Charles Barkley turned 58 on Saturday, and I couldn’t help but think of something Jim Lynam, Barkley’s last coach with the Sixers, once told me about the Chuckster.

“He’s a Hall of Fame player, so people have to appreciate it, but he’s special among that group,” Lynam said in that rat-a-tat, Philly-guy voice of his. “That’s how talented he was. And the word right there along with it is ‘unique.’ On Noah’s Ark, two of everything. Well I’ve got news for you — that partner fell off the edge of the boat. There’s one of him. One.”

Sums Barkley up perfectly. There has never been anybody quite like him, not only as a player but as a person and a personality. Listed at 6-6, he actually stood a shade under 6-5 but nonetheless led the league in rebounding one season (1986-87) and averaged 22 points and 12 boards for his 16-year career, the first half of which was spent in Philadelphia.

That speaks to the fury with which he played, which among other things fueled all his hell-bent, court-length rushes — thoughts and prayers to any guard foolish enough to try and take a charge — and ultimately enabled him to break down the Hall of Fame’s doors.

Now he has moved on to one of the great second acts in American sport, as a Turner Sports talking head on the acclaimed studio show “Inside the NBA.” There he continues to ramble off in unexpected directions. “First of all …” he will say when making some point or other. And never mind that the point might not be, ya know, on point. Never mind that there is never a “second of all.” It’s just Charles being Charles, as Lynam used to say, when as a player Barkley said something he shouldn’t have said, or did something he shouldn’t have done (which was often).

It’s not a bad life, playing a character, whether it’s NBA bad boy during one’s playing career or off-the-wall uncle after it’s over. And rest assured that Barkley knows it.

“I hope I don’t die,” he told a reporter friend during a visit to the Wells Fargo Center a few years ago. “I can steal this money for a long time.”

That was the same night he stormed into the place and bellowed, “HEY — Y’ALL STILL GOT THEM RATS IN HERE? THEM RATS AS BIG AS CATS?”

He never actually played in the arena as a home player, though his career did end there when he ruptured a knee tendon as a bloated Houston Rocket in 2000. He was surely thinking of the now-demolished Spectrum, a place he electrified after the Sixers used the fifth pick of the 1984 draft on him.

He was supposed to carry the Sixers out of the Doc-Moses era and into something new and different, and might have, if Andrew Toney’s feet had held up and Harold Katz, the team’s owner, hadn’t made so many foolish personnel decisions. (Katz likely set some sort of record when he traded three future Hall of Famers — Moses, Maurice Cheeks and, in the summer of 1992, Barkley himself. Katz also thought about trading Julius Erving the year Barkley came out and later drafted Shawn Bradley second overall, when Penny Hardaway and Jamal Mashburn were still on the board.)

Barkley soldiered on for a while, his furnace fully stoked. Fixed in my memory is one night in the Spectrum when the Sixers were playing Washington. Somebody was shooting the first of two free throws, and there was some jostling under the rim between Barkley and a weatherbeaten forward named Dan Roundfield.

“He does that again,” Barkley informed a nearby referee, “and I’m gonna fuck him up.”

Lynam, who coached the Sixers from 1987-92, knew how to rev Barkley’s motor as well as anyone. The running joke among reporters was that the Sixers had only one play in that era: “Turn Cholly” — i.e., a post-up for Barkley.

Mike Gminski, the Sixers’ center from 1988-91, also told me that during a game-day shootaround one year in San Antonio Lynam bet Barkley $100 that he could score on him. Barkley immediately wanted a piece of that action, and Lynam — who in his day had been a crafty guard at St. Joe’s — began talking smack as he took the ball to the top of the circle.

“And Charlie’s all worked up,” Gminski told me. “Jimmy throws him a little head fake, and Charlie goes flying up in the air, trying to block it. Jimmy takes a couple dribbles, lays the ball in, starts laughing and walks off the floor.”

