“I’m gonna race again, I’m gonna win.”
The words of Brian Farrell’s father stumbled off the hospital room walls and found their place inside Brian’s head, and the heart monitor beside the bed began to etch its sound across his eardrums: a long line.a beep. A long line.a beep.
Farrell, 21 at the time, had just watched his father die – and come back.
When his father’s heart stopped, a doctor had tried to revive him. Brian had stood in the middle of the room watching his father, whose eyes were closed, whose heart was barely pumping. Then all of a sudden, the older man jerked forward from the hospital bed, eyes open and screaming in pain. Brian had thought for sure his dad was gone. But he’d fought through it.
While his father, a harness racer at Scarborough Downs, was in nine-out-of-10 pain, the pair had reached toward each other and locked hands. Looking toward his son, as if to assure him that he was actually breathing and alive, he said, “the pain feels good.”
After years of struggling through high school, working himself toward self-destruction, and being unsure of where he was headed – which was looking like nowhere – his father’s second chance at life inspired Brian to make one for himself.
Brian grew up in Cumberland and went to Greely High for one year before moving to South Portland and South Portland High School for his last three years. He considers both his alma mater.
While at Greely, Farrell picked up lacrosse, but was forced to give it up when he moved because South Portland didn’t have a team.
High school didn’t impress or motivate Farrell, and he graduated from South Portland in 1996 with what he calls a D-average.
“I wasn’t even thinking about college when I graduated high school, I didn’t even bother taking the SAT’s,” he said.
Nonetheless, he began attending the University of Southern Maine as a non-matriculated student, taking a couple classes each semester while juggling four different jobs.
“I was working 80 to 100 hours a week, I would go from one shift to the next,” Farrell said.
For the next few years, Farrell continued to work and take classes with no forward movement towards a degree and no career aspirations outside his regular employment.
It seemed as though he was bound to live up to everyone’s expectations that after high school, he’d go nowhere.
In 1999, when his father came back to life, things changed.
To say that Brian found direction would be an understatement.
By 2001 he had been accepted to USM and began his first semester as a full time student with the help of financial aid.
By 2002, he had been accepted into the Honors Program and named the student representative for the honors faculty council.
In 2004, he became the assistant director for “Words and Images” an annual art and literature magazine published at USM.
He held that title for four years, but Brian’s involvement with everything USM didn’t stop there.
“USM had challenged me mentally, it had challenged me emotionally, but it hadn’t yet challenged me physically,” he said, so in the fall of 2006, Farrell began getting his body and skills back in tune, practicing in the fall off-season with the men’s lacrosse team.
“I knew I wasn’t going to be an All-American,” Farrell said, starting to laugh, “but this was my ‘Rudy’ moment.”
But the NCAA wasn’t quite so sure. Though Brian didn’t know it yet, the NCAA deems players ineligible after their 10th semester of being a matriculated student.
It didn’t matter so much that he was ten years the senior of his freshmen teammates – that spring was his 11th semester, so the administration was forced to cut him from the team.
Still Brian persevered – and head coach Malcolm Chase asked him to become an assistant coach. Brian, feeling honored, accepted, and has this year entered his second season on the team’s staff.
Meanwhile, he was pressing on with what had become a never-ending college career in the eyes of his peers. To surprise them all, he graduated in 2006 with a degree in history (and came back the following year, to no surprise at all, to take a second degree in political science).
He finally finished in 2007, but through lacrosse, has maintained his presence on campus.
Most people go through the clichéd trials and tribulations of life without gaining much, without knowing what they should do about them, or what they’re capable of doing.
Despite all of his failures, Brian remains unsatisfied until he reaches heights he once thought impossible, regardless of where they place him.
“If I can push myself as far as I can go,” he said, “then I haven’t failed.”
Fresh out of college and less than a month after his 30th birthday, Brian has found himself coming around the bend for yet another lap on the racetrack.
And if the last lap is any hint toward the future, he will race again. And he will win.