Charles Barkley and Madonna: the ’90s Couple That Never Was

All of this was playing out right before Charles and the Suns faced off against Jordan’s Bulls. A manager with The Roxy, a popular Phoenix nightclub, told the Phoenix New Times about how the pair danced the night away and hung out at a roped-off section. (Charles maintained that the reports were false, saying he had never shared dance moves with Madonna.) Unsubstantiated reports of Charles’s limo being parked overnight outside her hotel filled newspapers.

The pop star played coy about the details of the alleged tryst, replying, “Who’s Charles Barkley?” Outlets couldn’t help scrutinize the potential pairing. “She’s awfully short. He’s awfully married. He’s said he’s an emotional man, can’t open his eyes when he makes love. We know she’s a voyeur, can’t keep her eyes closed when she makes love,” Gerhart wrote in “Tattler.”

“He may retire; she’ll never retire. She’ll be stripping in the old-age home.”

Amid Barkley’s incredible season, rumors swirled around his love life. Charles and wife Maureen were separated at the time, and the reasons were never made public.

There was a separate matter in which gossip columnists reported how Connie Colla, the morning news anchor with Phoenix’s NBC affiliate, had been seeing Charles. Years later, Colla maintained that was never the case. The two were working with each other on the weekly Suns show, and a couple times each month, they would shoot stories about everyday life and goofy bits, such as, “What if Charles had hair?” featuring Barkley in a mohawk or Princess Leia buns. They had grabbed lunch one day as they often did, but this time, a gossip entry reported them as having an “intimate lunch.” The Montana native called Charles to see if he was rattled. He wasn’t. “Listen, Montana, when you’re in the spotlight, people are going to say all kinds of things about you. As long as they spell your name right, it’s all good,” he said to her, she recalled. “It means you’re important enough to sell their paper.”

But those two lines ended up changing everything for Colla. The rumors had hit a point where she had to end the friendship with him, and hasn’t spoken to him in nearly twenty years.

“After a while, it became obvious people really believed this, so I told Charles, ‘This is nuts.’ I’d never in my life told someone to go away and not be my friend, it was really painful,” Colla recalled. “I think he was stunned by it, too.” Through it all, Charles became the most popular athlete the city had ever seen. At 62–20, the league’s best record, Charles, the league’s MVP, had given the team and Phoenix exactly what it needed at exactly the right time. And now it called for a championship.

But the headlines and gossip columns took a toll. Speculation surrounding Charles and Madonna had become so constant that Ellen Blumhardt, his mother-in-law, had suffered a heart attack. “She has had a lot of stress from the jokes about me and Madonna [dating] and has been harassed with people calling the house. She’s not doing well right now and that’s a major concern,” he told reporters of the heart attack, which appeared to have happened the same day as Game 7 against Seattle. “I only met [Madonna] one time when she was in Phoenix. We don’t date. We don’t have a relationship.”