Gund in the conference room of his company in Princeton, New Jersey. He holds an NBA basketball signed by members of his team, the Cleveland Cavaliers.Photograph by Mark Costanza

In February, a worldwide audience of 600 million watched the annual NBA All-Star Game, played this year in Cleveland's Gund Arena. The game was a special one, since the National Basketball Association turned 50 in 1997, and all but three of the designated "50 greatest players in NBA history" showed up to help celebrate. The occasion was particularly exciting for Gordon Gund '61. For four years, he had lobbied NBA commissioner David Stern--once, even haranguing him on an Aspen ski lift--to bring the All-Star Game to Cleveland. As principal owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and the new, state-of-the-art Gund Arena, Gund was hosting the big party in his hometown. Naturally he was thrilled to meet basketball greats like Bill Russell, Julius Erving, and Bob Cousy, and to rub shoulders--well, rub shoulders against elbows--with megastars like Michael Jordan. And as chairman of the NBA's Board of Governors, he had a superb seat for the game itself. But in a way, for Gund, all seats are equally good, since he has been blind for nearly 30 years.

In 1970, a progressive degenerative disease of the retina called retinitus pigmentosa (RP) took what remained of Gund's vision when he was 30 years old. Now, at 57, he has lived the first half of his life with normal sight and the second half in darkness. "There's a stereotype of blindness--which I once held myself--that it disables you in more ways than it in fact does," he says. "Now I see that the limitations are actually very narrow."

Narrow indeed. An energetic venture capitalist and investor, Gund hopscotches the country as chairman and CEO of Gund Investment Corporation, whose holdings include hotels, apartment and office buildings, and Nationwide Advertising Services, a recruitment-advertising firm that is the largest in its industry, billing $282 million annually. He has a stake in the San Jose Sharks of the National Hockey League. As for the Cavaliers, when Gund and his brother George took over in 1983, the team was nicknamed the "Cleveland Cadavers"; among the league's worst performers, they drew only about 4,000 fans per game. But the Cavs have reached the playoffs 10 times in the last 13 seasons, went to the conference finals in 1991, and this year made another run at the playoffs. Each home game draws about 18,000 to Gund Arena.

Besides running his own businesses, Gund serves on several corporate boards of directors, including those of Kellogg and Corning Glass, and from 1980 to 1989 he presided over Groton School's board of trustees. He is also active in philanthropy. He has donated a million dollars to Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, for example, but he works hardest for the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which he cofounded in 1971. (In May, Gund and his wife, Lulie, are scheduled to receive the Special Recognition Award of the international Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.)

Gordon and Lulie Gund have been married for more than 30 years and have raised two sons, Grant and Zachary; they maintain homes in Cleveland and in Princeton, New Jersey, headquarters of Gund Investment Corporation. Vacations pull them to their house in Aspen--where Gund skis the expert trails--or to Nantucket for sport fishing and island life at their beach house. In his spare time Gund may visit an art museum or work on one of his woodcarvings (see next page). Commonly, people who meet Gund forget very quickly that he is blind.

If they even notice. Years ago, the Gunds hosted a dinner in a private dining room at Locke-Ober Restaurant in Boston. "It was a long dinner that went on until the wee hours of the morning," recalls Mike Deland '63, a longtime friend. "Finally the waiter brought Gordon the bill, and he immediately passed it to Lulie to read. The waiter looked at Gordon in utter shock--he had spent hours in the room with him and never had an inkling that he was blind."

For the first 25 years of gund's life he not only had normal vision but was an extremely active youth, a "hell-raiser," according to one old friend. At Groton and Harvard he played ice hockey and rowed on the crew. Gund was a "wild skier who liked to leap off moguls," recalls Ferdinand Colloredo-Mansfeld '61, a college roommate. "After a run he looked like a snowman." An accomplished amateur photographer, Gund was also a certified private airplane pilot.

After college Gund spent three years in the navy, mostly in the Pacific. Once discharged, he began working for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City. Then in 1965, two momentous events occurred: he met Llura ("Lulie") Ambler Liggett and he was diagnosed with RP. "At the time I didn't pay much attention to it," Gund recalls. "I was told it would affect my sight but I wouldn't have a serious loss of vision until I was in my sixties. To a 25-year-old kid that doesn't mean much." But his night and peripheral vision continued to diminish steadily over the next few years. In 1966, Gund married Lulie in a nighttime ceremony at her family's house in Florida. "The reception was in an orange grove," recalls Colloredo-Mansfeld. "I remember seeing Gordon walk into a wooden fence that was fairly visible. I realized that his eyesight had deteriorated more than I had noticed."

As his night vision declined, Gund could no longer drive home when socializing after dark with friends. And he had a scary daytime experience when landing a plane at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. "On the downwind leg, I was told there were 14 other planes in the landing pattern in front of me," Gund recalls. "But I could count only about seven. I went way down, out of the pattern. The tower called me to ask what was wrong. When I got in, I decided I couldn't fly again. I could see clearly only what was straight ahead of me."

RP was contracting Gund's visual field to "tunnel vision"--and then the tunnel itself began to narrow. It was "like looking through a straw," Gund says; he could see whatever the straw pointed at quite well, but nothing outside the tube. (For this reason, some people with RP can be legally blind yet record 20/20 vision by scanning an eye chart.) The disease first affects a doughnut-shaped area, surrounding the center of the retina, where photoreceptors called rods predominate. Rods can respond to dim light, and thus make night vision possible. Gradually the retinal degeneration closes in like a noose toward the retinal center or macula, where the cones, which enable color vision and fine acuity (but need bright light) are concentrated. "You end up with a circle of central vision, surrounded by a rubber tire of lost vision," says Alan Laties '53, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, who has chaired the scientific advisory board of the Foundation Fighting Blindness since its inception. "It's like being in the dark with a flashlight--you can point the flashlight, but you'll bump into things. RP patients frequently suffer cuts and bruises on their shins--from walking into low impediments like coffee tables."

The retina has 20 times more rods than cones, but when the rods falter, the retinal environment changes, with consequent damage to the cones. "Think of RP as a 1-2 punch in boxing," says Laties. "It isn't the first punch that disables you, but the combination."