SAD NEWS: Newcastle Star Player Has Just Been Cornfirmed…..

Sorry to share the extremely sad news, but Ron, a Hull resident and Newcastle United fan, passed away.

A Newcastle United supporter submitted his first-ever contribution to The Mag back on Tuesday, February 21.

Though he was genuinely very much “Ron from Newcastle Upon Tyne” who had eventually relocated in Hull, he became known to Mag readers as “Ron from Hull.”

Not many pieces have affected me as much as this one has throughout The Mag’s thirty-five years of publication.

It was headed “I am in the last year of my life and this is the final chance for me to see us win something domestic,” in case you haven’t read it before or can’t exactly remember what it was about (I have copied that article below).

Days before Newcastle United’s League Cup final at Wembley, Ron wrote an article in which he shared his hopes and ambitions that his team could win this time around. The incredibly depressing irony of his piece is that Ron realized he wouldn’t likely be alive in a year because of some extremely serious health problems.

The response to that pre-cup final piece from readers was amazing. Ron was really astonished by the response, but I wasn’t.

Some people just have a natural ability to articulate themselves, but I believe what truly set Ron’s piece apart was the fact that he was writing about something that was obviously very important to him, something so serious and personal, and he was not at all seeking sympathy or pity for himself.

Ron and I began exchanging emails back and forth, during which we exchanged many personal anecdotes and stories. Ron even hinted that under different circumstances, we might have remained close friends. Even if the circumstances meant that our time together was limited and we never had the opportunity to meet in person, I would like to think that we still did.

Ron was blown away by the response to his first article in The Mag, but after I said that other Newcastle supporters would love to see him write more, he wrote a post-League Cup final piece and seven more articles in which he shared details of both NUFC and non-Newcastle United related tales while sharing stories and anecdotes from a very interesting life well lived.

The final of those nine stories appeared on The Mag on March 20, 2023, as of when I checked.