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By then, in 2019, Barr served as a physiotherapist to help professional athletes recover from injury. It was a subject he knew well; a major knee injury derailed his own career as a professional soccer player in England. After that, he shifted his focus toward helping players, first in soccer -- including for Manchester City -- and later joining the New York Knicks, where he worked for six years as a director of performance and rehabilitation from 2009 to 2015.
Barr had worked with players across all sports who had suffered catastrophic injuries, including rupturing an Achilles tendon, and he knew how challenging, both physically and mentally, it could be to recover.
After all, Achilles tears have long cleaved professional sporting careers -- from what a player was, to what the injury reduced them to, the gap often hauntingly wide.
Because of that dynamic, Barr said that much of his job during the rehabilitation process surrounds managing those anxieties: What if I don't heal right? What if I'm never the same? What if I'm never good again? What if my career is over? What else am I going to do with my life?
Those nagging questions can hinder a player's progress through the mind-numbing days of rehabilitation, repeatedly performing menial exercises, rebuilding strength toward a return date that might never exist.
"It's tough," Barr told ESPN. "You've really got to be there for them during that process."
