Earlier this year, Denny Schrecker was in Florida, playing golf with his wife, when his doctors asked him to come home so they could treat the brain tumor that was killing him. But Denny said no. He said this was maybe the last chance he’d ever have to play golf with Linda in Florida, so he was going to enjoy it to the hilt, while he still could. The doctors would have to wait.

So would Andy, for just a little longer.

Andy was their son, a wonderful young man blessed with his parents’ good looks and athleticism and charm. As a senior at Male High, Denny’s alma mater, Andy won the 1987 state singles championship in tennis. He went to the University of Louisville and became only the second player to win more than 100 singles matches.

But on the night of May 24, 1987, while jogging alone in E.P. “Tom” Sawyer State Park, Andy suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 27. His death came exactly 10 days after Jim Bolus, one of Denny’s football teammates at Male and the University of Kentucky, had also died of heart attack after jogging.

To say that Denny and Linda were devastated by Andy’s death would be a gross understatement. But instead of allowing the tragedy to tear them apart, they only grew closer, leaning on each other and their other child, Amy. They picked up the pieces of their lives and moved forward, smiling brave smiles they didn’t feel.

The obits say that it was the brain tumor that finally got the better of Denny, who was 66 when he died Saturday night at Baptist Northeast Hospital. But his friends know that a broken heart also had something to do with it. Try as he might – and Denny was as strong as they come – he never got over the loss of Andy.

I met Denny through Bolus, who became one of my dearest friends when we worked together at The Courier-Journal & Louisville Times in the mid-1960s. Denny loved sports of all kinds. Once he called to tell me that he had come up with three special Muhammad Ali prints and would give me one if I could work it out to have them autographed by the champ.

It was a deal I couldn’t refuse. So when I lined up an interview with Ali at the Galt House, I called Denny and told him to bring the prints. In the photo accompanying this piece, I’m on the left and Denny on the right, looking on as Ali signed one of the prints.

One reason for Denny’s fascination with Ali was that they were contemporaries, more or less, on the Louisville sports scene. In the fall of 1959, when Denny was a senior end on the Male High football team, Ali – then known as Cassius Clay – won a national Gold Gloves boxing championship.

While Clay went on to bigger things, Denny went to UK, following his older brother Ray, who had lettered in football for Coach Blanton Collier in 1959. Collier liked Denny’s size (he was 6-foot-3 and 196 pounds in his heyday), his soft hands, and his quick feet.

In those days, freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition, so Denny didn’t get to suit up for the varsity until he was a sophomore in 1961. As the preseason media guide had it, “Schrecker shows good indoctrination in the Kentucky system…he had a fine spring practice…Schrecker is very important in end plans.” As it turned out, he played 73 minutes for a UK team that went 5-5, even starting against Kansas in a 21-8 Wildcat win at Stoll Field.

After the season, Collier was fired and replaced by Charlie Bradshaw, a sadistic protégé of Paul “Bear” Bryant. Bradshaw immediately instituted some private indoor “conditioning” sessions that were violations both of NCAA rules and the laws of human decency. It was so brutal that players began to quit or transfer, including four of his friends from Male High – Bolus, Lindsey Able, Tom Hedden, and Joe Blankenship.

But as recounted by author Shane Ragland in his book “The Thin Thirty,” Schrecker seemed to relish the new regime’s emphasis on toughness and contact.

“Schrecker, genial and fun off the field, relished the hitting, the brutality, the man-to-man combat,” Ragland wrote. “He bought into it, and the big, quick and lean Schrecker was a prototypical Bradshaw player. Schrecker could pounce off the line, he was fast for his size, and put a big hurt on his opponent in a hurry. He liked to hit and Bradshaw relished contact.”

But before spring practice, during some silly horsing-around in the football dorm, Denny was accidentally shot in the eye with a BB gun wielded by teammate Dave Gash. Although Shrecker didn’t completely lose sight in the eye and remained on the squad, his football career was effectively over. He left the team after the “Thin Thirty” season of 1962 and competed on the UK track team before graduating in 1964.

Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Denny married Linda, who had come to UK from Harned, Ky., and was homecoming queen her senior year. They settled down in Louisville, where Denny indulged his passion for football as an assistant coach at Trinity, Male, and U of L.

After Andy was born in 1970, Denny got out of coaching and went into the insurance business. He was successful enough to eventually merge his firm, Gordon-Shrecker Associates, into Thompson Associates. He devoted much of his spare time to the Cabbage Patch and the Male High alumni board, in addition to serving as president of the Louisville Quarterback Club for several terms, a fellow at UK and a member of Southeast Christian Church.

And, of course, he played golf with Linda.

They were always the best-looking couple in the room, the living proof that the Princess could, indeed, find Prince Charming and live happily ever after. But they also were so unassuming and friendly that people just naturally gravitated to them. Denny was the ultimate guy’s guy, the jock who married the homecoming queen. But he also was just so darned nice that nobody could begrudge him anything.

But Andy’s death changed Denny. It haunted him. You could see it in his eyes, even when he was laughing. He always seemed only a blink away from dissolving into tears. He always greeted me with a hug because he knew Jim Bolus was one of my dearest friends. He promised that someday we would own a race horse together and we would call it “Andbo” or “Boand,” or some combination of Jim and Andy’s names.

We never got to do it and now it’s too late. I hope Denny explains to Jim and Andy. I’m confident they’re together. I’m also sure that Andy will understand completely why Denny wanted one more winter with Linda in Florida.

It was the football player in him coming out again. It was his way of looking death in the eye and knocking it on its sorry butt, if only for awhile.