University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: A Holiday Message
December 23, 2004 | Football
Dec. 23, 2004
By Adam Lucas
Steve Sullivan wants you to deliver a message. He is not always the best at expressing his feelings, isn't really the Hallmark type, but he urgently wants to tell Carolina's head football coach something.
"If you see Coach Bunting, could you tell him how much he means to me?" Steve Sullivan says.
They make an unlikely pair. Sullivan is in frail health, the result of a pair of kidney transplants. He is currently experiencing kidney rejection and renal failure. He takes a passel of pills every day, and at least every other day he endures severe migraines and nausea as his body rejects the kidney donated to him by his wife, Wanda, in July of 1999. When Sullivan speaks, you have to pay close attention, his voice nearly a whisper.
Bunting is strong, a former NFL linebacker. He has creaky knees but otherwise has his health. His voice booms across the Carolina practice field even without the benefit of a microphone.
Bunting knows tough. He is a former Philadelphia Eagle, has seen men play the game of football with gruesome injuries. This is what he says about Steve Sullivan: "I think he's tougher than nails. When you're around tough people, they inspire you. He is one of those people. He gives you hope. I just love being around him."
Not so fast. We're trying to get Bunting a message, remember? We don't have time to hear about how he invited Sullivan to Chapel Hill to play in the annual Kenan Football Center golf outing, and when Sullivan arrived, he discovered his partner was...John Bunting. We don't have time to hear about how before last year's game at Clemson, Bunting ran straight out of the tunnel, ran over to the front row of the Death Valley stands, and slapped Steve Sullivan a high five before taking the field. We don't have time to hear about how Bunting and his wife sent flowers to Sullivan during a recent hospitalization. We don't have time to hear about how through the good times and the bad, through the disheartening losses and scintillating wins, Bunting has provided tickets for Sullivan.
We don't have time, because Steve Sullivan doesn't know how much time he has, and he's got a message for the head coach. Understand this: Sullivan should not be alive. After a promising high school football career as a nose guard, he was on track to attend Carolina as a walk-on. But after graduating from high school in 1983, he began to rapidly lose weight, dropping nearly 175 pounds. The eventual diagnosis: kidney failure. Six months later, his legs were paralyzed.
In 1989, Sullivan finally received a kidney transplant. The new organ came with a grim forecast: Steve Sullivan, you have, at most, five years to live.
What would you do with five years? How much could you pack into 1,825 days? It sounds like a big number. It's got four digits and a comma, but before you know it the pages are falling off the calendar and the days aren't quite as long as you remembered.
This is what Steve Sullivan did with five years: he turned it into 15, at least. And lived a life. He got married and had two daughters. Listen to him talk about Alyssa, 6, and Sarah, 3, and it's as though a light has gone on.
"I took Sarah to her first game this year," he says. "She said, `Go Tar Heels,' the whole time. She didn't sit down or shut up at all the whole night."
He does not bother to camouflage the pride in his voice.
Around the time Sarah was born, it was mentioned to John Bunting that one of the biggest Tar Heel fans in the world happened to live in Columbia, and his one stated wish was to attend a Carolina football practice.
The head coach's response: "Absolutely. Get him up here."
This is where Bunting is supposed to stop by, shake a few hands, pose for a picture, and go on with his life. He is the head football coach at a major Division I-A school. He is not supposed to have time for charity cases.
But he doesn't consider Sullivan a charity case. He considers him a friend.
"He's a great guy," Bunting says. "He's good people."
He is also just a little fanatical about Carolina football. Bunting frequently says he likes his players to be "consumed by football." You want consumed?
Sullivan was in a Columbia hospital the day of the State-Carolina game this year. Tubes criss-crossed his body, IV's delivering the necessary chemicals to his failing organs. And he had a major problem: the nurses had forced him to turn off the radio broadcast of the game.
"They said I was getting too wild," he says sheepishly. "They said I could really do some damage."
Health problems have cost him his job, his house, and any semblance of what most of us consider a normal life. At times he measures the future in months, not years.
You would like to give him the power, you tell him, to make any one thing happen. This is a man who needs a lot of things. Narrowing it to one seems unfair, but that is the question.
He does not have to think about it. "I'd like for Coach Bunting to win a national championship for Carolina. And I'd like to be there for it."
That is, technically, two things. You don't mind, probably because of the unexpected moisture forming in the vicinity of your eyes.
He does not notice. He asks you again: "Are you going to see Coach Bunting soon?" Yes, you reply.
"I don't think I've ever really told me what he has meant to me," he says. "When you see him, just tell him Steve wanted to say thank you. Thanks for everything. It has meant so much to me. Of all my dreams, Coach Bunting has made just about every one of them come true, and I'd really like to tell him that."
Message delivered.
Find out more about Steve Sullivan at www.stevesullivan.org
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. His book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about the book, click here.
