“If you have invented or designed a toy, press five.”
The Toy Manufacturers of America in New York, whose switchboard plays that message, receives inquiries from about 100 toy inventors each week, and each year, 5,000 to 6,000 new toys join 120,000 already on the market.
But Mike Sullivan, 35, originally from Riverdale, an ex-convict who lives in his van and makes a living selling other people’s trash, doesn’t care. Like most inventors, he’s committed to his idea. Unlike many, he believes that by inventing a toy he’s reinventing his life.
Sullivan created Get-O-Ball, a board game that simulates football, two years ago at Dixon Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison where he served 18 months of a four-year sentence for possession of a controlled substance.
“Most inmates are pretty rowdy people,” Sullivan said. “I thought, `if they like the game, everybody’s gonna like it.’ That’s a great test market, if you can get in there without them killing you.”
Sullivan, who has a long and varied police record, was paroled last August. To pass the time at Dixon, he invented 14 games before coming up with a tabletop version of football.
Get-O-Ball is played in four 15-minute timed quarters. Using dice and “draw” cards in much the same way as Monopoly, players move a football up and down the board’s playing field, while playing pieces circle the board. Moves are dictated by squares that read run, pass, interception and sack and the like, and by cards. Players pursue first downs, encounter penalties and accumulate points by scoring touchdowns and field goals.
“It caught on” in prison, Sullivan said. “One guy offered me three cartons of cigarettes for it-that’s 60 bucks. Then it got to where (inmates) were fighting over it, and (the warden) made me get rid of it.” (A spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections said Dixon officials couldn’t recall Sullivan’s game.)
Sullivan sent the game to his former girlfriend for safekeeping, and after reflecting on its popularity, contacted Vince Barry, an old friend on the outside, for some advice. Barry, 32, of Campbellsport, Wis.,
was the best friend of Sullivan’s brother Jim, who was shot and killed in a Hammond, Ind., parking lot in 1991.
Barry, who raises dogs and owns a bar in nearby Allenton, Wis., wasn’t a toy industry expert, but was, he said, “one of the only ones who stuck by (Mike) while he was in prison, except his brother Pat,” who lives in South Holland, where Sullivan periodically parks his van.
“He said he invented a tabletop football game and wanted me to patent it. I told him I preferred to wait until he got out,” Barry said.
Barry supplied little cash toward the venture, but plenty of moral support: “He used to call me twice a week about the game,” Barry said.
After Sullivan was paroled, the two became partners in the S&B Toy Co., a corporation they formed to produce Get-O-Ball.
Jobless, Sullivan took up residence in his current home, a white van that would be nondescript except that he’s scrawled “Get-O-Ball” in black paint on its sides.
“He stayed here (living in the van) all winter, and we worked on the game,” Barry said. “But I told him, `No more drugs. I can’t watch you go down again, if you’re gonna hang around the city living on the streets with no job.’ ” Sullivan has served time before, two years of a four-year sentence for arson, which Barry said resulted from Sullivan setting fire to a building in Chicago.
“He’s a strange guy, but a real decent honest person. . . . He does everything he says he’s gonna do. We started doing this real legal and slow,” Barry said.
Sullivan had saved some money before he was arrested: “Before prison I was scrap hauling, doing anything for cash. I won some money at the racetrack-close to $3,000 betting on the favored horse just to show up. I won every time,” he said.
To finance his business, Sullivan and his Rottweiler puppy, Rip the Wonder Dog, scour South Side and south suburban alleys for discarded couches, lawn mowers, anything he can sell to junk dealers or used furniture stores. He is homeless by choice: Both Barry and Sullivan’s brother Pat have offered him room and board.
“You have to take away to get something,” he said. “I live as cheaply as possible to make money to get this thing going. This is my shot at the big time. If it don’t work, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
Sullivan had used the prison library to learn how to manufacture and market his game. After his release he became a regular fixture at the Riverdale Public Library.
“I think he found us in the Yellow Pages,” said Tom Ring, partner at Potthast & Ring, a Chicago law firm specializing in patent and copyright law. Ring and his colleague Camille Miller began the long paper trail that will lead to copyright and trademark protection for the game.
“What we mostly run into is an individual who comes up with a variation on a childhood game. (With the inventor) we go through a hierarchy of what is `protectable,’ ” Ring said.
For Get-O-Ball, Ring said the firm is seeking “a trademark, which covers anything that indicates the origin or source of the product, the Get-O-Ball name, phraseology, slogans that are affixed to the product. . . . (We applied for) copyright, which protects the expression of the idea-the artwork, packaging, decorative aspects of the game board, playing pieces, instructions as text materials. A trademark takes at least a year (to obtain) and a copyright . . . maybe six to seven months.”
Ring said: “Sullivan is real focused on creativity. (Game inventors) seem to be thinking on a level as if they’re prospective players (of the game), thinking, `What would be fun?’ “
Asked about the success rate of the inventors he sees, Ring said that within six years, when trademark renewal papers must be filed, “At least 75 percent are still using the mark.”
Said Camille Miller, who worked with Sullivan when he approached the firm eight months ago: “(Sullivan is) one of our more conscientious clients. He didn’t know the avenue, but he wanted to get as much protection as he can.”
