Leon Mattingly

Coach Leon Mattingly, center, suffers from retinitis pigmentosa and has lost almost all sight, but still manages to guide a Class A softball team.
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Mattingly, who uses a cane to pace in front of the dugout, still shouts instruction to players.

Leon Mattingly has essentially lost his sight, but not his feel for the game or for his players.
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Mattingly uses a white cane as he paces in front of the dugout during games, kicking up little dust swirls in his wake.He grimaces.He spits.He might turn to an assistant coach and ask, "Whose glove did that hit off of?"

One of the assistants occasionally will say, in that merciless way common to sports, "You just missed a pretty play, Leon."

Mattingly has retinitis pigmentosa.Five of his six brothers have the same disorder, which could begin as night blindness or reduced peripheral vision and progress to total blindness.

"You could probably say I'm 99 percent blind," Mattingly said.
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Gary Sipe, one of Mattingly's assistant coaches, explained that it's like looking through a straw - with the picture blurred.
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"Leon's almost a legend in his own time," said Brian Shelman, customer service representative for Louisville Slugger, which furnishes the team's equipment, including $300 Catalyst bats.
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People don't look at him any different than they would a coach that can see with 20-20 vision, because they know that with Leon being legally blind, he can coach better than 90 percent of the people out there with 20-20 vision."

Mattingly, 59, lives in Mount Washington with his wife, Judy.

He grew up in Nelson County, milking 50 cows twice a day.Farm chores kept him from playing sports in school.But as a teenager, he played "hind catcher," he said, quaintly, for a traveling men's baseball team.

After he went to work for General Electric, he turned to softball."I played till my vision was too dangerous to play, actually," Mattingly said.

That was about 20 years ago.

"Being out on a softball field wasn't the best thing in the world for (the disorder)," he said.
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Cobbie Harrison, a former pro softball player, is general manager of the Kentuckiana Sports Complex in southwest Jefferson County, where Mattingly's team played last weekend.He said Mattingly's vision has gotten worse lately.
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First baseman Steve Guillaume has played for Mattingly for seven years.
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"I go by what my coaches tell me," Mattingly said.
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During games, Mattingly leans on his cane or paces.
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Sipe said of Mattingly: "He's got great instincts for the game - a feel for the game.
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Mattingly's team - Riverside Paving/Spitz Seeds/TPS - competes in Class A, at the top of the slow-pitch hierarchy.
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It was the sort of finish that explains the game's hold on Mattingly."If he could live in a softball park without going home, he would," Sipe said."It's not like he doesn't have a home life.His wife's a great person.They get along great."

Mattingly just "loves the game more than anyone I've ever been around," Sipe said.