Rick Reilly said this about him and his swing after being his partner at a celebrity tourney.

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I have bad news. I saw it up close"?and it's getting worse. In one fairway bunker Barkley took it back, froze as usual, then suddenly flinched and aborted the swing altogether. Balk. He gathered himself and made another run but, again, could not bring himself to finish the last two feet. It was like a man trying to shoot a favorite old cow. The third time, he finally swung but whiffed. On the fourth, he hit it. And this was only the first hole.

When Barkley freeze-flails, people laugh, shriek and gasp, but it's not funny. It is a pox on his life. "I've tried everything," Barkley says. "Tiger can't help me 'cause the hitch is there no matter what. I even tried getting hypnotized for 45 minutes and still woke up with the same crappy swing." And so it went the rest of the day: Barkley making people laugh and hug him, interrupted by these sporadic fits that made them look away in sympathy. "Hey, I know I suck," he yelled on the eighth hole, still lying two and not yet to the women's tees, "but I got nice equipment."

Thing is, he never stops having fun. I missed a putt badly on 12 and told the crowd, "I forgot"?every green breaks toward Charles." He counterpunched with "Uh-oh, God don't like you bein' mean to fat people." Toward the end, I asked him why he puts himself through it. "Beats working," he shrugged.

Overall, in this 54-hole Stableford tourney, in which double bogey is the most you can take, Barkley took the max on 41 holes and finished last by a large county. No wonder that, in Barkley's group, the sign boy was given no numbers.
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