He looked forward to the opening this fall of the David Paterson Golf Technology Center at Yale, a modern training facility complete with high-speed cameras, course simulator and launch monitor. He and Angela would spend more time at a second home they're building in South Carolina, and he'd return to his paint box—he's a longtime watercolorist—and work on his left-handed golf swing, a pet project he took up a few years ago.

That afternoon in May, Paterson followed the action with a video camera, filming the swings of alums and giving a running commentary. (He showed the footage in the clubhouse to laughter after the round.) As shadows stretched over the course, now a gauzy spring green, he headed to the eighteenth tee to watch a group of his former players, all in their late twenties, finish up. Two of them, Ian MacAllister and Brockner, were battling for low gross. Each made par, and Mac­Allister won by a stroke with a seventy-three. As one of them replaced the flagstick, the foursome doffed their caps and shook hands beside the hole. Paterson flicked off his camera and turned to me: "Isn't it a great game?"