This week's Sports@Large

As I mentioned, I do a radio essay that airs each Monday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. on WYPR-FM, 88.1 in Baltimore, with a re-air in the 9 a.m. hour on Tuesdays. Here's the script from the current Sports@Large:

The road to a college education rarely runs smooth, and for some goes a bit bumpier than for most. What is supposed to be a four-year journey through the halls of higher learning sometimes goes as far a ground as that three hour tour that Gilligan and the Skipper led the castaways on, and with a lot less comedy.

Take Christian Abate, for instance. When he graduated from St. John Neumann High in South Philadelphia in 1997, Abate had dreams, dreams that he would teach kids. In order to make those dreams a reality, Abate had to get a college degree, so he enrolled at Temple, a fine university in his hometown.

Alas, dreams need funding, and Abate’s funds ran short, so he had to drop out of Temple, though he continued to work as a busboy at Saloon, an Italian restaurant on South Seventh Street in the city. Every so often, though, a dream gets a boost from the most unlikely of places. In Christian Abate’s case, he got an assist from a fairy godfather, albeit one who is 6-foot-5 and weighs around 300 pounds.

One of Saloon’s regular customers is NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, and in the course of his visits, Barkley struck up a relationship with Abate. During a meal last summer, Barkley asked Abate if the teaching world was treating him well, only to find that Abate had not gone back to Temple because he couldn’t get the proper level of financial aid. So, Barkley arranged to leave Abate a rather sizable tip, namely, to pay his tuition, but only gave him until the end of the meal to make up his mind over whether to accept the offer or not. It didn’t take that long for Abate to say yes.

Few athletes, current or former, inspire the kind of reaction that Barkley does. In his playing days, the man known as the Round Mound of Rebound used his gifts to the max to make himself an updated version of former Baltimore Bullet Wes Unseld, only Barkley could jump and score. There aren’t many players for whom it can accurately be said that he or she left every single ounce of effort of themselves on the field or court every time. Charles Barkley is one of them.

But for all his wonderful basketball abilities, Barkley can be crude, rude and boorish. There’s the spitting on a spectator, the throwing of a bar patron through a glass door, the punching in the chest of an Angolan opponent during the 1992 Olympics, the proclivity to say whatever comes to his mind with little, if any filter, not to mention little if any concern for whom those words might hurt. And there’s the indiscriminate gambling, which only recently stopped.

Yes, the rap sheet on Sir Charles is long, but it should also be noted that Barkley has given separate million dollar gifts to his high school in Leeds, Alabama, to a poor high school in Birmingham and to Auburn University, the school he attended before he was drafted by the 76ers in 1984. It should also be noted that Barkley didn’t finish Auburn, leaving school a year early for the NBA. It seems that Charles Barkley has made the biggest assist of his life, and Christian Abate is the recipient.