Sean Maloney grew up in gritty South East London, last in a line of six kids, and got kicked out of school at age 15. Not that Sean was a bad kid. As a young member of the Socialist Labor League, a left-wing group pitched against a rising neo-Nazi movement, Sean organized antigovernment demonstrations and, with his charisma and passion, recruited followers. Perhaps the only person not charmed by the young man was Sean's father, Eddie, who had become estranged from his rebellious son. Then, just before Eddie Maloney died of poisoning in the chemical dye factory where he worked his whole life, he stopped by a rally and watched his son speak publicly for the first time. "That boy has a skill," Eddie told Sean's mother afterward. "He'll do something great with it or something terrible. Either way, he'll inspire people."
"You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability." -- Kurtz to Marlow in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Two years ago life could not have looked brighter for Sean Maloney. At 54, he was a Silicon Valley-based executive vice president at Intel (INTC) and widely believed to be No. 1 in line to succeed CEO Paul Otellini. Having joined Intel after dropping out of Thames Polytechnic University and working briefly at Barclays, Maloney caught the eye of former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who made the young man his technical assistant -- sort of a chief of staff cum researcher. Grove remembers that in 1994, when the company was managing a crisis over millions of flawed Pentium chips, Maloney "was a dynamo." An indefatigable problem-solver, Maloney once addressed a group of employees dressed as explorer Ernest Shackleton -- parka, goggles, and all. The crowd went wild. "One of the world's best communicators," Otellini recalls.
Maloney, who had five children, also was a workaholic who embraced the punishing travel schedule and long hours, all the while taking on heady physical challenges -- tearing down ski runs, racing his scull at 6 a.m. every day with a much younger rowing buddy. This extreme behavior often taxed his co-workers and family, but they would prove to be the keys to the remarkable physical and mental recovery he was about to embark on -- a journey Maloney and his family have not discussed publicly until now.
In October 2009 during a routine visit to her doctor, Maloney's wife, Margaret, who was expecting twins, learned that one of the fetuses had lost a heartbeat. The best way to keep the other baby alive, her doctor advised, would be to carry both to term. On Jan. 4, 2010, she delivered five weeks early. Sean, who was off skiing during an annual winter vacation with his oldest children, raced back. The surviving twin, Catherine, at 4 pounds 11 ounces, seemed healthy. But six weeks later she stopped breathing and had to be rushed to Stanford Hospital.
Maloney hurried home again that fateful Thursday, this time from a business trip, to be at Catherine's side, and on Friday, after visiting the baby at the hospital's neonatal intensive-care unit, he felt sure that something was wrong with him too. "I started to think, 'I'm losing words,' " he recalls. He tried to write "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," but he couldn't get the words and letters to go in the right order. He showed his jumbled writing to his son George, then 21, and daughter Brigid, 20, making them promise not to tell Margaret, who had a sick baby plus 5-year-old twin girls in her charge. Getting on his computer, Sean Googled "speech," "mixed-up words," "headache" -- anything he could think of to describe his symptoms. It took him no more than a few minutes to reach a conclusion: " 'That's it,' I said to myself, 'I'm having a stroke.'"
