Words in the Mourning Time.” The title poem is an anguished response to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and to the deepening quagmire in Vietnam. Another poem in the volume is a long elegy for Malcolm X. Throughout his career (he died in 1980, at 66), Hayden returned frequently to the struggles and tragedies of Black Americans, including his own family.
Born in Detroit in 1913, Hayden, the first Black American to hold the office now known as poet laureate of the United States, was part of a generation of poets — Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Margaret Danner and others — who came of age between the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the ’60s.
A poet of modernist sensibilities and moderate temperament, he didn’t adopt the revolutionary rhetoric of the times, and was criticized by some of his more radical peers for the quietness of his voice and the formality of his diction.
But his contemplative style makes room for passion.
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