TAMPA, FL — If you could map the memories that weave through Michael McFarland’s mind, you would find a child who lost his dad, a teenager who lost his mom and an 18-year-old man who has survived and escaped his circumstances.
(Editor’s Note: This is a story that originally ran in Gator Country Magazine about Florida recruiting class of 2010 signee Michael McFarland. We thought it was outstanding and worth sharing with our internet audience).
On March 9, he received a phone call. A talented tight end prospect from Blake High School, McFarland settled into his comfortable couch in his suburban home to find Urban Meyer’s voice on the other end.
Up until now, McFarland liked everything he had heard about Florida. He liked the fact that he’d get a full scholarship, full meals every day and a tutor.
He liked that Meyer and coach Dan McCarney came to his school to visit him — they weren’t just telling him they cared, they were showing him. He liked the thought of being part of a family.
He did not take these gifts for granted. They have not always been a part of his life.
On March 9, Meyer made that routine phone call. Armed with a newfound sense of insecurity about early verbal commitments, he was making sure that McFarland wanted to be a Gator and wouldn’t change his mind during his senior season.
For thirty minutes they talked. Meyer could feel he was close, so he tried to make the final push.
“I want you to sit down with your family,” Meyer said, “and I want you to talk it over. We don’t want you to make a mistake.”
McFarland said, “Yes sir,” and hung up the phone. The only problem is that parents have long been a part of his past, and he doesn’t have biological brothers or sisters. Instead of looking to them, he turned to the man who gave him the home he never had, his basketball coach.
For thirty minutes, they talked, simultaneously confident and anxious of the next step — the decision.
* * *
We take our father’s name even if he doesn’t take care of us. The last time Michael McFarland lived with one of his parents, he was in the sixth grade.
It was a Saturday, he remembers. He was sitting on the sidewalk outside of the low-rise projects where he lived with his dad in Tampa. His dad was painting on the porch. Young Mike was sitting with his friends DeAndre, Peter and James and James’ little sister.
When a kid from down the street spotted Peter’s Gameboy Color, fists started flying. James joined in. His sister was bleeding. Michael McFarland Sr., yelled, “Stop!” Mike dropped the kid on his head. It stopped. Rather, it paused.
Later that night, three cars came crashing into Michael Sr.’s fence. It was the kid’s family. They accused him of beating up the kid. When the police came, Mike tried to tell them that it was all his fault.
His dad was stuttering. Mike was scared. The sirens screamed and stole his father. They stole Mike’s home, not just for the six months that his dad was gone, but for all the nights since then when he has had to sit in someone else’s bed at night and try to sleep.
Michael Sr. was not arrested for hitting that child. Rather, according to police reports, he was charged with and pleaded guilty to driving with a suspended or canceled license. In 2005, he would serve a six-month prison sentence for becoming a habitual offender of this charge. His record goes back to 1984 and includes more than a dozen arrests.
Mike and his coach call Michael Sr.’s situation “unstable.”
Mike couldn’t live with his mom because, at the time, he didn’t know where she was. Before she had Mike, Mike’s mom was a prostitute. Before she could raise him, Mike’s dad took him away.
So Mike went to live with friends and family for the rest of middle school. Occasionally, his mom would keep her promises to visit him. Most of the time, she wouldn’t.
On his 13th birthday, at his grandma’s house, Mike waited for his mom for hours. She had promised him that she would be there. She never showed.
Mike grew tall and strong while she was gone. He stands higher than 6-foot-5 and weighs more than 230 pounds, but he still looks skinny – he hates it when people call him skinny.
He was always taken care of physically by his “foster” families — a collection of friends and family members — but no one cared for him. He couldn’t be himself.
He was always scared that he would slip up and get kicked out. Always overly apologetic for his few mistakes. Always nodding along to the speech that always started and ended the same way: “We took you in … If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
Mike finally got to know his mom at the end of 10th grade. His mom had a knack for figuring out who the fake people were in his life – the people who would betray him. In her, he found someone that he could share secrets with over her famous fried chicken and baked beans.
When they were beginning to build a bond, to establish trust and to move past their past, fate dealt Mike another blow. She died of a drug overdose that year.
“I don’t think I got the chance to say everything that I should have as a son,” Mike says from his coach’s house — his home — in Tampa.
Teachers and counselors and friends were clueless about his sorrow. Mike would sit behind the bleachers of the football field or in the empty acting auditorium at Blake and cry so no one would see him.
“Some people think that I’ve got this house with a white picket fence and a family inside,” Mike says, “but it’s not like that.”
One day, his basketball coach, Calvin Barrs, found him behind the bleachers. Barrs had become Mike’s confidant, teacher, counselor, friend and … father.
“You have to live through this stuff,” Barrs told him. “She’s in your heart forever. She is always your mother.”
Barrs has not always been Mike’s father.
* * *
Calvin Barrs is not a complicated man. He has a manicured beard and a modest home. And he knows that boys need dads — Barrs and his dad talked every day for 23 years before he died last year.
Barrs had a loving family all his life. His parents divorced when he was in the second grade, but they remained friends. He had a twin sister and three other brothers. His mom raised them in the projects in Daytona Beach. Three of them earned college degrees. Four of them are still alive.
When he was nine, he was running around in a neighbor’s yard. The older lady who owned the yard leaned out of the window and said to him, “Young man, whatever you do in life, be kind to old people.”
