All except, that is, for the Beast. Friday night, June 16, should have been Johnny Mac night in New York City. The legendary John McEnroe had walked to the court from his Central Park apartment, Yankees cap pulled down tight. As so often happened throughout his playing days, he had been greeted by enthusiastic cheers from his hometown crowd. Yet a mere 10 points into his match against Frenchman Henri LeConte, there was the graying, 41-year-old McEnroe, a doting father of five plus a stepdaughter, doing something just as inevitable: Turning everyone against him by charging the net — to question a lines call. “C’mon, Mac, not already!” a spectator called out.

McEnroe turned to the courtside fan, his face suddenly pale with rage. “You got an appointment to get to?” he said, spitting out the words through lips pursed in anger. “What the fuck do you care, asshole?”

The crowd erupted in boos and the umpire administered a code violation for unsportsmanlike conduct, but it was too late: The Beast had been unleashed. For the next two hours, against all his intentions, McEnroe stalked the court, throwing his racket four times, berating a middle-aged linesman and slamming a courtside sign advertising Sector Sport Watches (“Hey! Hit somebody else’s sign!” someone yelled from the Sector Sport Watch company box seats) in dangerous proximity to a female tournament official, whom McEnroe then blistered with a series of choice condemnations of the “you fucking asshole” variety when she saw to it that he be penalized. He also, in between such dramatic acts, hit some of the purest and most creative shots a tennis court has ever seen and, once the match was over, refused to shake the umpire’s hand, leaving a crowd that came expecting feel-good nostalgia but instead had been treated to the genuine, raw article.

Screw nostalgia, McEnroe seemed to say; just as in the ’80s, when his combination of talent and temperament transcended his sport and he attained pop-culture icon status by turning tennis into performance art, McEnroe had yet again provided a voyeuristic glimpse into tortured genius.

It is no accident, after all, that since leaving the tennis tour in 1992, McEnroe has devoted himself to rock music — writing and performing songs in New York clubs under the moniker the Johnny Smyth Band — and opened a SoHo art gallery. He has always delighted in being called an artist; his authorized biographer, Richard Evans, once wrote that McEnroe is a “pointillist tennis player,” referring to the school of art fathered by Georges Seurat in which the painter uses only the tip of his brush.

Similarly, McEnroe, who was renowned for rarely practicing or watching what he ate, dominated stronger, bigger, more committed players with a wholly instinctive game that was characterized by a feathery touch, a series of jabs and wrist flicks that produced unfathomable, sharply angled shots. “McEnroe saw the court in different geometric dimensions than anyone else,” says Eric Riley, a former tour player who has coached Pam Shriver, Lisa Raymond and the Jensen brothers. “On any given volley, the rest of us might choose between two or three shots. But somehow Mac would see all these possibilities that never occurred to anyone else before.”

Yet, despite the seven Grand Slam tournament victories, the 77 singles titles (third all-time behind Connors and Ivan Lendl) and the No. 1 ranking from 1981 to 1984, it was the dark side of his artistry for which McEnroe became most widely known, the temperament that led him to be dubbed “McBrat” by the staid English press after he lambasted a stuffy Wimbledon umpire by screaming, “You are the pits of the world!”

It wasn’t so much that McEnroe was supercompetitive; his rage for perfection in himself and others was just as likely to explode when he was winning. The tirades would invariably be followed by rambling public soliloquies of introspection (“Why do I let it happen?” he wondered once, after the Beast had run amok) showing both an innate intelligence and a stunning tendency toward self-flagellation. Behind the blowups was a self-loathing narcissism (“I’m so disgusting, you shouldn’t watch. Everybody leave!” he screamed between points during the ’81 Wimbledon tournament) and a class resentment in reaction to tennis’ pretensions. He would rail against the sport’s “phonies and elitists,” earning him antihero status.

He hung with Jack Nicholson and Mick Jagger, both of whom offered similar advice after he’d been banned from the Davis Cup in 1985 and there were rumors of a yearlong suspension: Don’t ever change. (“When you’re 26, who are you gonna listen to, Jagger and Nicholson or some old farts in the United States Tennis Association?” McEnroe recalled in Sports Illustrated in 1996.) Nike signed him up (his total career earnings from tennis and endorsements are said to surpass $100 million, well beyond what any other tennis player ever made) and graced Sunset Boulevard with a James Dean-like mural of Johnny Mac on a city street, the collar of his leather jacket turned up. It was a fitting image, because long before Dennis Rodman or Latrell Sprewell, McEnroe was sports’ preeminent rebel without a cause.

