Enough Grit to Produce a Pearl : Blind since birth, peninsula writer, singer, composer, athlete, husband and father was determined to achieve a remarkable life.

From the front yard of his family’s brownstone in a suburb of Boston, young Tom Sullivan used to listen to the other kids in his rough-and-tumble neighborhood play baseball at Holy Name School. He could hear the crack of a bat, a ball hitting a glove, the sounds of a game he loved but was never invited to play.

Blind since birth, Sullivan was pretty much confined to the yard, which was fenced for his safety. But, determined to succeed in a world he could not see, Sullivan played baseball by himself. When the other kids got together at Holy Name, he started his own game. A stick for a bat. A rock for a ball.

“I knew I had to compete to survive,” says Sullivan, now a successful singer, composer, actor and author.

“There is a phrase about the Irish,” he says. “ ‘Their wars were merry, and their songs were sad.’ And that’s what my life has been about. The war of competing, the blackness of a young Irish soul looking to be free.”

It is a life that took him from a boarding school for the blind to Harvard University, that transformed him from a young boy shunned on playgrounds to a young man who became an Olympic-class athlete and later, a successful performer.

Most important, it is a life that Sullivan knows is rare but that might be more commonplace in a world less intimidated by those who are disabled. “Tom Sullivan is the tip of the iceberg,” he says. “I’m the lucky one.”

Sullivan, who lives in Palos Verdes Estates, says he has turned that luck into something he can share with others through fund-raising events. They include today’s 13th annual Mobil Tom Sullivan 10-K in Torrance. Proceeds from the race will benefit research and prevention of blindness.

Born prematurely in 1947, Sullivan was blinded when he was given too much oxygen in an incubator. For the first five years of his life, he lived with his parents and two older sisters in West Roxbury, Mass., then an Irish-American enclave near downtown Boston.

His father, Tom, was known to everyone as Porky. A short, wiry former prizefighter, Porky Sullivan was unsuccessful in the ring but made a good living outside it as a fight manager, bootlegger, bookie and bar owner.

“He was a larger-than-life character,” says Sullivan, recalling how his father once grudgingly paid $470,000 in back taxes by delivering a truckload of $1 bills to Boston City Hall.

If Sullivan’s competitiveness came from his late father, his pluck and pride can be traced to his mother, Marie, who today lives outside Boston.

A tiny woman with dark curly hair, Marie Sullivan is a devout Catholic who passed on her faith and determination, as well as her bright blue eyes, to her son. “In her mind,” Sullivan says, “her son was going to dress himself, feed himself, be self-sufficient and not look blind doing it.”

Sullivan remembers an early childhood of struggle and joy, living with his parents and two older sisters, Peggy and Jean.

But that changed, he says, at the age of 5, when he was sent by the parents he loved to a place he hated: Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts.

It didn’t matter that Perkins was then--and still is--a well-known boarding school for the blind.

“The doctor told my parents to put me in an institution for the blind . . . and they felt it (Perkins) was the best place for this little blind kid to learn,” Sullivan says.

“But it was the worst thing they could have done to me because I’m a people person,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be part of the world, and I saw the school as completely limiting.”

Though he soon emerged as a top student, athlete and performer at Perkins, his success there meant nothing in “the real world,” Sullivan says.

“I was the best at everything at school, but when I came back to the neighborhood on weekends, I was always the last kid taken when the kids played games,” he says. “So I used to think, ‘How do you win if you are the best among the blind, but seen as the worst in the real world?’ ”

One way, he decided, was to make the other kids play on his terms. To learn basketball, Sullivan rigged a buzzer to the basket so he could “shoot by sound.” And when the other kids came to play, he’d purposely lose games during the day and invite them back at night.

“That way,” he recalls, “they couldn’t see the basket either.”

Mindful of his frustration, Sullivan’s family also tried to help him overcome his isolation. “My father wanted to prove I could be equal, and he knew he needed to make me popular to do that,” Sullivan recalls.

So Porky Sullivan once took his winnings from a poker game and bought a pony. “He brought it home at 3 in the morning and tied it up outside the house. The next morning, there was a sign up: ‘Sullivan’s pony rides--10 cents apiece,’ Sullivan recalls. “And every kid on the face of the Irish earth showed up at my house.”

