Declan Sullivan Was 'Truly Original'

Filed under: Notre Dame

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- During their freshman year at Notre Dame, Shane Steinberg, Declan Sullivan and three other friends from section 4B in Fisher Hall entered a team in the school's famed Bookstore Basketball tournament. The largest outdoor five-on-five basketball tourney in the world, Bookstore stokes the fires of countless "Domers" who seek to evoke memories of their high school glory days.

But not all of them. Sullivan (pictured above, on left, with his sister Gwyneth and brother Mac) was one of the exceptions.

"It was a close game late in what you'd consider the second half and Declan was urging me to call a timeout," recalled Steinberg of their first-round contest in the event where the winner is the first team to 21.

"In the huddle, he pulls a cigar out of his pocket. The rest of the game he played point guard, puffing on the cigar as he dribbled up court."

On a campus that all too often can be its own homogeneous zone, Sullivan, the student videographer who died during football practice on Oct. 27 when the scissor lift from which he was filming toppled over onto a service road, was defiantly uncommon.

"To know Declan was to know someone who was truly original," said Steinberg, a junior from Fresh Meadows, N.Y., who is majoring in finance. "You encounter people here and you think, I've met you 42 times already, you just had a different face. But you never met anyone quite like Declan."

The two met on the very evening Steinberg arrived on campus in 2008. Steinberg, who was nursing strep throat and a 103-degree fever at the time, was sitting in his dorm room late that Sunday night when a stranger popped his head into the room.

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