After a ‘huge’ stroke ended this Navy vet’s golf desires, 2 guardian angels stepped in to help

SYOSSET, N.Y. — Three ft to the left of John Hanser, sporting all-white and a cheery grin, stands a character of such profound empathy and real love that it’s only cheap to surprise if you’re in the presence of an precise saint.

Her title is Maria Hanser, John’s spouse of 51 years, and his caretaker for much longer.

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“You think this started two years ago?” she says, pointing down at her husband, who is seated in an electric wheelchair and bundled in at least three layers despite the heat of a good Long Island October afternoon. “Try fifty-one years ago. We’re together for life.”

Maria Hanser’s case for sainthood is compelling even if her miracles are not of the loaves and fishes selection. Forget about the 51 years of marriage to the same man (even if tolerating anyone for half a century is miraculous in its sheer persistence). No, focus on the more mundane miracles that now fill Maria’s life: She garments John, transports him and feeds him. She speaks for John, translating his sometimes garbled sentences; advocates for him, with docs, therapists, and all method of insurance coverage complications; and rehabilitates him by copying his hours of day by day bodily therapy in a routine she administers back at their home. (When I ask how John takes to her instructing, Maria turns stern. “I’m hard on him,” she says.)

But Maria’s most spectacular miracle, the one that introduced her and John to the red-brick patio next to the clubhouse at Long Island’s Woodside Country Club, is not any of these issues. It’s that Maria desires for her husband — and desires so arduous and with such drive that perhaps the most far-flung of those desires has come true: Today, for the first time in two years and despite the excessive skepticism of his many docs, John Hanser will play golf again.

Maria laughs as she considers that sentence.

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“This program…” she says. “It was an answer to my prayers.”

***

THE FIRST 88 YEARS of John Hanser’s life were a glimpse into the American dream.

In his twenties, John joined the Navy and spent two years patrolling the Mediterranean. In his thirties, he took a job working for the NYPD in midtown Manhattan. And in his 40s and 50s, he raised a middle-class household with Maria in a middle-class city in a middle-class half of the world.

John was never paid lavishly for his work or his mind — he has long possessed an astonishing present for tinkering with client electronics — but always believed in the advantage of an sincere day’s wage. He believed that if you gave enough, you also got enough.

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Sometime in the Nineteen Seventies, one of John’s buddies from the drive first launched him to golf, and he was hooked virtually immediately. For John, golf was a natural extension of his meritocratic worldview. It was also a place where he could discover connection with the males in his life — and sharpen his own stubbornly pushed instincts.

“He’s a competitive person. Very competitive,” Maria says. “When he used to play, whoever got it closest to the hole on each hole would get $1. And he would come home pretty much every time to tell me that he got $14. I said, ‘Oh yeah, and how much did you pay for the golf?'”

Still, for most of John’s early years in the sport, golf was a daydream more than it was a pastime. The Hansers did not make enough money for John to disappear on golf journeys, and there was enough chaos at home to keep him from spending his weekends on the course.

It wasn’t until retirement that John actually fell for the sport, and not until the Hansers picked up and moved to Myrtle Beach in early 2024 that John thought of his golf love in full bloom.

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“We finally had a little money that we had been saving,” Maria says. “Golf was at the center of our plans.”

Then, shortly after the transfer, everything modified. In January of 2024, John went to the hospital with abdomen ache and was advised he’d suffered a delicate coronary heart attack. He went home and started biking through medicine given to coronary heart attack sufferers to mitigate the risk of future health issues. In May, he went off the medicine, and in July, he was in the home one morning when something went gravely unsuitable. By the time he made it to the hospital, his life had modified eternally.

“They told me he had a massive stroke, almost like a double-stroke,” Maria says. “I was told he’d probably never walk again.”

The stroke wiped out John’s energy on his proper facet and hampered his capacity to converse, but when he finally woke, something else was on his thoughts.

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“When the stroke happened — I could cry right now — he said, ‘I’ll never play golf again.'” Maria remembers. “And he gave all his golf stuff to our grandson. Everything.”

The two years since John parted methods with his golf desires have been some of the darkest of his life. John has endured more than 600 days of bodily therapy — and numerous more hours of speech and bodily work at home with Maria — but he has only regained a fraction of his energy. He can stroll, but a motorized wheelchair is his most popular methodology of transportation. He can converse, but the phrases come slower and language comprehension is a problem. He can not swing a golf membership, or stroll down the fairway, or keep in mind the feeling in his fingers when he actually gets a maintain of one. The overwhelming majority of his conversations with pals — the conversations that used to take place on the golf course — are tales about the rounds he’s missed.

“It’s been very hard hearing his friends come by the house and tell him about their lives,” Maria says. “Very hard.”

Some days, the totality of it bowls John over. Many days he feels helpless, but on the worst days, he’s something else: hopeless.

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“Usually patients, after a while like this, they give up,” Maria said. “John has not.”

There are a few theories about how John has managed to navigate his restoration at the tender age of 90, but the best one stands proper by his facet. John might have given up at some level in the two years following his stroke, but Maria would not let him.

