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April 26, 2001
Tom Sullivan never has seen a bunker he didn’t love ... or a water hazard, a big lie, troublesome tree or even a spike-marked green.
Sullivan cherishes the good and bad equally in golf. It’s a perspective he came upon not so much because he took up the game late in life but because he is able to play if at all — considering he has been blind since birth.
Sightless, however, has never come close to stopping Sullivan, 53 from achieving a life so full of satisfaction that his ability to shoot regularly in the mid-90s — and as low as 84 from the blue tees at the Riviera Country Club in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades — is merely a part of his success story.
He has traveled the world as a musician, recorded five albums, written six books, worked as a network-television correspondent, is paid to do corporate lectures, and even won a national wrestling championship — competing against sighted wrestlers — before entering Harvard.
Not surprisingly, his accomplishments contributed to interest in making a movie of his life: “If You Could See What I Hear,” released in 1982.
But it has been golf that has made the upbeat Palos Verdes Country Club member complete.
The game has afforded him not only a regular, renewable communion with nature but also a midlife opportunity to help other sightless people through his annual tournament — The Tom Sullivan Blind Childrens Center Celebrity Golf Classic, which is May 7 at the Riviera.
“Sports and music have been my ticket out of the darkness,” Sullivan said. Music allowed him to communicate with and be accepted by his peers growing up in Connecticut. Sports from wrestling to track to crew to triathlons, “gave me the competitive area to feel good about myself.”
Then, at age 35, came golf, the latest athletic endeavor for a man who has refused to allow a limitation strip him of his good attitude or humor.
“Tennis was gonna suck,” he said. “I knew that game wasn’t going to happen.”
Golf intrigued him.
“It provided a way for me to share in the community.”
And nature.
“When I’m on the golf course,” Sullivan said, “I’m plugged into every sensuous thing — the wind in the trees, the sound a shot makes through the air, the feel of the grass, the smells ... the joy of everything. I can read putts with my feet better than most people do with their eyes.”
Those kinds of feelings, he said, are the same reasons many blind golfers became hooked on this only slightly altered version of the ancient game — a version begun after World War II for returning injured veterans.
With the help of a spotter, or coach — who squares the club face to the ball, adjusts stance and alignment, then stand aside and relates distance, with conditions and trouble areas — the sightless golfer has his anxiety reduced to the one worry that plagues golfers everywhere: trying to make a good swing.
“I go through the same problems every player goes through,” said Sullivan, who sounded like a lot of everyday golfers recently, following a round and some postgame rehashing with three sighted playing partners at Palos Verdes, where he plays to a 24 handicap. “But any standard, I’m very long,” he said.
“But I don’t know here it goes. I hit the ball hard, but I have an over-the-top move and pull a lot.”
Sounds normal enough and so is Sullivan’s response when Bill Goodale or Luke Manthe, who split time as his coach, deliver the news of another pull.
“I say, so let’s aim right,” the right-handed golfer said. “But coach’s deal is to hit it straighter.”
Some blind golfers mange that better than most, and six of them — all members of the U.S. Blind Golfers Association — will participate in Sullivan’s third fund-raising event at the Riviera.
“These guys are incredible,” Sullivan said, “but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real story is what golf has meant to them.”
He can relate to that.
“I’ve completed in celebrity events, got to play in the Dinah Shore, played a round with Mr. Palmer and Mr. Nicklaus ... How can I possibly feel slighted?”