Photography by Sarah Whitmire

Bill Wohl wasn’t always a world-class triathlete with philanthropic goals. The once overly stressed, money-hungry businessman didn’t gain a new appreciation for life until his heart, and the heart of a complete stranger, stopped beating.

You sit for a few hours in the living room of the Scottsdale condo, and you listen to the subject of this story speak, but your eyes always return to the medals – gold and silver and bronze – that dominate one wall of the room. They come from around the world, from the speaker’s prowess on a bike, in the water, on the run. Every last one of these medals, and there are rows of them, represents a span of time conquered, more distance put between competitor and starting line, another victory hard won.

You count the medals, write down the list of accomplishments, and you are suitably impressed, but your point of view is completely beside the point. The only opinion that matters is the one that can never be known.

What would he think, the other subject of this story, the man who cannot be interviewed, the man who had to die so all these races could be won? Would he take pride in his sacrifice? Would he care that he owns a large part of all these polished pieces of ore?

Or would he simply want his life back?

Bill Wohl leans forward in his chair, serious now. His eyes dart to the medals. Now you’re both pondering the collection on the wall, this testament to athletic skill. Wohl’s deep voice sinks even lower.

“Every day, all day, I thank God for Brady,” he says. “The biggest thing is to honor him. When I ride, when I work out, sometimes I talk to him.”

And then the room goes silent. It’s so quiet you can almost hear a heartbeat. And that’s as close as the man who is not there ever comes to speaking.

The story of Bill Wohl has a slew of beginnings, as many tempting places to begin as the number of race-day starting lines this 62-year-old champion has approached.

Wohl’s tale could commence in Brooklyn in the late 1940s, where a Brillo-haired little Jewish boy learned to swim in the salty ocean waters off Brighton Beach. Or we might start in New York City, at James Madison High, where the same boy, a teenager now, made a name for himself running track. Or maybe the kickoff point should be the University of Maryland, amid the fever of the Vietnam War, where Wohl turned a track scholarship into a degree in marketing. Or perhaps it’s best to fast-forward to Arizona, where Wohl made a fortune during the go-go ’80s and ’90s selling everything from solar panels to Jacuzzis before finding his niche peddling high-end audio/video systems.

If Wohl’s story were the standard American dream, we’d follow the money and start with the salesman’s rise to riches, the wealthy version of Wohl, a father of two who once lived in a custom-built, million-dollar house beside Pinnacle Peak. It’s a sexy narrative: the guy who had all the spoils you amass when your client roster includes Charles Barkley, Paul Allen and the king of Saudi Arabia.

The trouble is, the high-achiever version of Wohl also had more anxiety than his workdays were long. He weighed a blobby 260 pounds. He had no time for exercise. He skipped seeing the dentist for so many years that he developed a serious jaw infection that leeched into his bloodstream. His coronary arteries were more clogged than Interstate 10 at rush hour. Worse still, Wohl had no clue about any of it. He was so oblivious that what he believed to be a nightlong bout with food poisoning from a bad Chinese dinner was actually a massive coronary that should have killed him.

That was Wohl’s life, circa Easter Sunday 1999.

“I wasn’t even smart enough to realize that I was having a heart attack and dying,” he says, recalling the night it took him seven hours to decide to dial 911. “I had two main arteries that were 100 percent blocked. Your body goes, ‘OK, we’re not moving, we have no blood. You’re dead.’ … Ninety-some-odd percent of people just fall over and die in that situation.”

Instead of keeling over, Wohl got two stents sewn into his chest. The procedure did little more than slow down the dying process, stretching it across a period of five months that included 17 trips to the hospital. Most every meal was followed by vomiting. A simple outing to the office demanded a nap. Wohl slowly grew weaker throughout the summer of 1999, and then he took a serious turn for the worse when he caught pneumonia.

“I was like a shadow after that,” he says. “It got to where I felt like I was totally dependent on the will of God and/or the doctors.”

This downward slide could be another beginning for Wohl’s story – the beginning of the end. His physical freefall continued unabated until one afternoon that September, when Wohl found himself in the back of an ambulance bound for University Medical Center in Tucson.