Twenty years after ending the cross-Canada run at the Victoria beach that would bear his name, Steve Fonyo wasn’t sure he would do it again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If you think about all the ups and downs that I went through because of it…”
But then he backed away from that sentiment. Ask him that question on one of those days when he felt good about his high-profile adventure, he said, and you might get a different answer. His 14-month Journey for Lives, which ended at Mile Zero on May 29, 1985, raised close to $14 million to fight cancer. He got to travel the world. He met George Harrison, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Pope. He was named to the Order of Canada.
Other days, though, when his missteps hit the media, he wished the world had never heard of Steve Fonyo.
That conversation was in 2005, when I caught up with Fonyo by phone during a coffee break in Surrey, where he had been doing mechanical work on transport trucks. His home was in Burnaby: “Me and my two cats. It’s a pretty quiet life, which I like.”
That quiet wouldn’t last. Fonyo, who died Friday, was stripped of his Order of Canada in 2009 after a string of criminal convictions. In 2015, when a documentary about his troubled life was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, he told The Canadian Press that he was getting himself together after decades of drug abuse, crime and near homelessness.
That’s not how we first met him, of course. At first, Steve Fonyo was a made-for-TV movie. The Vernon boy, who had lost his leg to cancer at age 12, set out from St. John’s at 18. By the time he reached Victoria 425 days and 7,924 kilometres later, he was a full-on national celebrity.
HMCS Qu’appelle brought Fonyo to Ogden Point on May 28, 1985. A helicopter flew him to Swartz Bay, from where he walked to Beaver Lake. Thousands of onlookers lined the route, some staking out positions with lawnchairs long in advance.
Thousands more were on hand when Fonyo completed the last 12 kilometres of his journey the next day, a 30-metre red carpet and a pair of red-serge Mounties waiting for him at the beach at the foot of Paddon Avenue.
Flanked by his parents Steve, Sr., and Anna, he emptied a jar of Atlantic seawater he had filled at the beginning of his odyssey.
But then came the unhappy epilogue to the fairy tale. Fonyo was on a fundraising run across the United Kingdom when his mother called to say that his father, with whom he was “very close,” was sick. The elder Fonyo died in November 1986.
That’s when things started going south, in public. Drunk-driving busts were followed in the mid-’90s by a conditional sentence for charges that included bouncing cheques and assaulting his landlord.
Encounters with alcohol, drugs and the law were all well-documented. Fonyo did his growing up, and screwing up, in front of us all.
Imagine that. Fonyo is far from the only one to struggle with demons, but he had the added burden of doing so with a public jeering section along for the roller coaster ride, reminding him that he was a fallen hero.
It had to be harder still while continually being compared with the incomparable Terry Fox. It was an unfair, yet inevitable, yardstick against which no one could measure up, not with Fox’s faultless, unchanging legacy forever preserved in amber at age 22.
Unlike Fonyo Beach, the Terry Fox statue at Mile Zero, 300 metres away, is a magnet for tourists. Even before Fonyo began to show his cracks, some resented what they saw as his intrusion into Fox’s spotlight. He was in a no-win situation.
On that day in 2005, Fonyo had just visited Victoria for the first time since 1987. He said he had been happy to see that the marker commemorating his run still stood. He said he had heard the chatter of onlookers while he was being photographed at Fonyo Beach — “Is that him?” “Yeah, that’s him” – but he didn’t sound as though he missed that kind of increasingly infrequent recognition.
Fonyo would return to the beach to get married in 2010. The marriage wouldn’t last, though, which probably fits with the rest of a roller coaster narrative that often focussed on the dips.
Still, remember this: Many people are troubled, and all of us are flawed, but only Steve Fonyo raised $14 million running coast-to-coast on one leg, ending the journey by dipping his artificial limb in the water at Victoria on May 29, 1985.
“I remember it clear as day,” he said in 2005. “It’s a memory that will be with me for the rest of my life.”
