A Father's Day that's off the scale

Michael Sullivan poses last October with (from l.) 'Sopranos' stars Michael Imperioli, Joe Scarpinito and Tony Sirico. Sullivan had just begun his weight-loss regimen.

Michael Sullivan is weighing in for Father's Day.

Three generations of the Sullivan family of Breezy Point were changed last Aug. 23 when Michael, at 442 pounds, thumped into the Long Island Weight Loss Institute in Westbury, plopped down in front of Dr. Andre Giannakopoulos, and said, "I want to be the poster boy of your clinic."

A month before, on a clammy July night, I reported on Michael Sullivan organizing a fund-raiser sponsored by Tony (Paulie Walnuts) Sirico of "The Sopranos" at the Long Island estate of Western Beef owner Peter Castellana for St. Jude's Hospital for Children with Cancer, when the entire cast of the HBO mob hit helped raise $519,000.

What I didn't write was that Michael Sullivan, who serves as Sirico's bodyguard, moved through the crowd in a stressed frenzy, sweat gushing from him like a Bernini fountain, panting for breath in a glaze-eyed swirl.

"I wound up bedridden for three days," Sullivan says. "Dehydrated. Stressed. I reached a critical moment in my life. Everybody on 'The Sopranos' called me 'Big Mike' as a term of endearment. But when I overheard my kids asking my wife Donna if Daddy was always gonna be fat, it hurt. Not because of my ego. But because I realized how much they were missing out on by me being overweight."

Michael, who played football for La Salle Military Academy, says he was always agile, trim and muscular. "But I played so hard that I received one injury after another," he says. "The shoulder, the knees, the ankles. Soon I couldn't go running every morning like I used to. Couldn't go to the gym, play sports, exercise. I went into a funk. I started eating ..."

With lack of exercise, the pounds piled on.

"The sad part was that my three sons are sports nuts like I was," he says of Ryan, 10, Austin, 8, and Andrew, 7. "They always asked me to play sports with them on the beach in front of my house. The most I could do at my weight was throw a ball from the deck and have them bring it back to me."

Which led to more funk. More eating. More pounds. Michael isolated. He stopped opening invitations to parties because he had no clothes that fit.

In 2004, when Michael traveled to Iraq with Sirico and James Gandolfini on a USO goodwill tour of the troops, the army couldn't find a flak jacket big enough for him. "They had to Velcro two vests together," he says. "Each vest was 65 pounds in 130-degree heat. When we got on the helicopter with the open side they didn't have a seat belt big enough to strap me in. I had to hold on for dear life! I was supposed to be Tony and Jimmy's bodyguard and they were afraid I was gonna sail out of a helicopter zooming over Iraq."

Finally, after that party last July, Sirico and his pal Joe Scarpinito did an intervention, demanding he go to a fat farm. Michael refused. He tried dieting. Didn't work. Then his wife Donna's cousin Melissa visited, and Michael noticed she'd shed a sizable amount of weight. She referred Michael to Dr. Giannakopoulos M.D., of LIWLI.

"The next day Michael came in and said he was going to be my poster patient," says Dr. G, as he's called. "I knew just from the determination in his eyes that he'd succeed.

"I put him on our special scale, which is called a body composition analyzer, that breaks down your body into water, fat and muscle. And [then] I placed him on a liquid diet, fortified with vitamins and minerals, based on his numbers."

I didn't see Michael Sullivan again until January. I was floored. He'd dropped 160 pounds. I saw him again last month and he was down 220 pounds from his original weight. He also urged his father, Russ Sullivan, in his 70s, suffering from heart and knee and hip ailments, and weighing in at 374, to see Dr. G.

"I was worried my dad wasn't gonna make it," Michael said.

"Dr. G put me on a modified liquid diet, where I can have one solid meal a day," says Russ Sullivan. "Since January I've dropped 95 pounds. It's made a tremendous difference in my life and health."

This spring Michael Sullivan went out and bought a barrel of baseballs, a backstop, a new glove and started playing baseball with his three sons on the sands of Breezy - shagging flies, running the bases, and sliding into home. He runs 3 to 5 miles a day, lifts weights, and kayaks.

"I reclaimed my life in under a year," says Michael. "But more important, my kids got their father back. And my father is doing just great. It's gonna be a helluva Father's Day ..."

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