Charles Barkley on Scottie Pippen’s Aborted 2007 NBA Comeback

Back on March 30, 2021, I published an article titled On Oscar De La Hoya’s Comeback From Retirement. At the time, Oscar De La Hoya, one of the best boxers of the 1990s and 2000s, was planning to make a comeback at age 48, more than 12 years after he had retired after suffering a one-sided loss to Manny Pacquiao, and after which he had acknowledged that he could no longer pull the trigger. Fortunately (in my opinion, at least) Mr. De La Hoya’s comeback was aborted and he decided to stay retired. While my arguments against Mr. De La Hoya’s planned comeback were grounded in the fact that boxing is dangerous and coming out after a decade of retirement in one’s late 40s is almost always going to be a questionable life-choice, one reason I wanted to publish the article was to share a critique of a potential NBA comeback from 2007. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I will quote the pertinent parts of what I originally wrote back in 2021: In either 2006 or 2007, there were rumors that the…