PHP not parsing joined tables well

I'm got a query that is joining a few tables. select par.*, pla.*, pro.*, reg.* from parent par, players pla, registrations reg, programs pro where blah blah blah Now, a result set is the same but I'm having trouble parsing it because I have column names that are identical in two of the tables. (A first_name in parent and first_name in players.) After getting the result set, PHP doesn't seem to like a reference to par.first_name to differentiate it from pla.first_name when I'm parsing the results. Even worse, in any given row, $resultArray['first_name'] only gives the first occurance which is the parent first name. The other "first_name" column seems unreferenceable. (is that a word?) Anyways, any help is appreciated. There are so many columns to pull, I'd hate to have to list them all out in the query. TIA.