John Patrick McEnroe Jr. was born on Feb. 16, 1959, at the U.S. Air Base Hospital in Weisbaden, West Germany, where his father was stationed in the Air Force. When John was 9 months old, the family returned to Queens, N.Y., living first in Flushing before settling in Douglaston. John Sr. was Depression-era born and first-generation Irish-American, both of which may help explain his eldest son’s later patriotism — McEnroe is the all-time leader in Davis Cup wins — and his class resentments. The senior McEnroe worked a day job while attending law school at night and eventually became a partner in the prestigious Park Avenue law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison.

John Jr. commuted to the tony Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There, with its tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking headmaster, McEnroe got his first taste of the stodgy upper class he’d later wage war against at Wimbledon. Yet he was well-behaved in high school, the odd subway turnstile jump while shouting “U.N. delegate!” notwithstanding. He was a stellar student who may have loved soccer more than tennis. But he fell under the tutelage of the legendary tennis coach Harry Hopman at the Port Washington Academy on Long Island and played junior tennis throughout high school. While his talent was clear, his dedication wasn’t. He wasn’t a top-ranked junior, and even garnered a reputation for giving close lines calls to his opponents.

In the summer of 1977, before heading west to play No. 1 singles for Stanford, McEnroe went to England to try to qualify for Wimbledon as an unseeded player. The pudgy, unknown 18-year-old stunned the sports world, making it all the way to the semifinals — the first qualifier to ever do so — before losing to Connors in straight sets. The next year, as a freshman, McEnroe was tennis’ collegiate champion and was soon challenging Connors and Borg, who were dueling to be ranked the world’s greatest player. Meantime, McEnroe’s temper had exploded enough times — and in close enough proximity to the court’s microphones — that he soon supplanted the roguish and sometimes crude Connors as public enemy No. 1.

Certain catchphrases became legendary, launched like verbal artillery at blank-faced umpires. There was, “You cannot be serious!” or “Answer the question! The question!” the last word emphasized with as much venom as words alone can contain. There was the time at the French Open when he screamed, “I hate this country!” and the time he told a tournament referee to “go fuck your mother.” And there was the inevitable contrition afterward. “I know I’ve got a problem,” he told his biographer Evans, author of 1990′s “McEnroe: Taming the Talent.” “When I walk out there on court, I become a maniac … Something comes over me, man.”

Yet the talent and the temperament seemed to work hand in hand. In exploding, McEnroe would create a drama with himself at its epicenter and, by raising the stakes, he’d more often than not raise the level of his play, as suggested by his first wife, the actress Tatum O’Neal. “All those negative responses, like ‘I’m going to win because the crowd hates me, people hate me; I’ve got to beat the crowd, beat the officials,’” she lamented to Evans. “He makes life so difficult for himself.”

But he won. In 1979, he won his first Grand Slam event, taking the U.S. Open. Then, in 1980, came the greatest match in the history of tennis, a five-set marathon loss to Borg in the Wimbledon final. The next year, McEnroe got revenge against Borg at Wimbledon and beat him again at the U.S. Open, toppling Borg from the world’s No. 1 ranking and sending the mysterious, stoic Swede into early retirement at all of 26.

The rivalry with Borg, though brief, remains epic, because the two men were such a study in contrasts. Borg was the emotionless, patient baseliner; McEnroe, the loudmouthed, net-rushing New Yorker. Borg was the master of the passing shot; McEnroe, possessor of the quickest and softest hands at the net, the toughest to pass. When Borg left the scene, aficionados expected McEnroe to dominate, but McEnroe missed the rivalry too much and went into his own funk. It was Connors, instead, who won the 1982 Wimbledon and ’82 and ’83 U.S. Opens, but McEnroe wasn’t done yet. Though he is best remembered for the wars with Borg, it is 1984 that should be McEnroe’s lasting legacy.

