I HAVE A THEORY THAT FIRST LOVE doesn’t count. How can it? What do you know about something as impossible as love the first time? Hell, what do you know the second? Or third? When my first love broke up with me, I was devastated. Or so I thought. I drank. I caroused. I...
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For the duration of the the NBA Playoffs, Barnstormer regular Alex Wong will be answering questions lobbed at him by the editors. In this, the first installment, Wong talks Amar’e, George Karl, and Durant without Westbrook. Can the return of Amar’e Stoudemire be a good thing for the Knicks? By all accounts, it...
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PITCHERS ARE GIFTED with the rare ability to be present in the moment, to stand unflinching and focused, with their fear turned off. For those of us who dread exposure, anticipate failure, and worry about pain, a determined man alone on the mound is easy inspiration. The pitcher suffers heartache and humiliation, and knows self-satisfaction...
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AT THE END OF THE 2008 SEASON I sat in a seat in the loge level of Shea Stadium. It was a couple of weeks before the last game was to be played at Shea. The shell of as-yet incomplete Citi Field loomed over the wall in right, being busily prepared to take...
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RUNNING INTO AN ATHLETE can be a strange, exhilarating, but ultimately irrelevant encounter. In the most simplistic way of thinking, it’s kind of cool. But think too long or start to write about it and, well, you realize there’s no meaning to these run-ins at all. They just serve to remind you how far...
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JEFF GREEN, EX-HOYA, from the same rookie class as Kevin Durant, enters the lane on the left side, on the storied floor of Madison Square Garden. He’s racing, in transition, gives a little hitch step near the elbow. He has New York’s Carmelo Anthony backpedaling. Green goes up strong over Anthony, there, on the...
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