A different dream

On Tuesday afternoon, Missouri will hold its first spring football practice under Barry Odom. There’s a largely new swath of assistant coaches. Seniors have graduated; players have transferred.

One name absent is Morgan Steward. Less than two years ago, Steward -- a running back out of Kansas City’s Staley High School -- looked poised for a breakthrough. During the previous spring season, he broke out with an 117-yard, three-touchdown day in the opening scrimmage. As Missouri looked to replace Henry Josey, Steward seemed a likely candidate to join Marcus Murphy and Russell Hansbrough in the backfield rotation.

The end of Steward's career began on August 8, 2014, when a non-contact injury to his hip was followed by 18 months of rehab. He came back, briefly, to start the 2015 season, but after three games, his season ended.

In late December, his career officially ended.

As Missouri prepares for its 2016 season, for a rebuilding year under Odom, Steward prepares, too. Except now, the 22-year old graduate student is waiting for a procedure -- radical in scope if not frequency -- that could help him live a normal, active life again.

Steward’s injury occurred early in preseason camp before the 2014 season. As he ran a route out of the backfield, a pass from quarterback Maty Mauk was slightly behind him.

“I dead planted, reached back with my right arm extended while my momentum was moving the other way,” Steward said. “I remember feeling and hearing a pop go down the line of my right hip.”

Steward believed he could “walk it off” but quickly realized it was something more serious. How serious, however, took time to determine. Over the next two weeks (by Steward’s estimate), he rested, trying to work his way back onto the field. About a week before Missouri’s season-opener against South Dakota State, Steward returned to practice.

“I was unsuccessful in that, and went right away to get an MRI on my hip,” Steward said. “That’s when it turned out there was much more damage done than just sprains.”

According to Steward, team doctor Pat Smith told him he suffered a hip subluxation. It occurs when the femur is partially dislocated from the hip socket. However, in that short time his hip was dislocated -- it popped out, then back in, on that play -- it chipped away a piece of bone and tore his labrum.

"Morgan was really doing well and had expected to come back that year," his father, Robert Steward said. "Surgery would be six months. He was going to be out six months. All he was thinking about was, 'Can I get back by this game? Can I get back by this game?'"

After the Stewards left that meeting, however, Smith called back to say there may another course of treatment. They used platelet-rich plasma injections to try to limit his time missed. Instead of six months, it would be four weeks.

Steward got back to working out and running, but he still didn't have his full range of motion. His father said there was a noticeable imbalance in his hips. After the medical staff reviewed his progress, they saw his bone and labrum had begun to heal, but there was debris in the joint. The cartilage began to wear away.

It required surgery.

Steward’s surgery occurred on Nov. 12, 2014, and was done by Dr. Asheesh Bedi in Ann Arbor, Mich. Bedi is the team doctor for the University of Michigan and the Detroit Lions. The surgery meant Steward would be shut down for the remainder of the season and he would also miss the ensuing spring practice. His rehab took a while to catch on, despite Steward’s efforts; however, by preseason camp in August 2015, Steward worked his way back onto the field.

“I had gotten pretty strong,” Steward said. “I had strengthened it, really worked hard to do the best that I could to get back to 100-percent. In the process, I could do a lot. I could run, I could hit, put my strength at a D-I playing level again. But the biggest thing that was inhibiting me wasn’t pain, even though pain was definitely a factor that I was having to deal with.

“The biggest factor was my flexibility. Some of the things I needed to do as far as flexing my hip and moving it in different ways, I wasn’t able to do, to fully open up my speed that I would use before, to fully be able to move into positions to work against the defense. That was the biggest inhibitor.”

Before the injury, Steward was the fastest running back on the team, reportedly running a 4.34-second 40-yard dash in early 2014.

“There honestly wasn’t a setback, but I realized there was a point, a hump I was trying to get over, and I hadn’t got over it yet,” Steward said.