In that year, McEnroe may have been the best player ever. He won 82 matches and lost just three, the highest winning percentage (.965) since the dawning of the Open era. His 6-1, 6-1, 6-2 dismantling of Connors in the Wimbledon final was arguably the most dominating display in modern tennis history: 78 percent of his slicing first serves in, most of them unreturned by the game’s greatest returner, and perhaps the most astounding statistic in the sport’s annals, only two unforced errors in the entire match. The angled volleys were sharper, the drop shots deadlier, the serve more meticulously placed than ever before. And this wasn’t just anybody he was carving up on center court; this was Connors, one of sports’ all-time competitors, who couldn’t get back in the match. If all the tantrums and vitriol had come from the frustration born of perfection’s elusiveness, then, for that one Sunday morning in England, there was finally no need to scream at anyone.

In keeping with McEnroe’s nature to see every glass as half empty, he remembers 1984 not as the year of his greatest triumph, but of his greatest regret. Up two sets to none and five points from taking the match against Lendl in the French Open, McEnroe overheard voices on a television headset that was left unattended on the side of the court. Picking it up, he screamed “Shut up!” into it — no doubt popping the eardrum of the poor unsuspecting technician at the other end — thereby earning the enmity of the crowd. “I have this unique ability to turn the whole crowd around,” McEnroe said afterward to Sport magazine. It was to be one of the few times McEnroe was unable to overcome the opposition of a hostile audience. Suffering from heat stroke, he lost in five sets.

After that year’s U.S. Open, McEnroe would never win another Grand Slam or be ranked No. 1 again. It was as if the near-perfection of 1984 hadn’t fulfilled him. More often than not, he seemed disgusted on the court. Brad Gilbert, now Andre Agassi’s coach, describes an uproarious 1986 McEnroe meltdown in his book “Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis.” Gilbert was the mirror image of McEnroe, a player short on natural talent but long on workmanlike desire. “Gilbert, you don’t deserve to be on the same court with me!” McEnroe snarled at his opponent during a changeover when it became apparent he might lose to him. “You are the worst! The fucking worst!” After the loss, McEnroe announced he was going on what turned out to be a seven-month sabbatical, because “when I start losing to players like him, I’ve got to start reconsidering what I’m doing even playing this game.”

By then, the game of tennis was changing. Pure power players like Boris Becker, with his 125-mph serves, were ascendant, aided by new racket technology that increased power without sacrificing control. Though still one of the top two or three players in the world, McEnroe, with his artistic flair for finesse volleys and quirky angles, was suddenly a stylistic anomaly. In addition, for the first time in his life, tennis wasn’t monopolizing all of his intensity. In 1984, McEnroe met his temperamental equal in O’Neal and the two wed in 1986 (the press dubbed them “Tantrum and McBrat”) after he’d called her “the female John McEnroe.” Indeed, she’d barred her father, the hot-tempered actor Ryan O’Neal, from the wedding when it was rumored that he’d called McEnroe “a jerk.” After six years of marriage, five homes (including a Malibu beach house purchased from Johnny Carson for $1 million and three tennis lessons) and three children, O’Neal and McEnroe parted ways, ostensibly because she wanted to work and McEnroe wanted her home with the kids. “I’ve had a lot of experience with men who are bullies,” O’Neal told Entertainment Weekly. “Taking on John McEnroe was the biggest struggle of my life.”

In 1992, while his marriage was crumbling, McEnroe reached the semifinals of the U.S. Open and led the United States to a rousing Davis Cup win over Switzerland. While other top American players, ranging from Connors to Pete Sampras, haven’t always made the Davis Cup a priority, McEnroe led the Americans to five world titles in 12 years. Fittingly, the last great moment of his tennis career came during the ’92 Cup, when he played doubles with rising star Sampras. When the Americans won, McEnroe unfurled a giant American flag and ran laps around the court, waving it and screaming, the normally placid Sampras in lockstep.

Though he didn’t officially retire, his tennis waned while McEnroe tried to find other outlets for his creative impulses. McEnroe had visited his first art museum in 1977, when his mixed-doubles partner and childhood friend, Mary Carillo, took him to a Claude Monet exhibit in Paris during the French Open. “I remember him standing in front of one of the great Monets and saying, ‘You gotta be kidding, my brother Patrick has better stuff than this on the front of our refrigerator!’” Carillo told the Guardian in 1994. “But I guess he’s coming around. He always did like to hang around eccentric, creative people.”

