By CHUCK POLLOCK, Sun Senior Sports Columnist
He wasn’t a super-big guy at least by current pro football standards … but Stew Barber was larger than life to me.
After all, at 6-foot-2 and 248 pounds and charged with protecting Jack Kemp’s blind side, he was four inches shorter and 60 pounds lighter than the average NFL left offensive tackles these days.
But, in his time, Stew was as good as there was.
After moving to Bradford, Stew’s hometown, in May of 1970, I realized, he had just retired from a 9-year American Football League career a season earlier in which he was part of the Buffalo Bills’ ’64 and ’65 AFL championships and was a five-time league all-star.
I met him totally circumstantially.
He was a scholastic buddy of two friends — Wayne MacDonald and Pete Taylor — and it was clear that was good enough for Stew.
EVENTUALLY, our jobs pushed us together.
I was covering the Bills for the Olean Times Herald and Barber, after being picked by the Cowboys in 1961’s third round, signed with Buffalo which took him in the fourth round. His pro football salary topped out at $30,000 a year and, as with most of his teammates, he had an off-season job. In Stew’s case it was as a sales rep for a Buffalo company.
But after retiring as a player, he took a couple of jobs in the World Football League before being hired by the Bills as a scout. In 1979 he was promoted to Vice President in Charge of Administration. As such he was charged with handling administrative, ticket and stadium operations, arranging the preseason schedule, coordinating travel arrangements and representing the team at NFL meetings. Most importantly, he was to supervise player signings.
Chuck Knox was in his second year as head coach and though Barber supposedly outranked him, the coach was listed above him on the team hierarchy. Knox was not about to abdicate player signings to a man charged with protecting owner Ralph Wilson’s money.
Thus began a tumultuous four-year territorial tug-o-war until Knox left after the 1982 strike season and took the job in Seattle. Shortly thereafter, Barber left the Bills with a clear sense of relief.
WHAT’S certain is, he was miserable during Knox’s tenure having been neutered in the critical area of salary negotiations. Worse, Barber was persistently filleted in the press … yours truly excepted.
In one memorable meeting in his office, Stew allowed, “You know, Chuck, you’re the only media person I talk to.” And it occurred to me he was right. I never prodded him for scoops or inside stuff … we just talked about life.
Stew passed away Wednesday, three days before his 86th birthday in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
But he left me one unforgettable message.
He was blessed with five daughters but sadly, one of them passed away from anorexia as a teenager.
I was so devastated by her death, I didn’t drive to Orchard Park for the wake.
A few months later, I ran into Stew and apologized for skipping the wake, explaining I didn’t know what to say to say to him.
He looked at me through sad eyes and said, “There’s nothing you can say. The reason we go to wakes is to let people know that we care and are thinking about them … that’s plenty good enough.”
That was over 40 years ago and I’ve never forgotten the message.
(Chuck Pollock, a Wellsville Sun and Olean Star senior sports columnist, can be reached at cpollock@wnynet.net.)
