With three weightlifters allegedly wanting to fight him late one snowy night in Milwaukee in 1991, Charles Barkley had to think quickly.

So he did what only Barkley could do.

“I started taking off all of my clothes,” the Hall of Famer recently told ESPN’s Zach Lowe on “The Lowe Post” podcast. “I take off my jacket, had a big coat on. I take off my shirt. I take off my shoes and socks.”

Then, to make himself look even crazier, he channeled the Karate Kid.

“So I was like, ‘Wax on, wax off,'” Barkley said.

It almost worked to perfection. Two of the men backed away, the current TNT analyst claims, but one stood his ground, so Barkley punched him as hard as he could. It left the 25-year-old man with a broken nose and ultimately put Barkley in jail for a few hours, though he was later acquitted of two misdemeanor charges.

Nearly 20 years later, Barkley relived his version of the fight, saying the man “deserved to be punched,” and gave more context to the wild night in question.

Barkley, then an All-Star forward for the 76ers, said he went out after a Saturday night game with Bucks players Frank Brickowski and Larry Krystkowiak. The 76ers were set to fly out early Sunday morning, so Barkley decided he would stay out and go to Brickowski’s condo for another drink. He was walking to a car with Brickowski’s wife when he began to hear running behind him.

“Then it started getting closer to me, and I could hear them saying, ‘F— Charles Barkley, F— Charles Barkley,'” Barkley said. “So I said, ‘Hey, girl, we need to speed this up.’ I could hear people running towards me, but it was really cold, I didn’t want to stop and turn around. We start walking faster. She had to park a long way away, we get about two blocks away and these three guys are up on me.

“I’m like, ‘Yo, man. What’s y’alls problem?’ [They said] ‘We don’t f—ing like you. We don’t like you and we’re gonna kick your ass.’ I’m like, ‘Why y’all gonna kick my ass? I don’t even know you dudes from Benny.’ They were three big weightlifters and they were right in my grill. Two at my back, one’s right in my grill. I said, ‘Yo, man, I don’t want no trouble.’ This dude’s like, ‘I’m gonna kick your ass.’ So I’m starting to think: ‘Okay, what are you gonna do, because right now you’re probably going to get your ass kicked.'”

That’s when Barkley began undressing and pulled his Karate Kid moves before punching the one man who didn’t fall for it.

“He’s down, he’s like, ‘You f—ing hit me!’ And I said, ‘You damn right. And there’s plenty more where that came from,'” Barkley said. “It would have been an interesting proposition, me trying to fight these three big guys if they all got on me at the same time. But when I hit old boy, he went down, and that was it.”