Later, the late Vitas Gerulaitis, a fellow pro and New Yorker, started ushering him around SoHo galleries. He bought his first painting, by the realist Audrey Flack, at a gallery on Prince Street and began visiting museums and galleries nationwide while on the tennis circuit. In 1993, while separated from O’Neal, he apprenticed at a gallery on East 79th Street, spending all day looking at art. “I was really down and out at the time,” McEnroe told the Independent in 1994. “I had just been separated and it was a godsend to be able to go to a place every day and keep my mind off what was going on. Because of that, I became more interested in the idea of doing something on my own.”

He opened the John McEnroe Gallery in SoHo the following year. “There are a couple of connections between art and tennis,” McEnroe told the Independent. “People in the art business have a tendency to one day tell you you’re the greatest artist that ever lived and the next second make you wonder if you’ll ever sell a piece of art again. So I think I have a knowledge of that, because you have a fear when you go on the court: fear of failure … I understand [artists] are needy and insecure.”

In recent years, McEnroe’s passion for the business side of art has lessened. First, he shifted his focus to rock music; years ago, friends such as Eric Clapton had tutored him in guitar. He formed a band and began working on an album, but inexplicably quit a couple of years ago. “I think it was a combination of fear of success and fear of failure,” the band’s manager told the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. His foray into rock ‘n’ roll did introduce him to his current wife, Patty Smyth, who sang “The Warrior,” a top hit in 1984. Together, they have two children of their own, to go with McEnroe’s three from his union with O’Neal and Smyth’s daughter from her previous marriage. Four years ago, the National Father’s Day Committee, a New York nonprofit organization, named McEnroe father of the year. When he’s not traveling these days, McEnroe can be found every morning walking his 9-year-old daughter Emily to school. “By having kids, I got my humanity back,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1996. “I’d been like some tennis dude, No. 1 in the world and not happy with it.”

Most recently, McEnroe has become re-energized about tennis, having been appointed Davis Cup captain, a position for which he’s long lobbied. His first act was to convince the top two names in the men’s game, Agassi and Sampras, that Davis Cup ought to mean something to them. When the U.S. team beat Zimbabwe in February, there was McEnroe stalking the sidelines, earning a warning for bad language and accusing the judges of holding old grudges against him. And he has been dominating the senior tennis circuit, even if the old demons still surface on court.

His TV commentary during Wimbledon and the U.S. and French Opens has won plaudits for him as the best sports announcer this side of football’s John Madden. He’s outspoken, smart and funny. But even in the booth he is never too far from controversy. A few years back, he took some shots at his longtime friend Carillo, suggesting that women should not commentate on men’s tennis. But he didn’t stop there. “I don’t know any women who know the men’s game,” he said at a press conference. “At the same time, I’m not sure men can really know the women’s game. I mean, how would they know how women are feeling at a certain time of the month?”

It was further proof of the many contradictions within McEnroe; though he’d long been one of tennis’ few progressive thinkers on race — he refused to play a $1 million exhibition in Sun City in the mid-’80s due to his opposition to apartheid — he’d often seemed like a Neanderthal when it came to women. For her part, Carillo expressed hurt and disappointment in her friend. “So much of his graceless and disappointing behavior comes from not looking beyond his own feelings,” she told the Guardian. “Like many great artists, he has a self-destructive side.”

In his biography of McEnroe, Evans reports that the actor Tom Hulce studied the behavior patterns of McEnroe while preparing for his role as Mozart in “Amadeus,” as did the great Shakespearean actor Ian McKellen for “Coriolanus.” Evans quotes a description of Coriolanus from author Peter Levi’s “The Life and Times of William Shakespeare,” and, indeed, it could just as easily apply to the tennis great:

The origin of all lay in his unsociable, supercilious and self-willed disposition, which in all cases is offensive to most people; and when combined with a passion for distinction passes into absolute savageness and mercilessness … Such are the faulty parts of his character, which in all other respects is a noble one.

