Digital Extra: The Station Fire

Lincoln's Philip Barr, a victim of The Station nightclub fire, has overcome plenty of adversity, has won the NCAA Division III's sportsmanship award and is an inspiration to others.

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, August 12, 2005

BY ROBERT LEE
Journal Sports Writer

God has a plan for everyone. That's what Philip Barr believes. And God's plan for Barr is to be an inspiration to others. To let them know that nothing is impossible, no matter what the odds appear to be.

With his life on the line, Barr, 23, never gave up. He overcame the odds and succeeded, and he knows that others can do it, too, if they work hard enough and believe.

On Feb. 20, 2003, Barr was one of the victims of the The Station nightclub fire in West Warwick. The former Moses Brown swimmer and baseball player from Lincoln suffered serious burns and lung damage in the fire, which killed 100 people.

To help his lungs heal, doctors gave Barr drugs that put him in a coma for 21 days. Even so, by the time he was released, after a little more than a month in the hospital, he had only about 45 percent lung capacity.

Doctors said he would never swim competitively again for Bates College, where he enrolled after graduating from Moses Brown in 2000. But he proved them wrong. After more than a year of intense rehabilitation, he returned to Bates in September of 2004 and swam for the team he grew to love.

His hard work did not go unnoticed. Last Friday, Bates announced that Barr had won the Division III NCAA Sportsmanship Award, which is given each year to a student-athlete who has demonstrated one or more of the ideals of sportsmanship -- including fairness, civility, honesty, unselfishness, respect and responsibility.

"To receive this honor is just a little overwhelming because I know that it's an enormous honor," Barr said. "It's overwhelming because there are so many athletes out there that I respect

just within my own sport. You see so many athletes in all other sports highly publicized that have come back from difficult injuries, so it's a real honor to have been chosen as a recipient of this award. I hope this is an inspiration to other athletes trying to come back."

Barr wasn't even supposed to be at the Great White concert the night of the fire. He was in New York City preparing for two internship interviews at investment banks. He was getting ready to write the next chapter in his life.

But a snowstorm blew in and canceled those interviews, so he came back to stay with his parents, Phil and Barbara, and his brother Chris, 14, and sister Kate, 21.

One of his buddies was home from college, and they decided to get together for a drink.

"I have always been an '80s rock fan, so we decided to catch the show," Barr said.

That night changed his life forever. He considers himself lucky to have survived, but his journey back to the pool was a long and arduous one. He never dreamed he would one day receive the prestigious NCAA Sportsmanship Award.

"My attitude was very positive from Day One," Barr said. "Before I could even talk, and I was still on an assisted breathing apparatus. Just coming out of the chemically induced coma, the only way to communicate with my parents was to write. One of the first things I wrote to my father was that 'I hope to make progress every day.'

"I was in immense pain," Barr added. "I just wanted that to go away. It was very stressful. Every 10 or 15 minutes, someone new would come in for a procedure. I just wanted out of that environment. I just wanted my life to go back to normal."

Barr improved little by little, day by day. In the beginning, he said he had difficulty walking from his front door to the mailbox, but he never lost track of his ultimate goal -- to get back in the pool.

He started out by working with a personal trainer, Anthony Diluglio, three to four times a week at a local gym. About six months after the fire, Bates coach Dana Mulholland called.

The coach told Barr he would love to have him back with the team no matter his condition because Barr was one of Bates' emotional leaders.

"That was six months out from the fire, and I was still rehabbing general strength," Barr said. "I hadn't even considered what my aerobic capacity might be. . . . That initial conversation kept me feeling good about my progress. I knew I could do it. It was a goal to reach for."

Barr decided to take courses at Brown University while he continued to rehab in the fall of 2003.

"By October, I decided it was time to get back into the pool," Barr said. "One day I went over to the recreational center at Brown and did about 50 meters. I was exhausted. All of the training I had done to that point allowed me to get around in my daily life, but my goals were higher than that. I talked to my pulmonologist and he thought that swimming would be good for my lungs, to help heal the scar tissue and open up my lungs."

By December, Barr was going to the pool once a week, and was swimming 200 meters on a regular basis.

"I wasn't swimming as fast as I was before, but I felt confident enough to take a stab at going back to swimming at Bates," Barr said. "At first, I had no intention of competing in meets. A lot of my friends were on the swim team, and I thought it would be a great thing to cap off my senior year by swimming again and being part of the team."

In practice, he struggled to keep up as best he could with his teammates. His lung capacity was up to 87 percent at that time.

"Swimming induced tremendous coughing and discomfort daily," Mulholland said in a statement on Bates' Web site. "Yet Phil never talked of his plight and never expected special treatment and never made excuses. He attended all practices -- including double sessions during break -- and meets, and he trained as hard as anyone on the team."

When the first meet rolled around, Mulholland asked Barr which race he was going to swim. Barr decided to swim the 50-freestyle because it's the shortest race.

"I had a reasonable swim," Barr said.

He kept up his vigorous workouts, and by the season's midpoint he was back to swimming his normal events -- the 100 butterfly and 100 freestyle.

Right before the biggest, and final, meet of his career at Bates -- the New England Small College Athletic Conference Championships -- Barr was diagnosed with pneumonia.

"I was really disappointed and felt awful that I was going to miss the last meet of the season," Barr said. "I went home and saw my pulmonologist. He put me on antibiotics and told me to rest completely for a couple of days and said that if I was feeling well in a couple of days then I could go back and swim."

Despite still feeling very sick, Barr swam the 100 butterfly leg of Bates' medley relay in the preliminary round at the NESCA championships and posted his best time of the season.

"That was a huge motivator for a lot of my teammates," Barr said.

And it was his coach and teammates, he said, who inspired him to continue swimming when he was struggling at practice.

"They supported me tremendously," Barr said. "Without the motivation of my team, this award wouldn't have been nearly as important. They encouraged me every day when it would hurt to get up for practice and to really put in the 110-percent effort that the sport requires."

While still recovering from The Station fire, Barr was part of the group that set up The Station Family Fund, an organization that has raised more than $720,000 to help the families of the victims of the fire.

"Many of the fire survivors have real problems and real issues that they have to live with every day," Barr said. "Many of them lost their arm or their leg. Others received severe burns that didn't allow them to go back to their professions and trades that they practiced before the fire, and this fund helps those victims get their lives back together. It's a great opportunity to help make someone's recovery a little bit more comfortable."

The organization also has a Christmas party for the children who lost one or both of their parents in the fire.

Barr, who was encouraged by his next-door neighbor, Kerri Carvalho, to begin swimming when he was 9, graduated from Bates in May with an economics degree and currently is an investment bank analyst at JP Morgan in New York City.

"This demonstrates that being a true sportsman, caring about your peers, and bringing other things to the table in athletics is valued and important," Barr said about winning the Sportsmanship Award.

"I am thrilled by Phil's award," said Suzanne Coffey, director of athletics at Bates, in a press release from the school, "because he embodies all aspects of this honor. In a sports culture that too often puts the individual before team, Barr's dedication, respect and selflessness encompass the definition of student-athlete. We at Bates are fortunate to have an athletics culture that celebrates sportsmanship and decency in every aspect of life, and Phil perfectly symbolizes these qualities."

"I have seen courage, compassion, selflessness and determination displayed in many ways over the years, but never more than what Phil Barr displayed at Bates," Mulholland said.

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For more information on the Station Family Fund, or to donate money, visit its Web site, www.stationfamilyfund.org