Hearn brings motivational talk to Princeton
By: John Fortuna
Ed Hearn sat forlornly on the bench of the New York Mets. Across the Shea Stadium infield, the Boston Red Sox stood on the top step of their dugout, poised to celebrate the team’s first World Series championship since 1986.
Hearn, the Mets’ rookie catcher and backup to Gary Carter, was admittedly envious.
Of course, Hearn along with the rest of the world was soon again reminded how quickly fortunes can shift. But as if to emphasize the point, the fates didn’t stop there with Hearn. His baseball career lay in tatters by 1988. Three years later, he was diagnosed with three life-threatening diseases, including the kidney disease FSGS (Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis), which often strikes children and affects as many people as cystic fibrosis.
He’s survived three kidney transplants, two bouts with cancer and thoughts of suicide. And he’s made it to another shift of fortune. Today, as a motivational speaker, Hearn is in position to have more of a lasting impact on people than any athletic achievement.
"What I do now," he said last week after a speaking engagement in Princeton for a financial services company, "is so much better than baseball. It’s knowing you have a real opportunity to make a difference. You’re talking about people’s lives."
In the crowded motivational speaker market, Hearn is different. He’s neither a self-promoter nor an entertainer hustling style over substance. Rather, he speaks from conviction and from experience. His is the perspective of someone who lost a potential million-dollar career through no fault of his own and, soon after, nearly lost his life.
"I always wanted to make an impact on people," said Hearn, who also spoke for a kidney dialysis organization in Atlantic City on Sunday. "I thought, ‘What better way to do it than as a professional athlete?’ I remember, as a kid, practicing signing my autograph.
"I wanted to be a role model. That was my plan. But what happened was part of a bigger plan."
Hearn hit .265 in 49 games for the ’86 Mets before they sent him, Rick Anderson and Mauro Gozzo to Kansas City in exchange for David Cone and Chris Jelic the following March. The Fort Pierce, Florida native was expected to be the Royals’ starting catcher for years to come. He played just six games for the Royals in 1987 before rotator-cuff surgery ended his season.
He appeared in seven games the following year, but the injury had done its damage. Hearn’s big-league career was over.
"So it was time for my second biggest childhood dream," he joked. "I took a job selling life insurance."
Soon after the life-threatening health problems began. And, one day while his wife, Tricia, was at work, Hearn descended into his basement and pulled out a .357 Magnum.
"I decided that if I was going to turn my life around," he said, "three things would have to happen."
He resolved to seek out the positive in people and in the world around him, and also to seek professional help. A week later, at the behest of a friend, he spoke at a meeting of the Kansas City Rotary Club. A speaker agent in the audience offered to represent him.
"I turned him down because I didn’t think I had any credibility," Hearn said. "This guy didn’t know that a week earlier I wanted to kill myself. Still, his offer represented light at the end of the tunnel. I took his card."
Today, Hearn represents that light for the thousands of people he speaks to annually. He serves as an ambassador for NephCure, an organization devoted to the cure of FSGS and another kidney disease, Nephrotic Syndrome.
In 1996, he published "Conquering Life’s Curves," a book about his personal experiences. Hearn also looks to reverse the negative direction that he feels society is headed through his Bottom of the Ninth Foundation.
"What we try to do," he explained, "is to try and find people who have something to offer others, to impact people in a positive way, and put them in position to do it. Our society and our country have declined. We’re like the frog in a pot of water, and the heat keeps gradually being turned up.
"We’re trying to find and develop good players who can help change this. Sort of like a minor-league system. The bottom of the ninth only happens if the good guys are tied or behind. Right now, we’re behind."
Baseball, he says, seems very far away. None of his former Mets teammates keep in touch, not even Gary Carter, for whom Hearn names his now 10½ -year-old son, Cody Carter Hearn. The only major-leaguer, past or present, who has visited Hearn over the past 12 years is current Royals’ All-Star Mike Sweeney.
"It’s disappointing (we’ve lost touch)," said Hearn, who lives in the Kansas City area. "But Sweeney is too good to be true."
Hearn still takes up to 50 pills a day and sleeps with the aid of a breathing machine. Yet his quest for a life of significance drives him to crisscross the country with his message of inspiration.
"When you see that moment in the audience that says you’ve gotten through to them," he said, "it gives you a feeling that nothing in sports can match. There were two Fortune 100 CEOs I’ll never forget. After I finished speaking, one took me behind the stage, laid his head on my shoulder and balled his eyes out. The other led me into a side room and just cried on the table in front of me.
"When you look at the audience, and you see their heads start to tilt to one side, their mouths drop open, the tears start to flow, you know you’ve made an impact. You know, it isn’t a tragedy that I got hurt and had to stop playing baseball or that I got sick. What would’ve been a tragedy is if I couldn’t make a difference to others."