Mr. Hearn went to Yale for a year, played the Yale course when he should have been in the library, then left the university for 40 months to serve in the Navy on a destroyer in the Pacific. There was no golf for him in those years, save for a brief moment, the snapshot of which he filed in his head: September 1945 on the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, watching golfers putt on greens made of sand, smoothing their footprints with long bamboo sticks. On the Long Island courses and at Yale, there were no sand greens. He finally graduated from Yale in 1948, with another fast duffer, the first George Bush.
Mr. Hearn faced his final days with courage and regrets. For years he drank too much, and then one day he stopped. Smoking, the same. There were relationships in his life that needed more attention. But he had no regrets about the hundreds of times he rose in the predawn darkness to play Bethpage Black, or the money he spent to join clubs when he was beyond midlife: Piping Rock, on Long Island; Mid Ocean, in Bermuda; the Golf House Club at Elie, on the east coast of Scotland; and Jupiter Island. For 20 years Greg Norman was his neighbor in the Sunshine State. Mr. Hearn would often see Norman's helicopter, but the Shark himself only once.
With the end coming, Bill Campbell, a former USGA president, would drop by from time to time to say hello and also goodbye. On one visit they spoke about Tom Morris Sr. as a vestryman at Trinity Church in St. Andrews and about some contemporary subjects, if you consider Tom Watson's chip-in on the 71st hole of the 1982 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach contemporary. Mr. Hearn was remembering that Campbell was a witness to that shot, as a rules official, and Campbell was supplying the details. They were golf buddies. More precisely, they were friends through golf.
Facing his end, Mr. Hearn said he was "undaunted," and he seemed it, colon cancer notwithstanding. "Golf enriched every aspect of my life, but it was collateral to my life," he said. Golf Channel bored him; it was an enabler, he felt, to the one-dimensional. Golf didn't narrow Mr. Hearn; it did the opposite. His favorite player was Julius Boros, for his tempo and his face, "a face you could put on Mount Rushmore."
His favorite golf quote was exceptionally brief. He was playing a casual game with his son David, a good golfer. David drove his ball into a greenside bunker on a short par-4, nearly holed his shot from the sand and tapped in. "That's 4," David said. He had grounded his club, by mistake, in the sand and took the penalty without complaint.
Mr. Hearn was a devout Catholic, but in his own way. Not all of the rules worked for him, and he had no use for rote, formal prayer. But he prayed to God daily to have mercy on his soul. If there's golf at his next stop, he hoped it was like the game he played here: miss 'em quick, count 'em right.
Preparing for his death, he had planned to have a friend in Scotland, a golfer and a carpenter, make a simple pine box for him and have it shipped to Florida. But in the end he decided he didn't want to take up so much real estate, so he left instructions to be cremated.
In early April, Tom Hearn was talking about making a summer trip to Scotland, but he never made it that far. On a Saturday morning in late April, at quarter to five, he grabbed a son's finger like he was gripping a club and took his final breath, at age 82. His family knows what to do next: take his ashes and have them thrown to the sky, as if testing the wind, at the three courses he loved best — Jupiter, Mid Ocean and Elie. And so he will return to his courses, not as a man in cleats and a green V-neck sweater, but as fairway dust. His time on the links, Tom Hearn said near his end, was time well spent. He should rest in peace.
