Barbara Barker: Farewell, Newsday, it's been my honor covering the sports world for the last three decades

The day after I was hired to cover the Knicks for Newsday, Pat Riley faxed in his resignation and headed to Miami.

Though I’m fairly confident one event had little to do with the other, I have thought a lot about that moment over the past two months. I remember what it felt like to be hired to cover the Knicks in the 1990s, what it felt like to be a young reporter writing about the hottest professional team in New York. I remember feeling sure that it would just be a matter of time before the Knicks won an NBA title and I would be watching them march around the court carrying the Larry O’Brien trophy.

Well, fast forward three decades: 15 Knicks coaching changes, 5,216 stories filed, 969 nights spent in a Marriott property, the acquisition of one incredibly patient husband and two great kids later, and it finally happened.

I found myself standing in San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center in June watching Patrick Ewing and Walt Frazier celebrate alongside Jalen Brunson after the Knicks finally won that title they had been chasing since long before I started covering the team.

Does it get any better than this? For two months, I’ve been asking myself that question. A few weeks ago, after a replay of OG Anunoby’s putback showed up on my Instagram for the 1,000th time and I felt compelled to watch it yet again, I knew the answer.

It’s time to move on.

Instead of summoning my inner Riley and faxing in my resignation, I want to take this chance to thank my editors, co-workers and most of all Newsday readers. Even in stressful circumstances — like having 10 minutes to turn a “Knicks blew it” column into a “I don’t believe what I just saw” column after they mounted a historical 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the Finals — I have felt honored to have your trust.

Thank you for this incredible ride. Thanks to you, I’ve covered almost every major sporting event, including 13 U.S. Opens (tennis), 11 NBA Finals, four Super Bowls, two WNBA Finals, two Final Fours, one World Series and one Stanley Cup Final.

I covered Michael Jordan’s final three championship runs, some of Serena Williams’ best and worst moments and Ewing’s heroic and heartbreaking attempts to lead his Knicks teams to a title. I was there for Allan Houston’s floater in Miami, Larry Johnson’s four-point play against Indiana, Jason Kidd’s back-to-back NBA Finals trips with the Nets and Kyrie Irving’s crazy tenure in Brooklyn.

Maybe most telling is that 27 years before covering Jalen Brunson’s title run, I covered his father, Rick Brunson, and the 9.8 seconds he played for the Knicks in the 1999 NBA Finals.

Along the way, I’ve had a few crazy adventures. I once rode in a limousine with Charles Oakley and a few other sportswriters to a Cleveland nightclub and then on to a dinner party at his mom’s house where she served us sweet potato pie and collard greens. I once smoked a cigar with a Knicks executive while walking down the street in Charleston. I once jumped off a boat into Moriches Bay to help Liberty-great-turned-oyster-farmer Sue Wicks check her on her nets.

I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’ve had a lot of help and kindness along the way. Some of the best minds in basketball took the time to patiently answer my questions and explain the nuances of the game, including Jerry West, Larry Brown, Jeff Van Gundy, Don Nelson, Larry Bird and Steve Kerr.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work during a time where tremendous gains were made by women in all areas of sport. When Newsday hired me, I was one of a handful of women writers covering the NBA and there were no women on the broadcast side. One of the best, Ailene Voisin, was then a national NBA columnist for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I didn’t know her all that well, but that didn’t stop her from reaching out, sharing her Rolodex — yes, we had those back then — and serving as a much-needed sounding board as I competed in the New York sports tabloid wars of the 1990s.

I learned an important lesson about women supporting women from that. And, if I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t spend more of my time covering women’s sports, especially the WNBA, which played its inaugural season in 1997, two years after I joined Newsday. Covering the Liberty’s win over Minnesota in the 2024 WNBA Finals was one of the best assignments of my career.

I know I’ve been fortunate to cover some big events and big-time athletes. The stories I remember the most, however, weren’t always about the most famous people or the biggest game.

I felt privileged that Frank Ntilikina and his mother shared with me the story of her harrowing escape from Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. I loved the reporting and digging I had to do to tell the story of Hempstead’s Jennifer Mitchell, a prep basketball phenom who scored 60 points in a game against Bethpage in 1972 but whose story was largely unknown because of her early death and a lack of record keeping from that era. I am honored that Sue Wicks shared her journey with me about how she became the first active team sport athlete — male or female — to come out as gay.

I think the most important work I did at Newsday was during COVID-19 when I was recruited to write obituaries on Long Islanders who had died of the disease. It was a brutal heart-wrenching assignment and I would often cry after getting off the phone with shell-shocked family members. Yet I knew that with the world in lockdown, this was the one grieving ritual that hadn’t been taken away from families, and I took pride in trying to give them the very best.

That was always the goal. Whether I was writing about Patrick Ewing, Serena Williams or some meaningless NBA game in the dog days of January, I never wanted to fax it in.

I hope I succeeded.