Back to Work : Cancer Surgery Behind Him, Stewart Shows Old Form at Missouri

Norm Stewart wants to show that nothing has changed, that eight months after cancer surgery he is fit as ever, coaching the Missouri basketball team the way he has for 23 seasons.

In his nationally televised comeback in the Maui tournament last weekend, Stewart was at his fiery best, and so was his team.

The Tigers defeated Evansville, No. 11 Louisville and No. 17 North Carolina on the way to the tournament title and a No. 4 national ranking, and are 5-0 after beating Creighton, 86-79, Monday night. Through it all, Stewart played thinking coach and lively bench jockey.

“That’s Norm,” Missouri Athletic Director Dick Tamburo said. “In the heat of the game, he is his old self.”

But, though Stewart acts as if nothing has changed, that he will remain the tenacious--some prefer belligerent--competitor he has been since his days as an All-American at Missouri in the mid-1950s, in his heart, he knows different.

Putting on his most convincing game face is more important now than ever--for himself, for his family, for his players and for Missouri basketball.

“One of the things about cancer, the doctors told us, is that you have to want to succeed,” said Virginia Stewart, a former Missouri homecoming queen who married Stewart 33 years ago. “Getting back to work was very important to Norm.”

If coaching is therapy, then, judging from appearances, the first treatment was a success.

For three games on three nights in the Lahaina Civic Center, a small gymnasium with no air-conditioning, in which temperatures reached 90 degrees, Stewart was electric.

He paced. He smiled. He screamed at players. He argued with officials. He yapped in mid-game with the Sacramento Kings’ Bill Russell, seated near the end of the Missouri bench. He gestured in almost every conceivable way, to express his emotions and demonstrate to the officials a call or two they might have missed.

And with his Tigers on the way to an 80-73 championship victory over North Carolina, Stewart pulled the kind of showboat move that over the years has entertained his supporters and infuriated his detractors. He turned to a television camera, raised the thumb and pinkie on his right hand and wiggled his wrist in a Hawaiian “hang-loose” gesture.

That bit of beach culture might have been lost on the landlocked folks watching back in Columbia, Mo., in the wee hours of Monday morning, but the rest of the act hit home.

His hair may be a little thinner, but Stewart, 54, demonstrated what he wants all to accept: The bleeding ulcers and the surgery for colon cancer and a diseased gallbladder that forced him to miss Missouri’s final 14 games last season will not drive him from coaching.

“At first we thought maybe it would be best he didn’t come back,” said sophomore guard Anthony Peeler, the Big Eight newcomer of the year last season. “Then we thought deep in our mind, and we knew that no matter what happened, he would want to be back. That is the way he is.

“But we wondered when he came back to practice what he would be like. We found out right away that he was the same coach.”

That is what Stewart hopes everyone will conclude. He points out that the doctors have given him “a clean bill of health.” But physical appearances are only part of the story. No matter how he acts on the basketball court, Stewart will never totally be the same.

Cancer changes everything.

FIGHTING BACK

In the days and hours away from the television glare, he will fight that reality. He will face the fear, the uncertainty and the anxiety of an examination every six months to tell him if the disease that cost him a third of his colon has reappeared.

Alone with his thoughts, he will contemplate mortality. He will recall a conversation with a nurse before he elected to undergo optional post-surgical cancer treatments. The brief exchange brought into the open words so hard to say.

“ ‘Norm, you have it figured out that life is fatal, haven’t you?’ ” Stewart recalled the nurse asking him.

“Oh, yeah,” was his simple reply; his thoughts were more complex.

“We all hear about mortality, and we are aware of it, but we don’t think about it,” Stewart said. “That is what happens with this. It is pushed straight up front to you, and you have to deal with it.”

Stewart responded in the way that fits his confrontational image. He decided to attack his illness, regain his health and, if the doctors allowed, return to coaching as quickly as possible.

“Norm lives basketball; it has been his life,” said Jack Lengyel, former Missouri athletic director who is now at Navy. “Knowing his competitive nature, I certainly expected that if there was any way he could, Norm would be back.”

It was not the easy way out. Coaching is stressful anywhere, and the pressures at Missouri are particularly intense.

He has returned to a team deep in talent but troubled by joint investigation by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. and an outside firm hired by the university to examine allegations of NCAA rule violations.

