Posted on: Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Coach's battle inspired Blazers
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
Amid the dog days of summer, when the temperatures average in the 90s, the Alabama Birmingham football team saw amid the shimmering heat a sign this season would be special.
Nearly a month prior to their first game, before they knew how some of the questions would be resolved on defense or got a feel for their opposition, the Blazers had come to feel good about 2004, a year that would bring them a 9-4 record and the school's first bowl appearance.
It was then, during the tortuous ritual of two-a-day practices, that the Blazers found their human thumbs-up sign. Offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Pat Sullivan returned to the field, a day in and day out participant again after a nine-month battle with squamous cell carcinoma.
UAB photo For a year ago at this time the talk was not of bowl games or even football for UAB, which meets Hawai'i in the Sheraton Hawai'i Bowl Dec. 24 at Aloha Stadium. Back then, in hushed tones — and in quite a few prayers — the Blazers' thoughts were with Sullivan, who had begun three months of chemotherapy.
"We knew it was a life or death situation," quarterback Darrell Hackney said. "I took it especially hard because he was the person who groomed me over the years. He has been like a mentor, a father figure to me."
Several months earlier, Sullivan the 1971 Heisman Trophy winner at Auburn and a frequent chewer of tobacco, felt what he thought was an earache or infection. Trainers advised him to see a doctor, who eventually diagnosed the condition.
After the Blazers' loss to Troy State in the third game of the season, Sullivan gathered the stunned players for an announcement. Suddenly, the 20-9 loss paled in comparison with their coach's crushing news.
At the next practice, when the import of the announcement had sunk in, the team held hands around the 53-year old Sullivan and, tears pouring down their cheeks, said a group prayer.
"It was a devastating time," Brown said. "It scared us to death because he was diagnosed with a very tough cancer."
Then came three months of chemotherapy, during which Sullivan somehow attended all the team's games and, as often as he could manage, some practices and meetings. Next were 35 sessions of radiation therapy.
The Blazers feared they might lose Sullivan in January during a trying period in which he developed pneumonia and doctors found it difficult to insert the feeding tube in a throat nearly burned shut from the radiation.
Sullivan lost, he figures, "about 65 pounds" and much of his hair. Not until this summer was he able to return.
"He's a tough guy, I tell you, to go through the ordeal he went through," Brown said. "It is the Lord's grace he is with us."
Sullivan said, "I'm not gonna say it doesn't (change your life and way of thinking) because every day I realize how fortunate I am and that we all are to have our health, to be with our families and to be doing something we want to do."
Said Brown: "The way he handled it meant so much to these kids and he could see that. They, these seniors, probably learned more from him in nine months than they learned in all the five years they have been with us."
"He is one of the most popular guys and when the kids saw saw him make it through those two-a-days without missing a practice, I think that's when they knew he was back," head coach Watson Brown said. "That meant something to this team."
UAB offensive coordinator Pat Sullivan returned after a nine-month battle with cancer.
