Memoir of endurance
Ibecame convinced that God has a sense of humor when my oldest son was a distance runner. I’m a former offensive lineman. About the only thing I’ve ever run toward is the front of a buffet line.
My son’s decision all those years ago was a smart one. In middle school at Holy Souls in Little Rock and in high school at Little Rock Catholic, he had the good fortune of being coached by volunteers such as Frank O’Mara and Mark Andersen, world-class athletes who had run for the legendary John McDonnell at the University of Arkansas.
These men were not only coaches for their athletes, but also counselors and father figures.
I was delighted when O’Mara sent me an advance copy of his book, “Bend, Don’t Break: A Memoir of Endurance,” which is being released this month by the O’Brien Press in Dublin, Ireland. Though he has lived in Arkansas since the fall of 1978, O’Mara remains a hero in his native Ireland. He ran three times for Ireland in the Olympics, competing in 1984 at Los Angeles, 1988 at Seoul and 1992 at Barcelona. O’Mara was a commentator for Irish television during subsequent summer Olympics.
I planned to read a chapter of the book each night while taking time off for the Christmas holidays. I became so engrossed in it, however, that I finished it in two days. Though it outlines his childhood in Ireland and his track career, “Bend, Don’t Break” is primarily about O’Mara’s current battle with Parkinson’s disease.
O’Mara, 63, was diagnosed with the disease at age 48.
In his dedication he writes: “I wish I had never met a single neurologist, but 14 years into this saga, I have the contact details for many. This book is dedicated to all those from whom I have received treatment or counsel, but especially to Dr. Lee Archer and Dr. Rohit Dhall at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, and Dr. Kendall Lee at the
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Without your care, many of us would not have the tools to cope.”
O’Mara’s professional track career took him to 56 countries, but he continued to make his home in Arkansas.
“I truly love Arkansas,” he told this newspaper’s Bob Holt shortly before being inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2013. “I don’t aspire to live anywhere else. … I had the great fortune of marrying a Little Rock girl, and that helped keep me in Arkansas, too. My wife’s great-grandmother was an O’Sullivan from Kerry so my kids are 9/16th Irish. I thoroughly enjoyed my athletic career. But it has been a wonderful decision to make our home here. I don’t regret it for a moment.”
O’Mara became the first NCAA outdoor champion for McDonnell in 1983 and the UA’s first NCAA outdoor champion since Clyde Scott of Smackover won the 110-meter hurdles in 1948. As a Fayetteville-based professional, he later won world championships in the 3,000 meters in 1987 and 1991.
McDonnell, also an Irishman, recruited the Limerick native out of St. Munchin’s, the boarding school that had produced Niall O’Shaughnessy, McDonnell’s first All-American distance runner. O’Mara turned down offers from traditional track powers such as Villanova and Providence to attend Arkansas.
O’Mara graduated with a UA engineering degree. While running as a professional, he also earned a master’s in business and a law degree from UA. After more than a dozen years of traveling the world, O’Mara retired from professional track.
“In a sport measured absolutely by time, mine began to run out,” he writes. “Like many high-level athletes, in the end it was injuries— and all the wear and tear on the body—that gave me no choice but to retire. So I turned toward a career in long pants . . . . Business was in my DNA. My father had been a serial entrepreneur who owned many small businesses. His last venture was a successful soft drinks business, which he owned and operated in my hometown in the southwest of Ireland.
“I was brought up working holidays and weekends in a bottling plant. Initially, I fed the massive glass-bottle washing machine, a particularly arduous task. I graduated to driving the forklift, which I found easier than standing in front of the giant mouth of a washer as it ingested a dozen bottles at a time and disgorged steam at skin-sizzling temperatures. Eventually I made sales calls in a pickup truck. On occasion I made collections calls as well. I became well-versed in the vagaries of business.”
In January 1997, O’Mara joined Alltel in Little Rock, which had been founded in 1946 as Allied Telephone Co.
“My tenure began when the wireless industry was in its infancy,” he writes. “Over the next decade, Alltel become one of the largest wireless, or mobile network, carriers in the United States with nearly 15 million customers and $10 billion in annual revenues. In two years, I was a corporate officer leading the human resources team. I later found myself in charge of the customer service, sales and marketing teams. The wireless mobile network industry in the 2000s turned out to be a great outlet for someone hoping to keep his competitive juices flowing.
“I was soon swept up in a dogfight as Alltel took on the emerging players in the field. We drove hard to acquire customers, launch devices and lower our customer churn rate. Every day there were deadlines and sales quotas to meet, network parameters to account for, new technologies to review and select. It was a constant battle with our successes and failures publicly reported quarterly to the markets.”
O’Mara thrived under pressure. Then came the sale of Alltel and the signs that something was wrong physically.
“The first indication that something nefarious had invaded my body appeared on Jan. 9, 2009, the day after Verizon Wireless completed its purchase of Alltel, the largest mobile phone provider gobbling up the fifth largest. I should have taken heed of those early signs, but I was preoccupied with what I thought was a more imminent threat. The team I worked with had done a tremendous job keeping Alltel relevant against the behemoths, AT&T and Verizon, whose advertising budgets were well over $1 billion a year.
“We were a gritty underdog who wouldn’t stop nipping at their heels. We poked fun at the big guys in award-winning creative. And everything was going swimmingly. . . . Then, suddenly, the big guy took the ball, and the game was over. Our teams and our almost 15 million customers were now part of Verizon.”
The progression of Parkinson’s was rapid. There were tremors, severe muscle cramps, and the inability to walk and at times even speak.
“Such is the all-consuming nature of this odious disease that it tries to define your life,” O’Mara writes. “Today, I am first and foremost a Parkinson’s warrior. My everyday schedule consists of one task above all others: do battle with the disease and slow its progression. Before PD, I would have described myself in the simplest terms as an athlete and a businessman with a wonderful wife, three beloved sons—Jack, Colin and Harry—and friends all over the world.”
Reading about O’Mara’s battle can be harrowing, but in the end it’s inspiring. O’Mara already was among my heroes for the way he treated my son. After reading this book, he’s even more of one.
“After years of fighting an endless war against the advancing foe, I am now much more guarded in my optimism,” O’Mara writes. “Unbridled positivity prevented me from accepting my fate and getting on with it. Parkinson’s is my mortal enemy. It will always be, but my focus should be on learning to live with the condition rather than trying to outwit it. If I could just come to terms with my incapacities, I could suck the remaining sap from my tree of life.
“I have to stop thinking that I’ll enjoy life again when I get over this ailment. I have changed irreversibly, but that doesn’t mean I have been broken . . . . I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I am focused on what matters: living in the now, loving my family and friends. I will plan for the future, but I will never dwell on the future.
“I will never play a part I haven’t been assigned. I will run the race one lap at a time, and I will not worry about the result. I will bend, but I will not break.”