Dave DeBusschere began that day as he did most of his Sundays: 9:15 Mass at St. Joseph’s Church, maybe half a mile from his home in Garden City, on the Island. He would later note that he had never won anything in his life that involved a drawing: no raffles, no 50-50s.
“I think I got a set of club head covers at a golf tournament once,” DeBusschere would recall a few hours after the Recessional. “That’s all.”
DeBusschere folded himself onto a kneeler in his pew that morning – May 12, 1985 – and he said a few prayers “as I always do,” and then, for the first time in his life, for the last time in his life, he decided to get a little more specific, just in case God happened to be listening.