CDRL premiership winner and Ivanhoe great remembered

A Cairns District Rugby League premiership winner is being remembered as a “gentleman” on the footy field and in life.

A Cairns District Rugby League premiership winner is being remembered as a “gentleman” on the footy field and in life.

Ivanhoe Knights junior and a member of the club’s storied A-grade sides that claimed back-to-back premierships in 1990 and 1991, Stephen ‘Howie’ Howlett, unexpectedly passed away while out on a run on Sunday, September 5.

Ivanhoe club president and former teammate Noel Slade said the club was shocked by the loss of Howlett, who he described as a “a true blue kind of guy”.

“He’d do anything for you, you only had to ask,” he said.

Ivanhoe Knights’ 1990 and 1991 premiership-winning player Stephen Howlett passed away on September 5, 2021.

“He was a good, hard-running backrower and was probably never in trouble with the judiciary, he was just one of those real gentleman of the game and in life.

“He’s one of our favourite sons at the club.”

Slade also paid tribute to Howlett for the role he played as a mentor for juniors coming through, including himself.

“As a young fella coming into grade, he was one of those players that took the young guys, like myself at the time, under his wing and guided them along, not just on the footy field but as a young fella going out on the town, he was one that would keep you check,” he said.

“There were a couple of times when I was a young guy coming into grade and we’d go away with the rep teams, I’d be in the under-18s or whatever and you’d head out and he’d just grab you aside and say ‘if you muck around, you’re going home’, and you’d listen to him as a young fella coming through.”

Howlett was among the first crop of juniors to come through the grades at the Smithfield-based club, alongside fellow Knights greats such as Andy Henley, Matt Hensler and John Skardon.

A celebration of Stephen’s life will be held at Ivanhoes Rugby League Club, 50 Leisure Park Road, Smithfield, Cairns on Friday, September 24, commencing at 1pm.

“They’re expecting over 300 people, so that’s an indication of the type of bloke he is,” Slade said.

“You'll probably find there’ll be blokes turning up from opposition clubs that he played against over the years.

“You’d be hard pressed to find someone that would have said a bad word about him, that’s for sure, and I doubt very much whether he was disliked at all by any opposition player, that’s just the type of bloke he was.”

Sharon Howlett to honour late husband in Cairns Marathon 10km

Mareeba resident Sharon Howlett will lace up her sneakers to honour the memory of her late husband Stephen in this Sunday’s Cairns Marathon 10km run.

The couple had planned to do the 10km run together, joining a 12-week training program specifically designed for the event with Getfit Results Training, before Stephen tragically passed away on Sunday, September 5.

It would have been easy for Sharon to stop training then and there, with the running an obvious reminder of what she has lost.

But to turn her back on the 10km challenge would betray one of her and Stephen’s mantras.

(L-R) Jordon Grogan-Howlett, Stephen Howlett, Sharon Howlett, Casey Grogan-Howlett. Picture: Facebook

“It’s either go hard or go home when you do anything, there’s no excuses,” she said.

“For me, the reason why I want to do it is because he’d want me to keep doing it.

“We started this together and I know he’d be saying ‘come on babe, no excuses, it’s for your fitness, and it will help you get through this’.

“And it has been helping me. I can sleep better at night because I’m tired from training – what else are you going to do, sit around and cry – it just helps.

“Training has always been our medicine and whenever we start to stray away from it, that’s when we start to get crook and run down.”

Sharon will carry Stephen’s race number with her during Sunday’s race.

Stephen and Sharon Howlett. Picture: Facebook

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to wear it or if that will confuse the officials, but it would be nice to display his number instead of just having it in my pocket,” she said.

“I’ll ask my coach what they’ll let me do but either way, at least he gets to still finish it with me.

“He’s still with me on my training sessions. When I go for a run, I can feel him there – ahead of me because that’s where he always was, I could never keep up with him.”

Sharon said while her husband passed away unexpectedly, he was doing what he loved.

“He was out doing his 10km,” she said.

“The last thing he said to me was ‘babe, I’m going to go do 22 laps of our little running area’, which equates to 10km.

“He got about seven and a bit kilometres into it and then it happened, it was pretty sudden.”

While the exact cause of death was unknown at the time, Sharon said it had since been attributed to an undiagnosed heart condition.

“We never knew, there was no indication,” she said.

“We’re both keen on our training, fitness, health and nutrition, and he’s the one that’s always at people – if anyone’s got an issue or any sort of an ailment, he goes ‘I was listening to a podcast the other day about that very thing, I’ll send you an article about it’.

“It could have been hereditary because his dad had a heart attack at 52, but he had a triple bypass. My darling wasn’t so fortunate.”

She said the family was “blindsided” by their loss.

“No one expected this – him of all people,” she said.

“He was fit and healthy, it was just that sleeping, dormant issue that we didn’t know was going on and was hidden to us all.

“I’ll make sure our two sons and anybody else who could be in that risk factor to go and get checked, because he’d be at everybody – ‘go and get yourself sorted’.”

Stephen was well known in the Far North rugby league community, as a member of the Ivanhoe Knights’ A-grade premiership-winning teams of the 1990s.

He later became a police officer on the Atherton Tablelands, before working as a mobile plant operator at the mines.

A celebration of Stephen’s life will be held at Ivanhoes Rugby League Club, 50 Leisure Park Road, Smithfield, Cairns on Friday September 24, commencing at 1pm.

“It’s been wonderful the pouring out of everybody’s tributes and just the respect shown from so many people from so many different facets of his life,” Sharon said.

“You’re going to be sad and all that but he used to say to me when we would go to funerals, ‘babe, you got to think about how the person lived and the relationship you had with them and honour that, you were blessed to have them in your life’.

“So I’m just trying to focus on that.”

Originally published as CDRL premiership winner and Ivanhoe great remembered