For more than 20 years on the public stage, John McEnroe has been unafraid, or unable, to keep suppressed the darkness most of us don’t even admit to ourselves. It would be nice to believe that, as he is wont to suggest, McEnroe has, in his 40s, taken solace in his family and found peace.

But there is also no denying him a sense of grudging admiration, for it takes something — a death wish? a kind of courage? — to so flagrantly parade the inner Beast, as he did June 16 on that Central Park tennis court, while Smyth and 5-year-old daughter Anna looked on. And there he was in the press conference afterward, moaning about how fans at other events across the globe always cheer louder for him than they do in his hometown, conveniently glossing over the fact that, as always, he’d had the crowd — and promptly lost them by loudly proclaiming some among them to be assholes. “I don’t know, maybe it’s my fault, I don’t know,” he mumbled in a monotone. Despite the flatness of tone, you could sense that, somewhere, all the old emotions were in play. Somewhere in there, John McEnroe was beating the hell out of himself.

But, post-surgery, he still couldn’t shake the vision of sports’ hardest worker, a gallant overachiever, helpless. So he rehabbed the knee with an eye on the calendar and there he was on that April night, five months later, standing before a genuflecting Houston crowd that deafeningly chanted his name one final time after he’d plodded through the last seven minutes of professional basketball he’d ever play, making one of three shots. And then he took the microphone, and the Charles Barkley I’d gotten to know a decade ago emerged, the one behind the macho pose. “Basketball doesn’t owe me anything,” he said, voice quavering. “I owe everything in my life to basketball. I’ve been all over the world and it’s all because of basketball.” He paused before finishing by reminding both the fans and his younger teammates to appreciate the moments of their shared passion, because, it turns out, they’re fleeting.

And with that, after hearing himself praised by his coach as the bearer of a “heart of a champion,” after being presented with a recliner by his teammates large enough to accommodate the girth of a rear end that his wife, Maureen, calls “the size of New Jersey,” Barkley retired at age 37. Over the years, he’d transcended sports in a way few others have; part raconteur, part provocateur, the bigness of his persona often overshadowing just how singular a talent he was on the court. There, he was a perennial All-Star, a former league MVP, one of only four players (Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone are the others) to have amassed more than 20,000 points, 10,000 rebounds and 4,000 assists.

What’s so startling about the numbers is another number: his height of 6-foot-4. Though nearly a foot shorter than the bruising behemoths he battled under the boards, Barkley often dominated thanks to effort and will. Always a braggart in the showy style of his hero, Muhammad Ali, it was the incongruity between his style of play and his height that once led Barkley to declare himself “the ninth wonder of the world.”

Off the court, where he spun quotes and welcomed controversy, Barkley was arguably the most interesting and influential athlete of his time — maybe since Ali. While others packaged themselves as though they were just another product to be hawked in America’s ever-burgeoning commodity culture, Barkley eschewed marketing for authenticity, giving rise to a whole generation of athletes — the hip-hoppers — for whom the ethic of “keeping it real” has become a mantra.

In recent years, Barkley has ruminated publicly about one day running for governor of his home state of Alabama. Yet, when I saw him last year, such grandiose plans were far from his mind. He was typically candid when asked what he was going to do when that April night finally arrived and his career came to a close. “I want to learn to play the piano, finish college and get really, really, really fat,” he’d said.

Charles Wade Barkley was born Feb. 20, 1963, in the small industrial town of Leeds, Ala. His father bolted early on, and Barkley was raised by his mother, Charcey Glenn, who cleaned white people’s homes, and his grandmother, Johnnie Mae Edwards, who worked in a meat factory. Later, Barkley would become the first athlete since Ali and Bill Russell to question the predominantly white sports media’s insistence on conferring “role model” status upon young black athletes who comport themselves deferentially, and, after arguing that parents and teachers should be role models, he’d always point out his: “My mother and grandmother were two of the hardest working ladies in the world, and they raised me to work hard,” he’d say.

Barkley was not an athletic prodigy. He was, by all accounts, a shy, fat kid. Yet he always harbored a brash ambition. In 10th grade, pudgy and merely 5-foot-10, he failed to make his high school varsity squad. Still, he insisted to anyone who would listen that he was going to play in the NBA. He shot baskets every night, sometimes all night (if he could escape his grandma’s strict, watchful eye) and cultivated his leaping skills by repeatedly jumping back and forth over a 4-foot chain-link fence.