When I asked Lynam about that tale a few years ago, he declined to confirm it, though he did say this: “That I could get a basket without a great deal of difficulty on Barkley, I can confirm that.” Barkley did confirm it, but also quickly changed the subject.

That edition of the Sixers, which won an Atlantic Division title in 1989-90, didn’t stay together, either. Katz traded Gminski. Derek Smith’s creaky knees didn’t hold up. Rick Mahorn was jettisoned.

The team sagged, as did Barkley’s mood.

The end in Philly wasn’t pretty. He tried to spit on a heckler in the New Jersey Meadowlands one night in 1991 and wound up hitting a little girl instead. That earned him a suspension, though to his credit he did apologize to the girl, while also befriending her.

The following season — his last in Philadelphia — he faced charges for brawling with a fan on a Milwaukee street (but was later acquitted), claimed he was misquoted by the co-author of his autobiography (in which he buried Katz and several teammates) and since then has said he played a game drunk after the Sixers backed out of a midseason trade that would have sent him to the Lakers for James Worthy.

Barkley has claimed he wasn’t trying to force his way out of town, and repeated that claim last week on Bill Simmons’ podcast, when asked about Draymond Green’s belief that there is a double-standard in the league — i.e., players are criticized when they make it clear they want to be elsewhere, but teams do not face the same scrutiny when they hold players out, in anticipation of a deal. (An example of the latter is Cleveland’s recent benching of Andre Drummond. An example of the former would be James Harden’s behavior in Houston earlier this year.)

“I don’t remember any guys in my day forcing their way out of a situation,” Barkley told Simmons.

First of all (to use the Barkleyan phrase), that seems like revisionist history. Everybody knew Barkley wanted out at the end. That includes, by the way, Lynam, who became the Sixers’ general manager in May 1992.

“Charles, from his perspective, he made it known in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to be here,” Lynam said on the Sixers Talk podcast last April. “And I would say in hindsight — this is just me, my own personal opinion — we made a mistake in listening to him. I tell Charles that to this day.”

Barkley insisted to Simmons that he kept his demands “on the down low,” and did not make them clear to the front office until the 1991-92 season had concluded — though he also said on the podcast that the Sixers were “a shit organization” at the time and “didn’t know what they were doing.”

The turning point, he told Simmons, came on the eve of the 1986 draft, when Philadelphia dealt the No. 1 pick, which became North Carolina center Brad Daugherty, to Cleveland for Roy Hinson, while also sending Moses to Washington for Jeff Ruland and Cliff Robinson.

“That actually started the downfall of my Philadelphia career,” Barkley told Simmons, later adding that being unable to play with Daugherty was “probably the biggest regret of my career.”

“I was like, man, I’m finally gonna get some help,” Barkley said on the podcast.

The Sixers shipped him to Phoenix in June 1992, for Jeff Hornacek, Tim Perry and Andrew Lang, a disastrous move. Barkley won the MVP while reaching the Finals the following season, and spent four seasons with the Suns in all. He closed his career out with four years in Houston.

All these years later, he remains one of one, as Lynam said. He was the guy who walked into a hotel bar in Richfield, Ohio, after a game against the Cavaliers one night, and upon seeing a Sixers beat writer talking to a woman — a bridesmaid in a wedding party, as it happens — made a beeline for the would-be couple.

“You can do better,” he told the woman.

Then he skulked out, laughing.

And he was the guy who following his career was asked by his friend, Dave Coskey, a former Sixers publicist, to do an introductory video for a banquet honoring the high school basketball team of which Coskey’s son was a part. Barkley went the extra mile, recruiting his fellow TNT studio personalities — Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith — to do a full-fledged video that according to Coskey had all the banquet-goers in stitches.

“It was,” Coskey told me, “Charles being Charles.”

Yeah, some back-in-my-day silliness has crept into his act in recent years. But for the most part Barkley continues to float along, a singular presence on a voyage unlike any other.