On The Steam Room podcast, where Ernie Johnson prods Charles Barkley to be even more candid than he already is on TV, the Chuckster — as Barkley is affectionately known — let everyone in on the fact that he travels with his own bar of soap. A big bar, if you must know.
“Is that for dermatological reasons?” Johnson asks Barkley.
No comes the answer. It’s “because these hotels started being cheap,” Barkley reports, and the bars of soap in hotel showers are now too small. Why is that a problem? Because there was one time when Barkley “was washing a part of my body I almost had a little incident” and almost “lost the soap.”
Johnson, laughing, mystified, reasonably asks, “What the heck are you talking about?”
Barkley’s reply, as if Johnson hadn’t been listening the first time: “I almost lost the soap.”
Sometimes The Steam Room comes up with content so curious, it crosses over to the TNT show — because Barkley’s lost soap is one of those moments that begs for the reactions of his TNT pals Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith.
O’Neal is nearly in tears considering Barkley’s lost soap on the Inside the NBA broadcast, and says in aside to Johnson, “we gonna get kicked off the air.” Smith’s follow-up, wondering why such an incident resulted in Barkley’s favoring a bigger bar, goes and raises the innuendo another notch. Smith at first told O’Neal, “Don’t go there. I got so many jokes.”