The game Sullivan designed in prison was crude, hand-lettered on cardboard. An art supply store employee suggested that he spruce up the game and recommended Bobby Blount, a graphic designer who owns Appak Design and Manufacturing in University Park.
Blount, whose business supplies printed T-shirts and promotional items to museums and corporations, gave Get-O-Ball its current look: a logo that looks like spray paint graffiti, and a purple game board with inner-city apartment buildings, billboards and windowless houses overlooking a football field with end zones marked “HOMEBOYZ” and “AWAYBOYZ,” Blount said.
(Sullivan said he came up with the Get-O-Ball name after his first name, USA Football, couldn’t be protected by copyright. He added, “I grew up in the ghetto, so that’s where I got the name. . . . It’s a play on words.)
“He created the idea . . . I designed the game for him, gave him insight on colors, did all his patent drawings for him and designed his logo,” Blount said.
Didn’t it make Blount nervous, investing so much time in a speculative project for a guy just out of prison?
“I wasn’t worried at all (about getting paid),” Blount said. “I didn’t really charge him what I normally would for work of this type. I thought if he had this much guts I should definitely help him.
“I actually think God sent Mike to me in the first place. I started my business to meet the needs of another person, to help other people make money, not just make money myself. . . . Mike brought my original reason for being in business back into perspective,” he said.
“I found him really motivating (because) he had all of this drive and enthusiasm, and he really set off a spark in me. He really believes in what he’s doing.”
Game boards, rule books and score pads are already printed, and Sullivan’s order of 500 boxes and plastic football-shaped game pieces was due in last week. He plans to have the game on the market within the next week or so.
The game costs $19.95, plus $4.95 for shipping and handling. Because the partners are stocking only 500 games initially, the unit cost for manufacturing is so high that Sullivan says profits from this limited edition will be “a total loss.”
Ultimately, they hope to make $5-$8 a game, depending on the volume sold.
The games will be warehoused at the West Bend Hobby Shop, West Bend, Wis. (call 414-334-0487 to order games). Sullivan plans to have a Get-O-Ball 800 number when finances permit. Sullivan’s lifestyle prevents him from sitting by the phone, and he plans to promote the game by taking orders at local football games and wherever he ends up, he said.
“We’re going to sell it on cable (TV),” he said. “I’m making a commercial in black and white with Rum (a high school friend and traveling companion) and Rip in front of Joliet (Correctional Center), like in the `Blues Brothers.’ “
Tom Holz, Barry’s brother-in-law and owner of the hobby shop, said, “I think (Get-O-Ball) will sell. I’m not a sports person, but people (who are) seem to really like it. People who have played (the prototype on display in the store) are very enthusiastic about it. . . . Ten or 15 people have asked about ordering it.
“They’d like to get it into chain stores, like Kmart and Toys R Us. I can’t hold onto an exclusive, but it’s neat to get in on the ground floor.”
Barry has a Get-O-Ball prototype in his bar and says he’s gotten 10 orders so far. “Mike was gonna go from swap meet to swap meet selling it. I said, `It’s too good for that.’ “
According to Jodi Levin, spokesperson for the Toy Manufacturers of America, games of all kinds grossed $1.3 billion in revenue in 1993. That’s a 5.8 percent increase over the year before, notable because the toy industry grew only 1.6 percent overall.
Sullivan’s brother Pat, 32, a mechanic who recently relocated to South Holland, said, “(Mike) does his own thing, but he’s really going all out for this game, so I hope it pans out. (His is) really a hard-luck story. I got my future, I hope he gets his.”
Barry, who, as the S&B Toy Company secretary and treasurer owns 50 percent of the company, said of Sullivan, the president and vice president: “He’s pretty easy to work with, but he’s definitely trying to take charge. He already wants to get my 1 percent share (which would give Sullivan 51 percent and control of the fledgling company).
“It’s like when you hire a bartender. You gotta close your eyes for the first month while they overpour, give away too many drinks, and get settled down.
“(Mike is) getting used to making all these decisions and he lets it get to his head a little bit-he’s a real enthusiastic-type guy.
“(But) he’s had a lot of chances to take advantage of people and he never does it. Everybody he’s ever known has taken advantage of him. He’s just too generous. That’s why if this makes it big, everyone in his family (his parents and five siblings) is going to be happy-he’s gonna give it all away.”
Sullivan is not what most people may envision when they think of an ex-con. There’s more toymaker than criminal in him as he talks about the many scrapes he’s been in, and what he’s learned the hard way. He seldom swears, and describes prison wardens, judges, even the man who killed his brother, in the same mild way as he characterizes his friends. Most of all, he displays a childlike faith in the success of his new venture.
“I want to make enough money to buy an island-that’s a major goal,” he said. “And I want to see people have fun, like kids. Kids are attracted to me.”
Unfortunately for residents of Riverdale, when Sullivan designed and named his game he was envisioning their suburb, where he grew up. He said that when Get-O-Ball is a success, “The cops are gonna freak out. The Dolton police department, they used to pull me over all the time . . .
“You know how when kids graduate (from high school) they say, `This one’s going to be a doctor, this one’s going to be a nurse?’ . . . well, for me they said, `Yeah, this one’s gonna go to jail.’ “
Though he’s proved his early critics right until now, Sullivan said, “I’m gonna turn them all around this time.”
