Death came instantly to Terry Rogers, one of Ireland's greatest ever bookmakers, as he walked out of a restaurant in Gran Canaria at around midnight on Sunday.
"It was the way he would have wanted to go," said his nephew and namesake. "He lived fast and he died fast. The only thing that frightened him was the prospect of being confined to a wheelchair and becoming a burden on his family."
To those who have started going racing only in the 1990s, Terry will be just a name over a betting shop or a snooker hall: ill-health forced him into early retirement in 1988.
"Like Space Invader and so many of those horses that I have had the misfortune to own, I have leg trouble." That was the jocose fashion in which he announced that he was quitting the ring after more than 40 years shouting the odds.
A native of Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, he was born in 1928 into the business. His father was a bookmaker before him but he was a totally different sort of character, quiet-spoken and reserved, with no ambition to become king of the ring.
Terry was cast in an exuberantly flamboyant mould. While there have been layers who bet every bit as big as he did, no one has ever created quite the same image by sheer force of personality.
Once he stood up on his box a crowd of punters would throng around, some to have a bet but all to enjoy the banter. Like many a politician he was at his best when there was a heckler or two in the crowd.
He was still a teenager when he started laying the odds at the dogs, and he was the first to tell how close he came to being put out of business in those early days. Other bookmakers came to his rescue and he never forgot them. Whether they were happy with the result of bailing out Terry was another matter.
He had red hair and it was a rival bookmaker who first christened him "The Red Menace". For someone who studied the odds with great care, he was extraordinarily superstitious. Discovery of one of the old red £20 notes in his bag was enough to send him berserk.
"I have never won on a race when I held one of those," he would scream as he dispatched his runner to exchange it for two harmless tenners.
As a profession, bookmakers are notoriously conservative. But if the Irish ring was light years ahead of that in England, the credit goes to Terry, who was wonderfully innovative when it came to new forms of betting. Today one bookmaker in three bets "chances", that is to say they quote odds about naming the winner of a race in which one or more of the horses is counted a non-runner.
That was dreamed up by Terry who, in the early 1960s, was betting forecasts and doubles as well.
Within the last 12 months a number of Irish bookmakers have been able to buy "seniority" and thus secure betting pitches at the principal English racecourses such as Cheltenham, Ascot and York.
This was a procedure that Terry conceived more than 20 years ago, and he persuaded fellow Irish bookmakers that it was the right way to go.
"I have paid for enough bookmakers' funerals to realise," he once said, "that amongst the most stupid of notions is the belief that there is no such thing as a poor bookmaker."
For those who have spent a lifetime on the racecourse this scheme affords an opportunity to buy a pension.
Last week the Irish bookmakers announced a new deal and one of the ideas echoed a Terry Rogers promotion when, at the first Irish Sweeps Derby, he struck a high sartorial note, outfitting himself and his staff in blazers and boaters.
Like J.P. McManus, he was at heart more a punter than a bookmaker, and there can be no form of human activity on which he did not have a gamble, whether it was an election, the Eurovision Song Contest, an American Football league, a Miss World contest or a European championship.
He gambled on the Stock Exchange, he bought shares in Irish Sweepstakes tickets, and he was a regular player at the "Texas Hold-Em" World Poker Championships in Las Vegas.
When Terry jnr joined the firm, his uncle advised him that there would always be punters trying to pull a scam, but that if the bookmakers allowed themselves to be caught, the punter deserved to go to Heaven.
However, even Terry could get caught on occasion. One night leaving Binyons in Las Vegas he gave an associate $100,000 to lodge to his bank account. The punter decided that his need of the money was greater than Terry's and he lodged $100 and added three noughts on to the bank receipt.
Several months elapsed before a bank statement finally caught up with Terry and he discovered just what had happened. As for his reaction? Well, let us leave it, and Terry, to rest in peace.