Barr Turned Cancer Battle into New Swimming Career

By Mark Kreidler
ESPN.com

He said, "Someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying."
-- Tim McGraw, "Live Like You Were Dying."

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. -- No one would call it a blessing. It isn't a blessing. Mark Barr won't hand an honorific like that to a sinister thing like cancer, a crazy, incomprehensible thing, a thing that tries to kill its own host, that tried to take him down for a death roll when he was a 14-year-old kid, exacting one of Barr's legs as the toll before it finally released its grip.
But then Barr speaks of the angel at his bedside, the one he woke up to on the day of his amputation. He speaks of the high school coach who rescued a cancer victim by figuratively throwing his fears in the pool.
He speaks of the friends who stood tall while he limped, then hopped, then dog-paddled and then -- well, then became an Paralympian. He speaks of the places he has been, the edges he has shaved off the corners of the world: Athens. Beijing. South Africa and South America.
Barr has stood with presidents, touched the lives of young people, chatted with global stars. He is a mountain biker, a skier, a student and coach, a Paralympic record-setter. He lives, at age 22, in a constant state of forward motion. He can't wait for what comes next.
He may even start going into hospitals again, this time as an angel himself.
"In one sense, cancer was really awful," Barr says. "But at the same time, it has opened so many doors. It has given me an opportunity to show who I am and what I'm about, and it's taken me all the way around the world."
He falls silent for a moment, thinking about what he wants to say. But he doesn't hesitate with the words.
"Really," he says, "it has almost been a positive in my life."
That much would certainly beat the odds.


Cancer came into Mark Barr's life in the manner that Hemingway once described a man going broke: gradually and then suddenly. It was first a simple tightness in the right knee, an annoyance that for weeks limited his lateral movement in his chosen sports of soccer and baseball. Then it got worse; and then Barr awoke one morning with a lump on top of the bone around the knee joint itself; and not long after, Barr sat in a doctor's office and heard the man mumble the word "cancer" into a voice recorder while he gazed at a set of X-rays.
"He's being totally medical, talking to himself, not to us," says Barr. "And it was just, blah blah blah, 'cancer.' That's all that came out. And my dad and I were just … waterfalls."
For Bradd Barr, the diagnosis confirmed a dark fear. The elder Barr, no stranger to cancer indicators as a professor at the University of California-Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, had an uneasy feeling about his son's condition from the moment Mark mentioned the lump. He was the one who pushed for further tests and consultations when initial examinations failed to reveal a deeper problem.
Still, the confirmation was a blow to the solar plexus. The weeks that followed were a hollow daze for the Barr family: Mark and his father, his mother Cindie, older brothers Paul and Todd. It was the late summer of 2001. Two weeks after 9/11, with chemotherapy having failed to stop the growth of the tumor on his knee, Mark Barr's leg was amputated because it was the best chance of cutting out the bone cancer that was attacking him.
"And I know it may sound a little strange," Barr says, "but it was almost like losing the leg was a plus. I no longer had to see the thing that was killing me. It needed to happen so we could go on."
And he did go on. And everything changed. Or maybe nothing changed.
Maybe, for Mark Barr, the tragedy of cancer simply brought to the forefront the qualities he had always carried, qualities of tenacity and spirit.
His family already had an inkling, of course. They'd seen Barr process a deeply competitive athletic drive since joining a swim team at age 4, much younger than the standard cutoff for such a team.
His father certainly understood; he'd been with Mark on the 10th tee at a Sacramento-area golf course when a call came with the news that three spots had been detected on Mark's lungs via a chest X-ray. Bradd wanted to leave the course immediately. Mark made him finish the round, and it was the son who played one of the best nines of his life.
The spots proved to be unrelated to the cancer. Nevertheless, the chemotherapy followed, then the amputation. And on the day that he lost his right leg and the tumor attached to it, Barr awoke in a Sacramento hospital to find himself speaking with a nurse who seemed to know an awful lot about his new station in life.
"My nurse was an amputee herself, and she turned me on to the Paralympics -- swimming and everything," Barr says. "She told me about it the day I woke up from my amputation, because my parents had told her I was an athlete. She told me she had been a Paralympic swimmer herself.
"I never did know her name. I always tell people it was like an angel coming to visit. But from that point on, it was all looking forward -- there was still an opportunity for me to compete."
Unbeknownst to Barr, that opportunity was already in process.


