I should have been doing my homework, but instead I’d read it five or six times. Now I was just staring at the pictures – there were two. One was of Coach Barkley, taken within the last few weeks or months. He looked pretty much like he did now — a tall middle-aged sort of guy. In the picture he was casually dressed, a sort of smirk on his face and his forehead extended way up his head where there used to be hair. He looked like somebody who lived in the neighborhood or worked at the grocery store or was somebody’s father. The other picture was different. It was the cover from the old Sports Illustrated. It had Coach Barkley out on a basketball court, looking like he was maybe twenty years old. There was another player as well. He was wearing a different uniform and they were fighting for a rebound. In big red letters on the picture it said, ‘Barkley wins another one!’ I’d read the article over and over. It was funny how I almost always read each Sports Illustrated cover to cover, but hardly ever read that feature.