Dealing with the injury and mired on the depth chart, Steward managed 10 carries for 18 yards over the first three games of the 2015 seasons. At the time, Steward, his family and Missouri’s staff made the decision to shut him down for the rest of the year, in order to obtain a medical redshirt following the season. By not playing past the first quarter of the regular season, Steward would have missed two years because of injury, allowing him to gain one year back, with a waiver approved by the NCAA.

In the end, however, that waiver never needed to be sent. After the regular season ended, Steward had imaging done on his hip, and sent to Dr. Pat Smith, Missouri’s team doctor, Dr. Bedi, along with doctors at Washington University in St. Louis and to doctors in New York.

The consensus? His hip worsened.

At 22-years old, Steward had "advanced arthritis," his father said.

"Even if they smoothed it out, it would start flaking again," Robert Steward said. "It was that type of scenario. Arthritis is just bone on bone, and he was very close to that."

On Dec. 22, Steward traveled to Michigan to meet with Bedi, who gave him the news in person. The cartilage around in his hip had degenerated quicker than expected.

“For my future and health, they didn’t think that football was the best option for me moving forward,” Steward said. “Basically, they strongly recommended for me to retire from football, to look out for my quality of life and move on after football, because there’s so much more after football that we all have.

“There’s a lot of dangers (if he tried to come back). Obviously, pain is one, getting worse. It could get so much worse that there wouldn’t be any other option but to get a total hip replacement.”

Outside of football, Steward still dealt with considerable pain. Some days were better than others, he said. But at the worse, Steward struggled to walk without a severe limp, and the pain radiated throughout his body. At that point, Steward had two options. The first involved using stem cells to help generate a replacement for the lost cartilage, similar to what Kobe Bryant has done -- but Steward said it wasn’t “viable” because there wasn’t much confidence in it succeeding.

“It was like a 50-50 chance that it would help,” Steward said. “But in my case, they said it was more like a band-aid, that would cover up the problem but would be back re-occurring.

“It wasn’t the best option, but it was the best option that we had.”

He says this because his second option was a total hip replacement.

“If that (stem-cell treatment) didn’t work, I’d have to have a hip replacement,” Steward said.

A total hip replacement is a major, intensive surgery. It’s seen as a last-ditch effort to end debilitating hip pain; the entire joint is removed and replaced with metal and plastic to make an artificial joint. For anyone, it’s a scary scenario; even more so for a 22-year old former Division-I athlete.

“You want to be able to have a quality of life like regular people,” Steward said. “That was the biggest struggle for me. There weren’t many options, except that God would intervene and give me complete healing.”

"To think your kid has to go through that at 22, it's ridiculous," Robert Steward said. "It's hard. It's hard."

Steward’s faith has always been important to him, and he’s never shied away from talking about it in any interview. He said, after he finishes his MBA at Missouri, he may try to get into mission work abroad. As he was settling in for the best of two bad options, Steward said a recent call from Pat Smith was a “miracle.”

In the call, Smith told Steward about an innovation on an old procedure, which the University of Missouri is at the forefront. It’s a biological joint replacement -- instead of metal and plastic, grafts from cadavers are used to re-grow cartilage and other tissues around the joint to promote healing. That process isn’t novel; it’s been around for over three decades. However, research done by Dr. James Cook and Dr. James Stannard has allowed Missouri to develop a better preservation method for the grafts, allowing them to replace larger areas of joints at a time -- even entire joints.

Before this advancement, Cook said the procedure was mostly contained to “filling potholes.” Now, however, they can “resurface entire gravel roads.”

“The preservation method, that’s totally unique to Mizzou,” Cook said. “In fact, it’s called the Missouri Osteochondral (Allograft) Preservation System. It’s a patented technology. That makes the grafts better and last longer. So that’s totally unique to use, and we kind of use that innovation to expand what we’re able to do.”

Their research has come to fruition, and last July, Missouri’s BioJoint Center officially began. Since then, Cook said they’ve done the procedure on “about 80 knees” and seven hips. The average age of the patient is 34 years old, which is important.

“Our hope for people like Morgan is to keep them really active, to have a normal joint for 15 to 20 years,” Cook said. “I mean, we warn them all that they will probably need metal and plastic replacements at some point, but you sure as heck don’t want to do that when you’re 24 or 34 or 44 or even 54, to be honest with you.

