AS Seen In The New York Daily news December 20, 2017
By nature and profession, Dr. Carlon Colker is a man of movement and some mystery. At times, words aren’t enough to explain his methods.
“Push me,” he says after dropping into a football stance.
Colker stumbles back. It was the third time he asked to be shoved during the interview. He re-positions and plants himself to the floor.
“Now push me again.”
It was like trying to move a rooted tree stump. Or Dwight Howard out of the post.
“You have to feel the ground as an extension, as a force,” Colker explains.
Colker, 52, is a ball of muscle. His muscles look like they have muscles that can bench press 700 pounds. He also has lots of ideas about maintaining his client, Kristaps Porzingis, and has put many of them already into action as the power forward’s personal physician and trainer.
“At this point, he just knows my body really well,” Porzingis says. “He knows what I need all the time — when I’m tired, when I’m not, whenever.”
Notably, Colker has no association with the Knicks. His work with Porzingis — conducted from Greenwich, Conn., to Liepaja, Latvia — is completely separate from that of the team’s employed doctors and trainers. But like others both affiliated with the team and working independently inside the Porzingis camp, Colker has become a key figure in an area most paramount to the franchise’s future: keeping a 7-3 ‘Unicorn’ strong and healthy.
There is no blueprint for such a unique task, but Colker, in a sitdown with the Daily News last month, peeled back the curtain on the methods – some of which he proudly acknowledges are controversial in his field – of Porzingis’ physical makeover last summer designed to promote lasting health and base power.
It was an unknown methodology, even to the Knicks.