David McElroy

Briefly: For three beautiful minutes, this walk-on was a starter for a top-10 team

By David McElroy · February 24, 2021

Tyler Barnes will never be a basketball star. He probably peaked as a star high school player in Louisville, Ky. But for the last four years, he’s been a walk-on player for the University of Alabama. He’s a chemical engineering major with lots of academic honors who rides the bench because he loves being part of a team. He sometimes gets into games with a minute or two to go, but only if Alabama has a big lead. This Saturday, it was senior day for Alabama basketball, so it was his last chance to play in Coleman Coliseum. Alabama Coach Nate Oats says that one of the team starter’s came to him an hour before the game started — and fellow senior Alex Reese asked Oats if Barnes could start in his place for this one game. Even though the game was huge for Alabama, which is ranked No. 6 in the country and trying to wrap up an SEC title, Oats agreed. Barnes started and played the first three minutes, grabbing what was only the fourth rebound of his career and missing his only shot. Barnes has a great future as an engineer, but you’ll never again hear from him as a basketball player. For three shining minutes Saturday, though, he was a starter for a top-10 college basketball team — and his parents were in the stands from Kentucky to see it. There’s a lot of ugliness in college basketball right now, but this story makes me happy.

How much can human heart take when inner winter lasts forever?

By David McElroy · February 21, 2021

The weather’s been miserable here. We went through a bitterly cold period a couple of weeks ago. We’ve had a couple of other times when strong storms came through, thrashing us with heavy wind and deluging us with rain. By southern standards, it’s been a bad winter.

All the trees around my house look bare and lifeless. My back yard is littered with limbs and branches that I haven’t yet cleared away, debris from a couple of the recent storms. There’s one large tree branch — the one you see above — that crashed down one evening so close that it almost hit my house.

I was in the back yard Sunday afternoon looking at all the debris and the bare trees when I realized that what I was looking at matched the sour mood I’ve been feeling. It seems as though my heart has been experiencing winter for a long time. And then I remembered a simple question from an old song.

“Can you stand the weather — if winter lasts forever?”

And I don’t know how much more winter my heart can stand.

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‘Good enough’ isn’t enough if you want a relationship that will last

By David McElroy · February 17, 2021

I know a woman who’s exhausted with her life. She’s unhappy. She’s sort of numb. She told me tonight that everything in her life went downhill after she had two children with the wrong man.

I jokingly asked this 42-year-old why she would choose the wrong man to get stuck with, but she took it as a serious question.

“He seemed good enough at the time,” she said. “I didn’t expect much and I thought maybe he would get better. I never really loved him, but I thought he was better than nothing at all. That was stupid. He was a terrible husband and a complete dud as a father.”

I felt sorry for her, but there was also a smug little part of me which thought, “I’d never allow myself to get stuck with someone I didn’t love.”

And then I remembered something. I almost did the same thing.

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