from Stu Cown of the Montreal Gazette,

If there is a nicer gentleman in the world of sports than Jacques Demers I have yet to meet him.

In fact, it would be hard to find a nicer man anywhere. So it was fantastic to see Demers’s smiling face again Wednesday night as he was inducted into the Quebec Sports Hall of Fame. It was also difficult to see him in a wheelchair and unable to speak, paralyzed on his right side. But it could have been much worse after the last Canadiens coach to win a Stanley Cup suffered a stroke in April.

Demers, 72, loved to golf as a member of the Whitlock club in Hudson and has always loved to talk, as anyone who knows him will tell you. He can no longer do those two things, but his wife Debbie says he does have some feeling in his right leg and doctors think he will eventually be able to walk with a cane. He’s also working on his speech.

But as anyone who has a family member who has suffered a stroke knows, the future is always uncertain.

“It’s a slow, long process and time will tell,” Debbie said over the phone from their West Island home Thursday morning.

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