He Accentuates the Positive and Skips Negative

Tom Sullivan probably could have become a first-rate major league ballplayer. Except he couldn’t hit the curveball.

He might have made an acceptable tight end in football. Except he couldn’t catch the ball in a crowd.

He could have made a better-than-average basketball player. Except he didn’t have an outside shot.

Now, lots of guys wave at the curveball. Lots of guys drop touchdowns in the end zone when they hear footsteps. Lots of guys put up air balls from the top of the key.

But Tom didn’t have a hitch in his swing, bad hands or the touch of a blacksmith. Tom was lacking only two ingredients to make a four-letter man--eyes.

Tom wasn’t born blind. But it came to the same thing. He was born prematurely, which in that day and age (1947) resulted in the hospitals pouring too much oxygen into the incubator, trying to keep the fragile organisms alive. It attacked the eyes, imparted a permanent opacity to the cornea. Tom would never see a sunset, a child’s smile, a skirt blowing on a windy day, a dog running after a small boy, a tree, never mind a curveball, a pass over the shoulder or a Magic Johnson coming after him in a fast break.

Tom had most of everything else you’d need. He ran the hundred in 10-flat, he had size (6 feet 2 inches, 195 pounds), drive, motivation. He came from a long line of sports achievers. His father, Porky Sullivan, had been a first-rate New England amateur boxing champion. The Sullivans were competitors from John L. on.

It has been well chronicled how the world of sport is the way out of the ghetto for lots of people.

Tom Sullivan was brought up in lace-curtain Irish luxuries of Milton, Mass., not the South Bronx or the tenements of Harlem. But what ghetto is more drab and defeating than the ghetto of the blind? What minority is more disadvantaged than the one that can’t see?

Sports were a way out for Tom Sullivan as surely as they were for every kid from the canebrake who went on to become the heavyweight champion of the world. Tom, too, could say, “I coulda been a contender!”

What would you think a blind kid in the suburbs of Boston would do with his life? Sell light bulbs by phone? Weave baskets in a hire-the-handicapped program? Tune pianos? Hide away from the world?

How about sky diving? How about wrestling? I mean real wrestling, not the Hulk Hogan hippodrome. How about golf? How about crew? How about climbing mountains? How many people even with eyes try all those activities?

Tom Sullivan did. And Sullivan didn’t just try those sports in competition with the blind. He took on the sighted world. He wanted to lick every man in the house like that other Sullivan, too.

Tom Sullivan didn’t come to grips with his blindness. He ignored it. He did things like jump off the bridge of a ferry plying the waters of Woods Hole. He was not above getting in a barroom fight. He swam, ran, climbed.

He decided early in life to concentrate on what he did have instead of what he didn’t. “Listen! Everybody’s disabled,” he insists. “If you’re shy, you’re disabled. If your marriage is on the rocks, you’re disabled. Everybody’s handicapped in one way or another. I could recognize my disability and deal with it. I didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell me what was wrong with me. I just had to bump into a tree.”

Who knows what the world looks like to a person who can’t see it and has never seen it? Have you ever had a description of a place you’ve never been to and then built up a mental image of it, only to go there one day and it’s nothing like you imagined? The blind may inhabit a world that doesn’t exist. The greatest terror is the unknown. For all they know, stepping off what they think is a curb may at any time turn out to be stepping off a gorge, a precipice.

Tom Sullivan defied the unknown. He shrugged off maternal attempts to lure him into the sedentary life. Little Tommy would have none of it. Life was a dance and he didn’t want to sit it out.

Sometimes, when people lose their sight in mid-life, they are able to resume an activity they excelled in when sighted. Golf, for instance. Riding a bicycle. Even fishing. There have been blind golfers who used to be scratch players before an accident took their eyesight, and they are able to reconstruct their game in the dark. Tom Sullivan has never seen a green, a flag or a dogleg left. “On the other hand,” he laughs, “I’ve never seen a lateral water hazard, an unplayable lie or an out-of-bounds stake. I’ve always got an open shot to the green.” The pros say you’re supposed to have a mental image of the shot coming off perfectly as you play it. That’s the only kind Tom Sullivan has.

Author, athlete, recording artist, lyricist, Tom Sullivan got out of his ghetto. But he knows there are tens of thousands still locked in there.

That’s why Tom is hustling for his ninth annual Tom Sullivan St. Patrick’s Day 10-kilometer run Sunday, March 13, at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance. It annually raises $100,000 for the Family Center for the Blind.

A lot of guys who escape their private ghetto want nothing more to do with it. The prevailing notion seems to be “I got out--why can’t they?”

Tom Sullivan was this way, as he recounts in his remarkable book “If You Could See What I Hear.” A dozen years ago, he was in his own let-em-eat-cake mode. “Let those other Tommy Sullivans claw and clutch their own way to salvation,” he was telling himself one day as he was crossing a road with his beloved guide dog, Heidi. There was a sickening crash--and a car ran over Heidi just as she pushed Tom out of the way.

Tom Sullivan realized he hadn’t done it alone. No one ever does, blind or sighted. That’s why he spearheads events such as the Torrance 10K and is in the forefront of programs for the blind from coast to coast.

Tom Sullivan hits a curveball harder than Koufax’s every day. He gets open against defenses that would shut down a Willie Gault. He has outpointed a tougher opponent than Mike Tyson ever was. He makes it in life from the three-point range. He’s a major leaguer, a Pro Bowler, and as All-American as the Notre Dame backfield.