“The big thing is that total joint, metal and plastic, they really don’t work well in people under 60. They’re great in people over 60, especially lower-demand patients, but for young people, you’re going to have multiple revisions, each revision does worse than the other one. Really, the outcomes are pretty scary in young patients. This gives us a great option to get them through at a high-functioning level until they’re a good patient for joint replacement.”

Take Bo Jackson. His hip injury was also a subluxation, which resulted in a disease that cut the blood flow to his hip. He had total hip replacement surgery in 1991 after the injury, and has had numerous procedures on his hip since then.

Missouri’s BioJoint Center has performed surgeries on athletes before. Former Missouri diver Loren Figueroa had the surgery on her knee and returned to the pool. Cook said they’ve performed the surgery on a Missouri baseball player who is “doing well,” a former Missouri offensive lineman after his career, and a current professional athlete. However, those were all knee surgeries, and the scope of Steward’s injury is bigger than anything they’ve done.

“We did the procedure on a 24-year old’s hip -- not as extensive as Morgan’s -- but he went back to playing basketball recreationally,” Cook said.

Steward’s surgery will happen sometime soon, likely in the next few weeks. As with any surgery that utilizes organ donors, the timeline is up in the air. But the hope is that, a year from whenever the surgery will take place, Steward will be back to living a normal, pain-free life -- albeit without Division-I football.

“We have three goals with this surgery,” Cook said. “Number one, to address the pain, and number two, avoid metal and plastic because we know in a young patient, it’s not a good idea. Our other goal is to return them to -- not Division-I football with a hip like that -- but we certainly expect him to be able to run around, do flag football even, those types of things. Live a normal, normal-person’s life.”

“I’ve been looking for a miracle,” Steward said, “and this is the first thing that’s come to give me the option to become fully healthy again.”

Morgan Steward has already grieved.

After the doctors recommended that Steward retire from football on Dec. 22, only his immediate family knew. The officially announcement about the end of his career came on Feb. 5.

After a record-setting career at Staley High School, Steward’s Missouri career ended with 31 carries, 102 yards and one touchdown. But that’s just one aspect of his career. Steward graduated in December with a degree in organizational communications and a business minor. He’s currently getting his MBA at Missouri’s Trulaske College of Business. He’s done all that in 3 ½ years, while undergoing procedures, surgeries and rehabbing his hip.

The emotional wounds of coping with a life without football are still evident here or there. In a 35-minute phone interview, he breaks just once, needing a few moments to resume talking when discussing about that December day when his football career officially ended.

“Overall, I’ve been grounded in my faith, but I’ve had to wrestle with different things with God,” Steward said. “There’s been a lot of not understanding of what’s going on, and the biggest thing I’ve had to learn is to trust in God’s overall perspective, and how his perspective is so much bigger than mine."

"It took him a mourning period to come to terms with the fact that football is over," Robert Steward said. "That it's really over. He needed time to tell that story on his own time. He had to mourn and get through this on his own time."

His father has had a unique viewpoint during his son's college tenure. Not only was Morgan a football player, but Robert's brother, David Steward, was on the Board of Curators.

David Steward resigned on Feb. 1, 2016, for personal reasons.

"I've seen everything from Morgan's standpoint, from a curator's standpoint and from a parent's standpoint," Robert Steward said.

He's seen his son develop as a human being during the injury process, coming to terms with the fact that football was one part of his story, but not the entire book.

"These things have happened because Morgan is a kid that can handle it," his father said. "He's represented the University of Missouri at such a high level, it's crazy."

He's still representing the University of Missouri, just in a different way. He wants his story of a dream changed to be used by others, to let people know that life isn't determined by one singular attribute. Whether it's mission work, or getting into his family's business or starting his own company, Steward is already looking past the impending surgery into what lies ahead.

After he came to terms with the end of his football game, Steward talked to his dad.

"I'm ready to put the same energy into education as I put into football," he said. "Into understanding what I'm going to do next, and putting my energy into that.