In his early years, Barr had shown a prodigious talent in the pool; he was recording nationally recognized times in swim meets by age 10. By the time of his cancer diagnosis, though, Barr had all but given up the sport and its grueling training regimen in favor of baseball and soccer.
But his swim coaches hadn't forgotten him. When Barr faced amputation in the fall of his sophomore year, Pete Motekaitis, the Davis High School coach who has worked with such talents as Olympian Haley Cope and Stanford All-American Keenan Newman, approached Barr's father.
"Pete isn't one who normally has a lot to say to the parents of his athletes," Bradd Barr says. "But I was watching one of my other sons play water polo, and Pete came up to me on the pool deck and put his arm around me and said, 'We're gonna get Mark back in the pool. We're gonna make this happen.'"
It was a fateful turn of events. Motekaitis, now the UC Davis coach, did welcome Barr back in the water in 2002, after Barr had completed his full chemotherapy and been cleared to try sports. But the coach took the favor one step further: He flatly refused to cut Barr any slack.
"It was a conscious decision, and it really did become something special," says Motekaitis, himself the father of a developmentally disabled son. "You worry about what they can do, not what they can't do."
The approach clicked almost immediately. Motekaitis rode Barr hard in the pool, demanding his absolute best and giving him no excuses for bad performances. At the same time, Barr's teammates relaxed around him, realizing that if their coach was going to treat him as nothing more than a member of the team, they could, too.
"One morning we were all in the weight room and Pete goes, 'Barr, you're pretty good-looking,' and I go, 'Thanks, Pete. That's kind of weird,'" Barr says with a chuckle. "The next day he goes, 'Barr, I'm not going to give you any special treatment. I'm going to call you Ugly.' And so that stuck. Ever since my junior year, he would just shout it across the pool deck: 'Hey, Ugly!' And I shout it back at him."
Adds Bradd Barr: "Mark loves that. They still go back and forth. They're two peas in a pod."
With his coach drawing great efforts from him and his lifelong friends refusing to let him default on his talent, Barr slowly recovered his life as a competitive athlete. He learned to swim at race speed despite having only one foot with which to kick -- and despite being so exhausted from his ordeal that, in the beginning, he needed buoys just to keep himself afloat long enough to get from one end of the pool to the other.
Once a brilliant breaststroker, with its intricate kicking pattern, Barr emerged as a butterfly specialist, using strong shoulders and arms to propel himself through the water.
"I give him a lot of credit for reinventing himself," Motekaitis says. "He's very in tune with his body -- he could have been, for example, a great golfer -- and he also made the decision not to cruise, or to just swim a little. He became a leader. Mark was truly grateful to have a second chance at athletics and a second chance at life."
By 2003, Barr had made his first appearance in a national competition. A year later, he went to the Athens Paralympics. By 2005, he was setting American and Pan American records. In Beijing in August, Barr competed in six events and finished eighth in the 100-meter butterfly despite having his appendix removed in June.
Along the way, Barr developed the template for the rest of his life, and it is one of no regret and no joy left undiscovered. From those early, clumsy days of trying to learn how to swim again, he has branched into skiing and biking and surfing, and he is ready to be fitted with a runner's prosthesis so that he can begin training for triathlons. He hasn't ruled out trying for the 2012 Paralympics swim team.
"You know that Tim McGraw song, 'Live Like You Were Dying'? That pretty much sums it up for me," he says.


At Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where Barr competed as a Division I swimmer the past several years, he is completing his degree in Nutrition Science. He spends time during the summer in his hometown of Davis, working with the swimmers who flood the AquaMonsters youth program also run by Motekaitis and his wife, Koren, a former NCAA champion.
He often speaks to groups about his survival of cancer, and its effect of actually enhancing his outlook on life. As Bradd Barr says, "Mark has a perspective about life that I wish I had. He often talks about the idea that you only live once. There's a maturity there that other people just don't have."
Now Barr sees himself becoming a nurse practitioner and going into the field of pediatric oncology, working with children dealing with cancer. The irony, says his father, is that after his own treatment and surgery, Mark had an almost physical repulsion to walking into a hospital again.
"But I feel I could have a great effect on others going through this," Barr says. "I feel like I already have the credibility in the field."
It is a credibility hard-won, the result of life itself. The cancer was never a blessing, no. But blessings do emerge, in their own time.