Still, Sullivan says, he was frustrated at his boarding school, growing to resent it almost as much as his blindness. At the age of 8, he was introduced at the school to its most famous graduate, Helen Keller. “When I met her, they said, ‘This is our little devil, Tom Sullivan.’ And she said to me, ‘Always be a devil, Tom Sullivan.’ ”

He was.

By the time he graduated from Perkins, Sullivan had been expelled 11 times for pranks ranging from disrupting a Christmas concert to pocketing $10,000 by shortchanging other students who helped him sell Christmas wreaths for a local company. When the school uncovered Sullivan’s ploy, it forced him to donate the money to an overseas school for the blind.

But Sullivan’s time at Perkins was not marked only by pranks and anger. In the classroom, on stage and in athletics, he excelled. Competing, he said, meant working harder than others, but it also allowed him to prove himself.

And particularly in sports, he says, it had its rewards. In his senior year, Sullivan won the high school state championship in wrestling. Four years later, he competed for a spot on the U.S. Olympic wrestling team.

By then, Sullivan had already graduated from Harvard University with a degree in clinical psychology. But his passion, he found, was in performing.

“From an early age, music became an outlet. And because I could play the piano and sing, it made me a hit at parties,” Sullivan says.

His professional career began at summer resorts and lounges in New England. It was there, one night in 1968, that he met his future wife, Patty.

“I was playing piano at a bar in Cape Cod. And the guy I was playing with said, ‘Jesus, this is some good-looking woman who just came in,’ ” Sullivan remembers. “So I found out from him where she was sitting and walked over, purposely tripping so she would have to pay attention to me.”

The next year, the two were married, and soon had two children: Blythe, now a student at Loyola Marymount University, and Tom, a senior at Bishop Montgomery High School.

By the early 1970s, Sullivan’s career was moving. Television. Recording contracts. Feature films. A combination of hard work and good fortune, he says. “Fate smiles,” he says, grinning, “and then you have to follow the signposts.”

Doing so has taken Sullivan in several directions.

In television, he has appeared on several shows including the soap opera “Search for Tomorrow” and has won two Emmy nominations: one for a performance on “Highway to Heaven,” another for his work as a correspondent on “Good Morning America.”

As a writer, he has completed five books, including his 1975 best-selling autobiography, “If You Could See What I Hear.” The book, co-written with his friend, author Derek Gill of Palos Verdes Estates, was later turned into a film of the same name.

And in film, Sullivan has worn several hats: actor, co-writer and producer. At present, he has three projects under way, including a film on the life of Mark Willman, a climber who twice scaled Yosemite’s treacherous El Capitan, the second time after he was paralyzed in a fall.

For years now, Sullivan says, he has been successful beyond his expectations, if not his dreams. And in a life that has brought him satisfaction, others say he has been an inspiration.

“His passion, his enthusiasm, his vision, if you will, inspires people and helps them realize their own potential. And the fact that he can’t see is only part of it. Tom is just so magnetic that he convinces you to pursue your dreams,” says Nancy Mansfield, director of the Institute for Families of Blind Children. The nonprofit counseling and therapeutic center in Los Angeles owes its start and continuing operation to Sullivan’s fund raising.

That fund raising includes today’s 10-K Run in Torrance, an event that has raised more than $1 million over the last 13 years for groups such as the institute.

The event, Sullivan says, was inspired by a 1978 story he did on blind children and their families for television’s “Good Morning America.” Before that story, Sullivan says, his own success convinced him the race always went to the swift, the battle to the strong. Afterward, he realized how his own life--and the lives of others--are changed by the help of family, friends, even strangers.

“The other day somebody asked me what legacy I hope to leave. And the easy part is to say I want to make a lasting contribution to the world,” he says.

“But if someone were to say, how would I like to be pictured? I would want to be pictured as a writer, singer, actor, athlete, husband, father, humanitarian, friend, and way down the line, blind,” Sullivan says.

In his heart, he says, he knows that may never happen. But it is another dream.

“If we pigeonhole people, life is simpler. But I’m saying, to hell with that, you don’t pigeonhole me,” he says. “You put a fence around my yard once . . . and I won’t let it happen again.”