To say Tom Galligan is a man of varied interests would be a vast understatement.
When he’s not reading Tolstoy or Tolkien, LSU’s interim president is moving. The 65-year-old has run 24 marathons, including the Boston Marathon, and he’s walked Hadrian’s Wall in England as well as The Camino Frances—a 497-mile trek from France to Spain.
While exercising, Galligan usually listens to some variation of classic rock. He doesn’t play an instrument, but since a post-college stint working at a record store, he appreciates the turn-of-phrase he hears in the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Lucinda Williams, and once even wrote a college commencement speech inspired by the lyrics of The Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias.”
However, Galligan’s signature trait is his almost encyclopedic knowledge of baseball history and statistics. Give him a date and a Major League Baseball team, and within seconds, he’ll rattle off which team they were playing against on that day, where the game took place and its outcome, among other trivia.
It’s a passion he quietly developed while attending law school after his then soon-to-be wife, Susan, gifted him The Bronx Zoo, a book about the 1978 World Champion New York Yankees. Over the next five years, Galligan read every baseball book that hit the shelves, fascinated by how, in many ways, the story of baseball mirrored the story of America.
He was particularly intrigued by the story of Jackie Robinson—so much so that when Galligan was president of Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire, he went to a student art sale and purchased a portrait of the famed baseball player that would later hang in his office in the LSU Law Center, where he served as dean before stepping into the interim president’s role nearly a year ago.
When it comes to growing attached to a cause, Galligan can relate. After all, his desire to understand big-picture issues, put faces to them and solve problems through collaboration is what has carried him through each of his professional endeavors. Read the full feature about Galligan from the latest edition of Business Report.