A 6-inch growth spurt his senior year led to a scholarship at Auburn University, where he became known as “Boy Gorge” and “the Round Mound of Rebound.” At 6-4 and close to 300 pounds, he’d rumble the length of the floor, dribbling behind his back, while taller, more sculpted opponents ran for cover.

The Barkley who was drafted fifth in the 1984 NBA draft by the Philadelphia 76ers bears little resemblance to the confident public man who addressed that Houston crowd in April. Joining legends Julius “Dr. J” Erving and Moses Malone, Barkley was awed by them and by the big, Northeastern city itself. Outside of going to practice and games, he rarely left his rented apartment. He even called sportswriters “sir.” He was thankful to be where he was, and not so sure he belonged.

“When I got drafted, I knew I had a God-given ability to rebound,” Barkley recalls. “But I never averaged more than 14 points a game in college. So I was just hoping I could score 10 points and get 10 rebounds a game for a few years and make some money to take care of my family.” Within three years, he was leading the league in rebounding, and scoring more than 20 points per game.

And Barkley was changing in other ways as well. I first got to know him in 1991, when he’d already morphed into sports’ preeminent anti-hero, the flip side of Michael Jordan’s crossover-era accommodating persona. The rap group Public Enemy had paid homage to Barkley in song (“Throw down like Barkley!” Chuck D wailed on “Bring the Noise”), seeing his in-your-face game and demeanor as the hardwood manifestation of rap. During a game in New Jersey, a courtside heckler, yelling racial epithets, was turned upon by Barkley, who promptly spit upon his tormentor. Only, as he’d later describe, he didn’t “get enough foam” behind the loogie, and, lo and behold, he’d mistakenly spat on a little girl.

It was a national story, of course, and Barkley was vilified. For months prior, Barkley had been persuasively arguing that athletes shouldn’t be considered role models. “A million guys can dunk a basketball in jail, should they be role models?” he’d ask, offending the sportswriter crowd who, as he saw it, demanded that he know his place and be a “credit to his race.” (His argument would prompt national news when he wrote the text for his “I am not a role model” Nike commercial, a carefully worded polemic that none other than Dan Quayle called a “family-values message” for Barkley’s oft-ignored call for parents and teachers to quit looking to him to “raise your kids” and instead be role models themselves.) But with what came to be known as “the spitting incident,” Barkley had indeed been found guilty of conduct unbecoming a role model.

I was a law-school dropout at the time, a sports fan who was fascinated by Barkley’s ballsy media critiques. I wrote a column in a city alternative newspaper, saying that, of course, Barkley ought not to have spat on someone — but that he was saying some things we should hear, too.

On the day the piece ran, my phone rang; Barkley was calling to thank me and to invite me over to talk about topics nonbasketball. He was distraught about the spitting incident, shattered even, because one constant over the years has been Barkley’s affinity for children. He has long been one of the nation’s most generous celebrities, often focusing on children’s charities, though it’s always been done with one caveat: that no publicity attend his good works (a rule he finally broke last year when he gave $3 million to Alabama schools).

Children don’t judge with the venom of adults, he’d explain. And it was that venom he was trying to understand then, in the fallout of the spitting incident: “I think the media demands that athletes be role models,” he told me, “because there’s some jealousy involved. It’s as if they say, this is a young black kid playing a game for a living and making all this money, so we’re going to make it tough on him. And what they’re really doing is telling kids to look up to someone they can’t become, because not many people can be like we are. Kids can’t be like Michael Jordan.”

Barkley grew even bolder, more in-your-face. He’d inherited leadership of the 76ers from the courtly Erving, and distanced himself from what he saw as just so much kiss-ass demeanor. He began conferring with Jesse Jackson and labeled himself a “’90s nigga — we do what we want to do.” Visits to the Philadelphia locker room were the stuff of great theater, as Barkley continued to castigate the press and a city still divided by race.