“He’s a motivating person,” Maria says with a grin. “He motivates other people.”

A few months in the past, a burst of motivation introduced Maria all the method to the Parks and Recreation Department in her hometown of Melville, N.Y. Maria wasn’t absolutely sure what she was hoping to discover, but she actually wasn’t anticipating what she got: a flyer for a golf program for army veterans taking place a few cities over, in Syosset. No capacity degree required. Disabled gamers inspired.

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A few weeks later, Maria and John confirmed up to the first day of camp at PGA HOPE — a non-profit in the golf world specializing in serving to army veterans discover group through golf. Camps from PGA HOPE take place all over the nation, and all yr long. Typically, they specialize in latest fight veterans hoping to discover fellow vets out in civilian life, but John was an fascinating exception. Here was a army veteran from more than sixty years in the past who needed group as badly as anyone stepping off the battlefield in 2026.

John arrived for the first day of class uncertain if he’d be in a position to stick it out for the complete lesson. Then something superb occurred. The Long Island model of PGA HOPE was taught by the man who would come to be his second guardian angel: Paul Glut, a Marine Corps veteran and instructing professional out of Woodside Country Club in Syosset.

Paul met John and, like the legendary bandmates, the chemistry arrived soon after. Maria suspects she knows the cause why: In a world full of people all too prepared to really feel badly for John, Paul was one of the few people prepared to give him a arduous time.

“They kid each other. John called him a pisser and a good guy,” Maria said. “They break each other’s chops constantly, and they have the most fun time.”

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When requested about his ball-busting tendencies, Paul shares a figuring out smile.

“Sometimes when I want him to really hit the ball, I’ll just scream ‘Marine Corps!’ at him,” Paul says. “He really takes to that; it’s like he knows that we Marines are tougher than the Navy guys.”

Eventually, with Paul’s needling, John discovered how to maintain the membership again. Then he graduated to short-game photographs, with the help of a side-seater cart. And finally, on a superb Thursday afternoon at Woodside, John and Paul moved off the apply vary and back onto the golf course. The dream John had allowed to die was out of the blue very actual — spare for one … minor element.

“I was so excited for him, and then I remembered, ‘oh my gosh, we don’t have any golf clubs!'” Maria says with a chortle. “I was ready to buy him a new set when Paul told me he’d take care of it.”

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When the afternoon of the large day arrived, John was nervous. It would not be golf the method he wished it or remembered it, and he was still studying the method from the side-seater cart. But after two years away from the sport, it was golf nonetheless, and you did not have to spend very long around him to know what it meant.

“I never thought I’d hear somebody say ‘golf saved my life,'” Paul says. “I hear that pretty often at this camp.”

John has not said those phrases precisely, but in so many methods, he would not have to. You can see the expression on his face change when Paul enters his orbit. You can hear the laughter enter his lungs.

“Oh boy…” John says when requested about his new trainer. “Paul?”

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His face scrunches into a scowl.

“He’s alright.”

“Alright?!” Paul screams, overhearing him from a few ft away. “Are you kidding me?”

And just when it seems Paul’s 90-year-old scholar is going to ship some dangerous information, he bursts out into laughter, his face spreading into a smile wider than the first fairway.

“That’s what I thought,” Paul says, a grin sneaking previous his bravado.

It’s arduous to overstate what these moments really feel like for the Hansers. To know how good it is for Maria to hear John’s laughter is to acknowledge that she has spent much of the last two years in the absence of it. To know what it’s like for John to obtain the present of golf is only to think about how it must have felt to spend two years pondering it was robbed from you.

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“This program has been more than meaningful,” Maria says. “It has been something that John looked forward to every week.”

Nobody in John’s orbit is deluded about his long-term prospects as a golfer. It’s unlikely he will ever take another full swing with a golf membership, or full a full 18-hole spherical. Some elements of his golf “life” might be over.

Fortunately, John has performed for long enough to know this is true of every golfer. The sport modifications as we age. The elusivity is the level.

“You never win at golf. No matter how good you are,” Paul says. “Even when you shoot your best round ever, everybody always tells me, ‘I shot my best round, but I double-bogeyed that hole, and I missed the putt over here.'”

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“Golf is about competing with yourself,” Maria agrees. “It’s about wanting to do better.”

On a excellent Thursday afternoon on Long Island, there was no ambiguity over if John had discovered golf’s inside which means. From the facet of a placing inexperienced in the solar, the golfer and his new coach started their first spherical as pals, punching low dribblers out in the direction of the flagstick.

The first few swings were short, and the next few were long, but then John began to get the dangle of it — gently rocking his 8-iron in the direction of the ball.

On possibly his tenth attempt, he caught a good one, watching as the ball struck the middle of the clubface and traveled down toward the flagstick. The ball appeared to take eternally on its roll, and John was caught there, watching, while Paul and Maria screamed at it with all their might.

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Back in the previous days, John might call what occurred next a common prevalence. On this day, though, his spouse called it something else.

“Here we are,” Maria said. “Hope.”

You can attain the writer at james.colgan@golf.com.

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