Stewart says those pressures might have contributed to the bleeding-ulcer attack that led to his passing out on a team flight to Oklahoma last Feb. 9. Doctors discovered eight ulcers, seven in his stomach and one in his esophagus. Further tests revealed the cancer and gallbladder problems.

Although his team was ranked in the top 10 and was 20-3 when he fell ill, Stewart had been involved in a series of incidents. These reportedly ranged from exchanging obscenities with hecklers at Nebraska to allegedly threatening the year-old son of a St. Louis reporter. Stewart has denied making any threat.

The day before he blacked out, his assistant coach of 12 years, Bob Sundvold, was suspended after admitted that he had violated NCAA rules by providing money for a round-trip plane ticket to P.J. Mays, an ineligible freshman recruit who has since left school. Sundvold has since been reinstated.

All that was going on at a time when Stewart was worried about his wife, who was recovering in the hospital after surgery that included the removal a tumor that tests later determined was benign.

“There were a lot of things going on and I was trying to give my time to all of them,” Stewart said. “I might have been a little stressed out.”

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

Still, although he insists that he had no hint of his own health problems, he also said he might have been blinded by single-minded purpose.

“I went into last year with my mind really set on our ballclub,” Stewart said. “I knew we had a good basketball team, and we had a good chance to go as far as we could. So I set myself aside from everything else. That was going to be it, and I zeroed in.”

That all changed with his illness. Instead of trying to lead the Tigers to their first NCAA tournament victory since 1982, he wound up fighting for his health. He endured some difficult days. He developed complications after the surgery that he said kept him from eating for 16 days. He lost 30 pounds, to 185 over his 6-foot-5 frame.

“I was not in the best of shape,” Stewart said. “I had a fever. I was getting into trouble.”

Those who saw him were frightened.

“I visited him in the hospital when he was under sedation and he was in a different world,” said Lee Coward, senior point guard. “He told us not to worry. He said he would handle it, that he would do the right thing. But we knew emotionally he was holding a lot of things in.

“I’m just glad to have him back. It was a change when he was gone. It was a different atmosphere.”

With Stewart out, the team was turned over to assistant coach Rich Daly, who is facing NCAA scrutiny over his admission that he brought in a player for a campus visit during a time when visits were not permitted.

Daly led the Tigers to the Big Eight tournament championship and the final 16 of the NCAA tournament, but it was a tumultuous time. Players said they rebelled under his authority and welcomed Stewart’s return.

“He makes a difference,” Coward said. “He has been on the sidelines 20-some years. He can put pressure on the officials. He can change the ballgame around. He is that type of person.”

With the new season just under way and his team again near the top of the rankings, more attention has been brought on Stewart.

“I’d like to get away from me as quickly as possible and get the focus on the players,” Stewart said after his first Maui victory.

But to do that would be to ignore someone who has been one of college basketball’s most confounding characters. Even before his illness, Stewart was a tough man to read. That has not changed.

Stewart reveals only pieces of what these recent months have brought to him and his family. He declines to discuss any significant details regarding his treatment after surgery. Tamburo, his athletic director, said that Stewart remained sketchy on his intentions to return until August.

Stewart is known to unleash his fury in an instant. His eyes can turn from inviting to steely cold. He can be profane, and he can hold a grudge.

He does this best with sportswriters. Stewart recalls an uncomplimentary article in his early days at Missouri that he said was the result of a recruiting battle with another school over a star Missouri player. He said the story caused him to end a working relationship with the reporter.

“I was not very nice, and I usually am not,” Stewart said. “I said, ‘It’s just something you are going to have to handle,’ and I hung up. To this day, when somebody does something like that, it’s easy for me to eliminate him. I mean, he obviously needs me, and I don’t need him. My wife will tell you I’m very severe when it comes to that.”

Stewart says that reporters often tell just one side of the story, but even he allows that his side is not always becoming.

Take the incident near the end of an 89-72 victory at Nebraska last Jan. 28. Stewart was overheard making a vulgar comment to fans seated behind the Missouri bench. Stewart said his response was in reaction to being called “a bush-leaguer, with some (obscene) adjectives in front of it,” earlier in the game.

“I played baseball (in the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system), and there’s one word you don’t call a baseball player, and that is a bush-leaguer, ‘ “ Stewart said. “Well, my mistake was in replying to him.”