“I don’t know why she said that to me out of all the kids there,” Barrs says. “But I thought it meant something, and I’ve been kind to all people since then.”
He went on to play high school basketball and college basketball when St. Leo University was still St. Leo College. He still remembers his game against former NBA All-Star David Robinson.
“I didn’t back down,” Barrs says. “He puts his pants on the same way I do.”
In college, he knew that he wanted to be a social worker. After college, he moved back down to Daytona Beach to do just that. Then a friend called to tell him about this wonderful woman he knew in Tampa. Her name was Consandra. They would be perfect for each other.
Barrs moved to Tampa and restarted his life as a social worker in the school system with his new wife. She works with the county’s school administration office.
When Barrs would encounter kids who had potential, but needed a push, he would take them into his home and get their grades right. Under his care, Jeremy Black earned a scholarship to the University of Tampa, Montrey Pride to South Carolina State and Tito Gonzalez to West Virginia.
“You don’t get many like him, though,” he says, pointing to Mike.
He and Mike are sitting together in Barrs’ home. The door here has been open for Mike since the ninth grade, but he just walked through it in January.
“He’s the first person that I go to if I need anything — even advice about girls,” Mike says, pointing back.
He need Barrs’ advice and craved his affection, but he wasn’t ready, at the end of 10th grade, for the other side of a parent. The structure.
* * *
They both remember vividly the day that they met, and putting them together to talk about it forces the words to collide in the thin living room at Barrs’ house.
Barrs was working a few jobs at the time, with the school system and running a restaurant, Back Porch Delights. (“The chicken is so good, you don’t even need sauce,” Mike says.)
One of Barrs’ job was to coach the junior varsity basketball team at Blake High School. He heard about Mike from some friends, and he went to see him at a local recreation center. He was in awe.
“Please tell me you’re coming to Blake,” Barrs said.
It turns out that Mike was going to Blake. He wanted to be an actor in high school, and Blake has a pretty good program. Mike was living with friends still, and the magnet school bus came and picked him up every day for school. He didn’t see Barrs again until basketball season started.
They instantly connected, and Mike told him about his family situation.
“For someone to have been through what he has and to be upbeat is amazing,” Barrs says.
He told Mike that he was always welcome to stay with him. Later that night, Barrs told his wife Mike’s story. She sometimes took a little while to warm up to the idea of having another boy in the house –– but Mike’s story was different.
“It wasn’t a question,” she says. “I knew we needed to help him out.”
***
Two years went by. Mike lost his mom, and Barrs lost his dad. Barrs started working at Blake full time. When Mike’s got a “C” in chemistry, Barrs took him in permanently.
Mike has an 11 p.m. curfew now, and he is expected to come straight home from practice on Friday nights. Barrs took away Mike’s cell phone, but Mike doesn’t mind. He likes to be alone sometimes and sit in his room for hours listening to music. His room.
Sometimes it takes just a few spoken words to send a message. Mike knew that Barrs wanted what was best for him, but he needed to hear it. After Blake’s football coach left, after the other coaches in the county hounded him to transfer to their schools, after the worst Christmas of his life, Barrs was there.
He pulled Mike aside and called him “son.” Barrs told Mike that he wouldn’t let him fail.
“Coach won’t let me waste my talent,” Mike says. “He keeps me focused. He’s like that father that I never had, and his wife is like the mom I never had. I’m blessed to have them.”
He finishes his homework on time now. And he goes to class. He has always been smart, but he hasn’t always had structure.
“I mean, how could I get away with slipping up in school now?” Mike says. “He works there!”
Barrs is a man of many metaphors. At different times, he calls mike a wild stallion and a rocket ship. The stallion because he kicked around his cage for a while before he got adjusted. And a rocket ship because he’s worried about what happens after the boosters fall off.
Barrs remembers the moment that he chose Florida – Mike still hadn’t made up his mind. He overheard a football player’s parent talking to another family at Junior Day. “Because my kid goes to Florida,” she said, “I sleep easy at night.”
There was another thing he liked. The drive is just two hours from his home – “but we could make it in an hour and a half,” Barrs says.
There have been a lot of boys in this home, but none like Mike.
Mike and Barrs talk for hours. Sometimes they don’t talk. Sometimes they don’t need to. When Barrs looks at Mike, he knows if something is wrong. He always knows what Mike needs.
After all, Barrs has been in the dad business for almost eight years. That’s when his biological son, Chase, was born. Chase and Mike kind of look alike, people tell them.
There have been a lot of boys in this house, but none have had an impact on Chase like Mike. Chase copies Mike and follows him around.
Having a little brother has taught Mike other lessons in responsibility. He has learned how to be a role model. He has learned how to behave even when no one is watching him. And he has learned how to succeed for someone other than himself.
On Mike’s chemistry notebook, there is hand-drawn picture on the front. Mike and Chase are standing next to each other wearing Gators’ T-shirts. The caption at the bottom, put down perfectly by the pen of a second-grader reads:
“Brothers forever.”
* * *
Mike dialed Meyer. Meyer was surprised to hear from him again so soon. Had he pushed him too hard, or was this the moment he had been waiting for?
“Coach,” Mike said, “I’m ready to be a Gator.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
Meyer’s response only filled a moment. It was only four words long. But it was a meaningful moment – they were the words Mike needed to hear.
“Welcome to the family.”