Saturday, October 15 the field at Laird Stadium on the Carleton College campus will be named for Bob Sullivan. The honor is appropriate as it’s not inconceivable to think that there would be no football team playing on a field at Laird Stadium if it hadn’t been for Sully. He resurrected the Carleton football program. But more importantly he made an impact on hundreds of men throughout his career.
I have many stories about Bob Sullivan. The first happened when he was recruiting me to play football at Carleton college. I was a senior in high school in Worthington, Minnesota. For some reason I thought I wanted to be an engineer. I was fairly certain that I wanted to go to college at South Dakota Tech, also known as Rapid City School of Mines and Technology. I would play football there and become an engineer.
But a man from Carleton kept calling me on the phone. He didn’t give up. In late January of 1982 he invited me to come to Carleton for a special weekend. I could stay with a player, get a taste of the campus, and talk to him. I had no plans to go to Carleton, but he called me on a week night just at the right time. I was trying to get out of a Sadie Hawkins request to a weekend dance, and Sully’s call gave me the reason. I would spend a Saturday night at Carleton instead of the Sadie Hawkins dance in Worthington.
I arrived in Northfield late on a Saturday afternoon. Most of the recruits had already gone through their visit. I met Sully briefly, and then he told me he would see me for breakfast the next day on campus.
I was staying with Dave Neinhuis. This seemed interesting. Dave was an interesting guy who had a lot of positive comments about the football program. But then my visit turned. Dave and his guy friends had a drinking party. I wasn’t interested in drinking, so I watched all of them get drunk. Then they took me to a huge dance that highlighted the band, the Suburbs. The Suburbs were a very popular punk rock band from the Cities. Dave and his friends quickly found something much more interesting to do than to entertain me. So I found myself in the middle of a gigantic crowd of students who were doing what you would expect them to do at a dance headlined by the Suburbs. They were having a blast drinking and dancing to punk rock music.
I had no interest in any of this. This was not what I was expecting on my recruiting visit. I hightailed it back to Dave’s room and went to bed. I’m sure that I was the first person on campus to go to bed that evening. As I went to bed I thought I couldn’t wait to get off campus and have my visit the following weekend at South Dakota Tech.
But I still had my visit with Sully the next morning. So I met him for breakfast. He laughed about the band and the rowdiness of the students. And then he started selling me on coming to Carleton. He shared his vision for the football program. They had won the Midwest Conference in his third season of coaching. They were going to do well in the MIAC two years later. He was positive about everything. He told me that I would get an incredible education by coming to Carleton, the football program was going to do well, and I would have an experience that would last for the rest of my life.
I bought it all.
My life’s direction changed at that Sunday morning breakfast. I never would have gone to Carleton without being recruited by Sully; I never even would have even gone to the campus if he hadn’t kept calling me.
Going to Carleton was one oof the best decisions I’ve ever made. The education was world-class, and I loved playing football at Carleton college. I’ll always be a Knight and will always root hard for the Maize and Blue. And it happened only because of this man who will permanently have his name on the field at Laird Stadium.
My story is a story that hundreds of Carleton football players share. We went to Carleton because of Bob Sullivan. And we’re much better people for the experience.
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