A Fabulous, Full Circle
Football Career
Ralph Stewart played with the best. Article Mary Bush | Photography Parker Harrison and Provided
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ighty-eight-year-old Prairie Village resident Ralph ‘Boot’ Stewart played professional football way before there were instant replays, glitzy half-time shows or over-the-top Super Bowl championships. But his football career, which took off at the University of Missouri, spiked at Notre Dame and included memorable stints with the (then) New York Yankees and Baltimore Colts, and allowed him to play his beloved sport with greats such as Missouri’s renowned coach Don Faurot and Alabama’s legendary Paul “Bear” Bryant. “Football has been very important to Dad since his youth,” says Stewart’s daughter Judy Heeter, a Kansas City, Mo., resident and attorney who formerly headed the business activities of the Major League Baseball Players Association. “It afforded him many wonderful opportunities and experiences.” It started in St. Louis where as a child,
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Stewart (whose older brother nicknamed him ‘Boot’) fell in love with the game of football and as a high school standout, earned a scholarship to the University of Missouri in Columbia. Stewart, a center
and linebacker, started every game as a freshman in 1943 with the Tigers, playing both offense and defense while taking direction and inspiration from the University’s esteemed Coach Faurot, credited with inventing football’s split-T formation. World War II came along during Stewart’s career at the University and when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, he was sent, along with other outstanding, college players, to pre-flight school at the University of Notre Dame. “The Army and Navy were as competitive in those days as they are now and the Navy gathered together some of the best young football players to play for them,” says Heeter. “Dad ended up earning a letter at Notre Dame during that time.” Stewart was transferred to the University of North Carolina where he continued his pre-flight training and played more