Stewart can also be a polite, funny and engaging conversationalist, the type who will take the care to read name tags and call the personnel in a hotel coffee shop by their first names.

This is when Stewart is at his charming small-town best. This is the side of him those closest wish he could show more in public. They see the reports of Stewart’s sometimes boorish public behavior and hope for a time when he can be understood as they know him.

A LIGHTER SIDE

“Norm has a great sense of humor, but not everyone gets the joke and that sometimes makes him look bad,” Virginia Stewart said. “The words are so flat on paper. If only they could see the body language.”

Then they should come to a Missouri game and watch Stewart’s sideline pantomime. He has all the moves--the travel, the over-the-top, the hold, the three-point goal, the wave of the hand in disgust. It might play well at home, but try going into someone else’s arena and doing that. No wonder he has become a magnet for hecklers.

Which raises an interesting question about what kind of reception Stewart will receive in arenas around the Big Eight. Will his fight back from cancer turn boos to cheers? Knowing Stewart, if they do, he would want them to turn out of respect, not sympathy.

He seeks respect not just for what he has overcome in the last eight months, but for what he has accomplished as an athlete and a coach. Stewart is sixth in victories among active coaches with a 526-267 record in 29 seasons at Northern Iowa and Missouri. He is the dean of Big Eight coaches and during his tenure has seen 26 other conference coaches come and go.

In his mind, that should have earned him respect that has nothing to do with sympathy.

He realizes that he is not likely to become a beloved coach to outsiders, but he wants respect. Maybe that is why he was so heartened by the community response to his illness.

He said he received thousands of get-well cards and letters. He said friends and strangers alike stopped by his home to offer home-cooked meals and help. He also learned that he is not alone with his disease.

“Any time we have a misfortune, people with that same misfortune contact you or you hear about them,” Stewart said. “It has been so overwhelming because of the number of people that have cancer. The feeling there is for one another. I have really been impressed with that.”

The outpouring could not have been more timely. With both husband and wife ill, they were unable to care for one another in a way their love said they should.

“Typically, I think a woman has a greater capacity for taking care of her man, than a man does a woman,” Stewart said. “That is true in so many instances and I know it is in ours. It was hard for her to recuperate and it was hard for me to recuperate when you are mentally concerned about your mate.

“We kind of caught ourselves laughing because you are trying to take care of one another and you couldn’t take care of yourself.”

Virginia Stewart said: “I know it sounds funny but it drew us closer.”

DOCTOR’S ORDERS

On the advice of Stewart’s doctors, he and Virginia used some of their time together to take mini-vacations away from the pressures of Missouri. Only in August, after Stewart had completed his treatments and the doctors assured him there had been no recurrence of the cancer and he was free to go back to work, did he decide to return.

“If something happens, and I can’t do it, then I’ll have to make a decision,” Stewart said. “But I have been doing this for 30-some years. For me, it is the same as someone going into an office to push paper or whatever he does.

“I don’t mind turmoil.”

But despite the tough words, some people around Stewart say they have seen a change in his manner. It struck Tamburo, the athletic director, a month ago as he watched Stewart conduct his first news conference since his return.

“I realized when I saw him at the press conference that his whole appearance is a little softer than it used to be be,” Tamburo said. “And he has told me there aren’t going to be those 18-, 19-hour days, three or four days in a row. He is going to do his work, then go home for dinner.”

That has not changed Stewart’s intensity on the court or the demands he places on his players. He said he took them to task after a 68-53 first-round victory in Maui over Evansville for poor shot selection.

“I can’t recall in the last 10 years having a team take more bad shots than that,” Stewart said. “I have had teams hold the ball and have the 45-second clock run out, but at least they didn’t take a bad shot. Taking a bad shot is kind of like giving up.

“I told my kids that after what I had just gone through, I was not going to tolerate that.”

Leave it to Stewart to turn his experience as a cancer patient into a lesson in basketball. But that is far from all his players have learned about life and their coach over these difficult months.

Peeler, the sophomore guard, was on the plane when Stewart became sick. He saw the frantic activity to save Stewart and the fear around him.

“After we found out what it was, we never took anything for granted again in our lives,” Peeler said. “Every day is a special day for each and every one one of us. Any single moment of life is very important.”

For Peeler, too, life will never be the same.