FADING GLORY
‘Little Ronnie’ Stewart was one of the capital’s football heroes. But this Grey Cup weekend, he’s among the many former athletes whose brains are paying a price for that time in the spotlight.
There was a time when Ron Stewart owned the Grey Cup.
He won the championship trophy three times as a member of the Ottawa Rough Riders (1960, ’68 and ’69), and was named the CFL’s outstanding Canadian player and Canada’s male athlete of the year in 1960. In retirement, Stewart was the CFL’s unofficial goodwill ambassador during Grey Cup festivals, wherever the game was played.
Yet, when the 105th Grey Cup kicks off at Lansdowne Park on Sunday, (Little Ronnie) Stewart will be far removed from the pageantry and roar of TD Place Stadium. The forgotten football hero will be 115 kilometres away, watching the game with his wife, Wendy, at their modest condo in Westport, or, perhaps across the street, at the home of their daughter, Melissa.
Stewart might take notes during the game, to keep track of the teams playing and the score, because he will forget who won the game minutes after it is played.
The last time Stewart was at the stadium it was 2014. He joined fellow Ottawa football icons Russ Jackson, Whit Tucker, Tony Gabriel etc., honoured with the re-retirement of their jersey numbers at the Ottawa Redblacks’ home opener. Ron watched the light shine on his No. 11, then grew disoriented and got lost coming off the field, this man who once made Lansdowne his personal playground.
“I wanted to buy him Grey Cup tickets, for his birthday (late September),” Wendy says, “but he didn’t think he would be up to it.”
Adds Ronnie: “If we (the Redblacks) are not in it, I’m not going.”
The sculpted face hasn’t changed much in 20 years, beneath the shock of white hair. The shoulders are there, the same powerful, compact build on the five-foot, eight-inch, 180-pound frame that scampered and barrelled through enemy defences in the 1960s. Stewart, inducted into the Queen’s University, Canadian football, Ottawa and Canada’s sports halls of fame, was equally dangerous running the ball or catching it out of the backfield.
The Toronto native and son of a furniture maker is simply one of the best Canadian-born running backs in CFL history.
At 83, Ron Stewart can still crush a visitor’s hand with a handshake. The mind, though, has become his nemesis.
Once capable of passing law school classes at the University of Ottawa while playing professional football, Stewart’s brain function is progressively deteriorating as a result of repeated blows to the head during his football career — 10 years of amateur ball, including five years as a star running back at Queen’s University, and 13 seasons of pro football in Ottawa.
Stewart is one of the lucky ones. He is living and well cared for. His Ottawa teammates Gary Schreider and Jim Conroy both died of Alzheimer’s disease linked to football.
Stewart was the best man at Schreider’s wedding.
Several other ex-CFLers in this community have also died or are suffering declining mental health. Take note, commissioner Randy Ambrosie, denier of a link between football blows and brain disease.
A visitor asks Ron Stewart how he is getting along.
“Good. Same old,” Stewart says. “Can’t remember anything.”
He laughs. Stewart jokes that there are benefits to his memory loss, for example he quickly forgets if his wife is annoyed with him, he says. On balance, his memory loss is distressing to him, which at least means he is aware enough to recognize the loss.
“I look at game stories in the newspaper,” Stewart says. “I put the paper down. Go have a coffee, and I can’t remember who won what. No memory. I go back and look again.
“I started to make a note to myself, rather than carry the newspaper around. If I had that reference in my pocket I didn’t have to say, ‘I don’t remember.’ ”
Geriatric specialists have told the Stewarts that Ron doesn’t have Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. Not yet. His dementia is progressive, however, with deterioration shown on MRIs of his frontal lobe.
For Wendy, the diagnosis has at least brought clarity. For years, she agonized over why her husband sat silent, and wouldn’t engage in conversation. It hurt her deeply until she realized the withdrawal wasn’t his fault.
Twenty years ago, Stewart’s behaviour was thought by the family to be quirky, and attributed to natural aging, but it took a while for anyone to make the connection to repetitive head blows from football.
Wendy’s brother showed Ron three times how to put the chain on his new chainsaw, and Ron couldn’t grasp it.
Generally, Stewart was coping, but in 2015 he was behind the wheel of his car when he suddenly froze, as if in a catatonic state, while on a four-lane highway.
Her heart racing, Wendy got him to pull over. It was the last time he would drive, voluntarily surrendering his licence at Wendy’s urging. Now, Wendy drives him everywhere, or they just walk to errands in the tiny village of Westport, population 590, southwest of Ottawa. Wendy says Ron gets anxious if she is out of his sight for more than half an hour.
Stewart doesn’t remember receiving a lot of football concussions, but at this point the things that stand out for him best are those feats people remember for him — such as his landmark 287-yard rushing performance on Oct. 10, 1960, a single-game CFL record that has stood for 57 years.
Concussions weren’t even in a player’s vocabulary in the 1960s.
“You remember getting hit, but you’ve got to get the ball and do it again,” says Stewart, who recalls the ’60s better than he does last week.
A running back, statistically the most injury-prone position in football, is a prime target for angry linebackers. Yet, Wendy says Ron’s overall physical health is remarkably good.
Stewart does recall how closely knit the Canadian players were on the Riders: Stewart and Jackson, Tucker, Gilles Archambault and Schreider, a fellow Queen’s alumnus and legal mind.
“We were very close, after hours, too,” Stewart says. “We would have a beer and talk about it. The American kids kind of stuck to themselves. We all got along OK, but the Canadian guys hung out together during the season and in the off-season.”
Asked if he plans to donate his brain for study at the brain bank in Toronto or Boston, Stewart reflects for a moment, then says he wouldn’t object.
“I just don’t want to make a big deal about it,” he says.
As sure as a first-and-goal situation with Stewart and Bo Scott in the backfield, Stewart was cruising into retirement after serving as ombudsman for the federal corrections system for more than two decades.
Appointed in 1977, Stewart retired in 2003, then was hit in 2006 by a string of allegations by the auditor general’s office related to overpayments, and business trips, among other inappropriate expenditures alleged during his tenure.
On the reports of a whistleblower, accusations were made, lawyers were hired and, when the smoke cleared, Stewart repaid $77,500 to the government of Canada, and apologized for “any procedures that might have been viewed as inappropriate or misleading.”
Wendy, a retired City of Ottawa councillor who admits mistakes were made, believes her husband was already suffering memory problems and accounting difficulties while in office. Regardless, the family was at the centre of a media circus — TV cameras on their cottage property at the height of the story. Those close to Stewart say his mental condition deteriorated from the stress.
“I thought it was going to kill him,” says Wendy, her eyes welling with tears as she speaks of the investigation.
Ironically, Stewart remembers nothing of that period. “I sleep well,” he says. “I do the worrying for both of us,” says Wendy, who notes that nothing came of an RCMP investigation into the matter.
If fresh air and exercise are important for geriatric health, then Ron Stewart may run to daylight for a while yet.
Eight years ago, Wendy and Ron moved from Ottawa to Westport for a simpler life. They boat from their condo to a rustic family cottage on Big Island in Big Rideau Lake, a five-mile trek with Wendy at the wheel.
At the cottage, they grow their own vegetables, raise chickens and cut and move cords of wood, with the help of son Christian.
Wendy’s father, Norman, bought the property from his army severance pay following the Second World War. Wendy met Ron in 1970, his final season as a player. They married in 1975.
Two family weddings have been held at the cottage, including that of daughter Melissa to Andrew Sullivan. The couple has three children, in their old Victorian townhouse across the street from Wendy and Ron. The Stewarts often walk their grandchildren, Jack, 8, Kylan, 7, and Emma, 5, to the school bus stop.
“We’re very lucky,” Wendy says. “Life is good. The people who care about you know what you are.”
“You get out of the hustle and bustle of downtown Ottawa and you live out here in the country,” says Stewart. “There’s no comparison.” “Little” Ronnie Stewart has earned the peace and quiet of the Rideau Lakes. In spirit, he will be at Lansdowne on Sunday, for the 105th Grey Cup, on a stage he once dominated as his own.
I look at game stories in the newspaper. I put the paper down. Go have a coffee, and I can’t remember who won what. No memory. I go back and look again.