“Just because you give Charles Barkley a lot of money, it doesn’t mean I’m going to forget about the people in the ghettos and slums,” he lectured. “Y’all don’t want me talking about this stuff, but I’m going to voice my opinions. Me getting 20 rebounds ain’t important. We’ve got people homeless on our streets and the media is crowding around my locker. It’s ludicrous.” He called Philly a “racist city” and told the press to “kiss my black ass — even though your lips might stink.” He vowed, “I’m a strong black man — I don’t have to be what you want me to be,” echoing an Ali line from the ’60s after he read Thomas Hauser’s oral history of the boxing great. When I told him I was writing a magazine profile of Erving, he dismissed the legend: “Man, I ain’t got no time to talk about no Uncle Tom.”

By 1992, Barkley was the NBA’s second-best player, behind Jordan, but he’d grown frustrated with Philadelphia’s management for surrounding him with a rotating cast of mediocre players. Management, in turn, had tired of Barkley’s outspokenness. He was traded to the Phoenix Suns, and the night before he went West, my phone rang. It was Charles, calling to thank me for leaving for him a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” about whom we’d been talking. He sounded pensive, even glum. “I’m just driving around, thinking,” he said. “This has been home for eight years. I don’t know what to expect somewhere else.” His voice, barely a whisper, made him sound vulnerable. Oh yeah, I remember thinking, he’s still in his 20s.

It was further proof that, for all his loudmouth faults, Barkley often exhibited a greater potential for growth than any other athlete on the public scene. He was always answering questions, questioning answers and — often — lapsing into introspection.

Such iconoclasm was on display in 1988, when he told his mother he was considering voting for George Bush. “But, Charles, Bush is only for the rich,” she said. “Mom, I am the rich,” he replied. Or, three years later, when his friend Magic Johnson tested HIV positive and other players, like Malone, were calling for uniform testing in the NBA. Barkley simply stated: “I’m disappointed in myself that I haven’t felt the same compassion for other people stricken with AIDS that I now feel for Magic.”

In Phoenix, Barkley became a superstar. He was the league’s MVP and took his Suns to the NBA Finals in 1993, where they lost to Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in six hotly contested games — arguably the toughest challenge to Jordan’s dominance in six championship seasons. On court, basketball fans finally saw that Barkley was the consummate team player; his five assists per game, often on eye-popping behind-the-back passes while double-teamed, gave lie to the conventional wisdom that permeated his last years in Philadelphia: that he was a talented player who couldn’t make his teammates better.

Off the court, Barkley continued to evolve. He entered a Republican makeover phase. His worldview began to mature; he became more focused on class and less virulent on race. He also grew close to Rush Limbaugh and Dan Quayle (a frequent golf partner), dined with Clarence Thomas and endorsed Steve Forbes in the presidential primary. Though exit polls showed that his imprimatur sealed Forbes’ primary win in Arizona in 1996, Barkley didn’t necessarily sign on to any particular ideology.

He’s become impossible to pigeonhole. He regularly lambastes liberalism, to the proud applause of Limbaugh and Quayle; two years ago, he told me, “Welfare gave the black man an inferiority complex. They gave us some fish instead of teaching us how to fish.” In the next breath, though, he’s liable to skewer 1994′s Republican revolution as “mean-spirited” and denounce Pat Buchanan as a “neo-Nazi.” A junkie of CNN’s political gabfest “Crossfire,” Barkley became convinced, after reading Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities,” that the way we fund public schools — through local property taxes — is designed to produce good schools in good neighborhoods and run-down schools in run-down areas. “My daughter goes to a private school because I can afford it,” he once told me, giving voice to his natural inclination toward populism. “But shouldn’t everyone have great education available to them?”

He may read about failing schools, but Barkley hasn’t exactly become a nerdy policy wonk. Throughout his time on the public stage, he’s reveled in his fame, as when he had a brief, much-publicized tryst with Madonna, prior to a reconciliation with his wife. Then, as now, he insisted on livin’ large: “We ain’t here for a long time, we here to have a good time,” he often says.

Indeed, while Jordan became a reclusive prisoner to his iconic status, Barkley lived to be out among the masses, and his nightclub hopping led to more than one mano a mano face-off with loudmouth fans. “Let there be no conflict in America,” Barkley said in 1997, after he tossed an obnoxious heckler through a plate-glass window in an Orlando, Fla., bar. “If you bother me, I whup yo’ ass.” His career has been dotted with such run-ins; they are the collateral damage of a personality that, as on the court, simply plows ahead, rarely stopping to consider each and every move.

Barkley never made it back to the Finals. His body had been badly beaten through so many years of being manhandled by bigger players, not to mention the ill effects of his legendary hard-drinking, late nights. When it got out that the Suns were fielding trade offers for him in 1996, he exploded: “The days of cotton picking are over,” he told the Phoenix media. “They disrespected me by shopping me around like a piece of meat.”

Traded to the Rockets, Barkley joined two other aging superstars, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler, in his quest for a championship. But Olajuwon and Drexler already had their championship rings and didn’t seem as committed as Barkley, who cut down on his drinking, started lifting weights and even offered to come off the bench for the good of the team in the 1997-98 season. But he was a shadow of his former self. “I’m the artist formerly known as Barkley now,” he told me in 1998. “Once in a while, I get flashbacks.”

Indeed, his own self-analysis was typically blunt. “I’m still a good player, not a great player,” he said. “I can score 15 points and get 10 rebounds.” Yet the ceaseless questions about never having won a title carried the implication that he’ll be remembered as less of a winner than his more hallowed contemporaries. He began to think of himself in relation to those who have won rings. “I’ve never played with a great player in his prime while I’ve been in my prime,” he said. “Michael has had Scottie [Pippen]. Bird had Kevin [McHale] and Robert Parish. And Magic, shit, Magic had everybody. When I came into the league, Doc and Moses were winding down. And Hakeem and Clyde, same thing.”

Toward the end, as a merely good player, it became easy to forget what the younger Barkley once was. More than a great player, he was, like Jordan, a wonder on the court: You’d watch and not quite believe it. He was a jumping jack who was too quick for other power forwards, too strong for small forwards and too visionary a passer for the double-team. And it was all done with an in-the-moment passion missing from today’s scowling, dour-faced jocks.

Off the court, ironically, Barkley became the league’s elder statesman these last few years, a respected spokesman for tradition and the status quo. At times, he’d sound like Paul Lynde from “Bye Bye Birdie,” wringing his hands over “these kids today.” When it was written that the cornrowed, tattooed Allen Iverson travels with a “posse” — friends from back home — Barkley admonished him: “Your teammates should be your posse.” When I offered that guys like Iverson see the league’s crackdown on droopy uniform shorts as a sign of hostility toward black culture, he demurred: “They’re wrong,” he said. “The shorts now are getting to the point where they don’t even look like shorts. I think the NBA has to be concerned with a lot of black guys getting arrested, me included, doing drugs, wearing shorts down to their ankles. That’s not hostility to black culture. That’s just reality.”

Still, though the volume came down a bit, Barkley continued throughout his final years as a player to challenge the predilections and prejudices of the men who present him to the world. He calls the journalistic pack “flies,” because they’re always buzzing around, annoying. One day, in front of his locker, I witnessed pure Barkley. Before the throng could lob its first question at him, Barkley singled out a Houston television reporter. “Would you suck a cock for a million dollars?” he asked. A roomful of men all instantly looked at their shoes.

“No,” came the cracked-voice reply.

“A billion?” Barkley challenged.

“No,” said the reporter, stronger now.

“Well, how much then?”

“I wouldn’t do it for anything!”

Barkley grinned widely. “Well, if you’d do it for free, come on over here then,” he said, while nervous laughter filled the air around him. “Tell y’all what, I would. If I was poor, I’d suck a cock for a million dollars.”

He paused and looked at his audience. “And all you muthafuckas would do the same, you just scared to admit it,” he said. “Like, remember when that movie ‘Indecent Proposal’ came out? Oprah had on three couples who said they wouldn’t let their husband or wife sleep with someone for a million dollars. Couldn’t help but notice that they all had money already.”

After an awkward moment of silence, the flies started buzzing again, shouting basketball questions over one another’s still trembling voices. I remember standing there, feeling lucky as hell to have seen this guy in action. After all, anyone who appears so utterly joyous exercising free speech, anyone so OK with his life as a very public work-in-progress and anyone in the insular, often homophobic world of jockdom who points out class distinctions by challenging the media to suck cock for money, well, that’s a role model worthy of emulation.