New London — True heroism, Arthur Ashe once said, is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

Heroism also comes sans pretense. It’s finding what you’re good at and sharing it with the community, unaware and unconcerned with who’s watching.

And this was John Dennis “Denny” Miceli, the selfless Everyman of Ocean Beach, who died earlier this week at 79.

It’s hard to know where to begin sometimes, summing up the shapes and forms of a lifetime, especially for a man who never took one dime for essentially being Ocean Beach’s ambulance driver, always offering a quick pick-me-up for anyone in need.

Not here, though. Not when Dave Sugrue, Ocean Beach’s conscience, offered a beginning and an end for Denny Miceli in one line.

“Denny,” Dave Sugrue said, “will make you view humanity differently.”

Here’s to inscribing that on Miceli’s tombstone, which will be one of the rare edifices in his life he didn’t build.

And to think Denny Miceli was a retired chemist from Pfizer. Picture it: white lab coat, glasses with the side shields, beaker in hand … this is the guy who climbed Mt. Washington every year on his birthday, built considerable sections of the Ocean Beach boardwalk and could basically bench press a dump truck?

Yep.

And his odyssey to Ocean Beach began with a phone call.

“In 2005, we had to close the boardwalk,” Sugrue was saying. “We didn’t really have construction to rebuild it so we called for volunteer groups. Denny was one of the first guys who showed up to volunteer.”

The Denny and Benny Show began, although short-lived.

“Benny Burdick talked him into it,” Ocean Beach worker and Miceli confidante Tom Hurley was saying. “Benny says, ‘Hey, come down to the boardwalk. It’ll be fun. You’ll get out of the house.’ Benny lasted one or two days. And there’s Denny still there 13 years later.”

Denny Miceli was a show unto himself. Except he wasn’t a show and he kept to himself. You didn’t tell Denny Miceli what to do or what to fix. You didn’t have to. He just did it.

“He would fix something before we knew it was broken,” Sugrue said. “Never took a dime. Never. Just so giving. All you had to do was mention something and it was done.”

Even if you didn’t mention it. Miceli took to constructing the stage that exists today at center boardwalk on his own. Know how some of the best ideas are often drawn on cocktail napkins? This one came in pencil on the back of plywood.

“Putting the stage in the center of the boardwalk actually saved the project money,” Sugrue said. “He had the math figured out. If we didn’t use that much epay decking (wood) in that square footage and built the stage there instead by using plywood, it saved us thousands of dollars. And we got this beautiful stage. He figured out the math using all these scratch numbers on the back of a piece of wood.”

Or there was the time use of the arcade was imperiled because the boardwalk project wouldn’t be finished that far down the beach in time.

“The back of the boardwalk wasn’t going to get done because of the time factor,” said Jeff Mullins, in charge of the rides at Ocean Beach (he calls himself the “Carnival Guy”) for years. “How were we going to get people to the arcade? I told Denny this would be a failure. He said ‘what do you mean?’ I said, ‘If I can’t get those back doors open, it’ll be a failure. The kids come in from the beach side.’

“Lo and behold,” Mullins said, “on his own, he must have laid 80 feet easy of the boardwalk himself near the arcade. He worked on that part of the project, one board at a time, so the kids could get into the game room.”

Maybe next time you visit Ocean Beach, you’ll note the concession stand, otherwise known as “Denny’s Sandcastle.” For a while it went by another name: obsolete.

“It needed a lot of work,” Sugrue said. “Denny decided it needed to be open. He disappeared in there. You heard noises coming out of there. He gutted the place by himself. We decided we would name it after him. It’s still called Denny’s Sandcastle and always will be.”

Denny Miceli’s inner fire belied the genteel soul folks always saw around the beach. His simple tastes — salami grinders from Giuliano’s in Niantic or his own cooking during Italian Night in Groton — belied his brilliant complexities.

“He was almost bigger than life,” Sugrue said. “Every birthday, Feb. 9, he climbed Mt. Washington by himself to the top and made a snow cave to sleep in. Who does that? He was a mountain of a man.

“Talented, smart, stoic, strong. Very strong. I had this snow plow pump that must have weighed 250 pounds that I needed one day during a snowstorm. It was on the top shelf in the shop. Who could have possibly put that up there? Only one answer: Denny.”

Happily, the bon mots were headed Miceli’s way before death. June 29 was Denny Miceli Day in New London. The beach gang read a proclamation from Mayor Passero at Miceli’s house.

“They made me read it,” Hurley said, alluding to how the touching moment was juxtaposed with Miceli’s failing health. “It was gut-wrenching.”

But, alas, worth it. They all finally got to be there for the man who was always there for everyone else. Faithfully.

“I don’t think any of us realized how much he fixed until it started coming our way,” Sugrue said with a chuckle. “He was a legend.”

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro