The code. The code. The code. That’s all that mattered in those days. Maybe it’s all that matters still. Hockey has always been a referendum on intrepidness. Who’s a tough guy? Who is not?

Former NHL referee Paul Stewart can still hear the words thundering down from a boss when back trouble forced him to lug his gear through airports and train stations in a rolling travel bag rather than one thrown over his shoulder.

“You look like a fag.”

This wasn’t that long ago. Stewart only retired in 2003, and the rolling bag came a few years before that – maybe a little before he found he had stage three colon cancer in the middle of a 1,000-game NHL officiating career. Always the code. Always be tough. The word he despised was “pussy”. It was tossed around rinks like a mark of shame. Use a rolling bag? You’re a pussy. Wear a helmet? What a pussy. Dare to say your head doesn’t feel right after it cracked against the ice? Don’t be a pussy.

So Stewart said nothing about the ringing in his skull on those nights after especially hard hits. To admit the confusion, the nausea, the gaps in recollection would be labeled a pussy, and there was no room for pussies in professional hockey. It’s only now, more than a decade after his last game, with nothing to lose, no reputation to risk that Stewart finally tells the truth. All those concussions the football players get that are also the domain of the hockey enforcers? Well, referees get those too. It’s just something nobody talks about.

“With hockey officials, it’s such a closed group,” he told the Guardian from his home outside Boston.

Before he was an official, Stewart was a player – a tough guy. He played defense and embraced the role of policing the code, correcting all slights or misdeeds against teammates. He brawled his way through all levels of hockey’s minor leagues in the 1970s and 1980s, eventually punching his way into the WHA and NHL. He never wore a helmet as a player and didn’t dare use one when he became an NHL official in 1986, even though the number of concussions he had endured in hockey by then was over 20.

Stewart’s father had been a hockey official too, once given last rites after hitting his head while refereeing a game at Boston College, only to recover and go back to work a month later. When Stewart asked him, in his early days of officiating in the NHL, if he should wear a helmet, his father told him his bosses would run him out of the league. Stewart knew he was right. In those days only the famed referee Andy Van Hellemond wore a helmet, and that was because Van Hellemond was so respected no one dared to challenge him.

Eventually Stewart did wear a helmet, and that probably helped, but by then his head had been thumped around arenas in dozens of cities. He estimates he had five concussions as an official to go with about 21 as a player, and he wonders now, at age 61, what damage he has done to himself. He has headaches and he forgets things. He had a brain tumor a few years ago and the neurologists told him they have no idea if there is a correlation. He says he has promised his brain to Boston University’s Center Traumatic Encephalopathy to help doctors there study the effects of CTE.

“I’ve got things going on,” he says.

Slowly, sport is coming to understand the danger ticking inside athletes’ heads. A Will Smith movie about the forensic pathologist who first exposed the link between CTE and head trauma in football will open on Christmas Day and a new conversation about sports concussions will start again. And yet until Stewart wrote last week about his experiences in a blogpost for Hockeybuzz.com, the idea that hockey officials had their own concussion problems was largely unknown.

Stewart says he knows a few other former referees dealing with the effects of concussions. But even now, years after retiring, the subject is taboo. The code is alive. No one talks about their pain. After surviving cancer and being rolled into countless MRI tubes, Stewart figures he’s proven his ruggedness, the words of a crusty ex-boss with a jagged nose don’t matter any more. They can call him whatever they want.

Don’t think he was tough enough? How about the night he was officiating in New Jersey and Claude Lemieux banged into him, sending him reeling into the boards? His head cracked against the glass. He called the rest of the game in a fog, went to bed in his hotel room and woke the next day “feeling as if I was on Mars,” with no recollection of what happened after the hit.

Then there was the time Stewart got between two players who were fighting, only to have a third jump in and deliver a punch that missed the intended target, landing on Stewart’s skull, knocking him out cold.

Or how about the game in Long Island, when he and a linesman collided full-speed, knocking his head to the ice?

“There are certainly ramifications,” he says. “My wife thinks there are definitely mood swings. I still have long-term memory but my short-term memory is not so hot. But I fight every day to stay on my feet and keep going.”

As he talks, Stewart is quick to say he doesn’t want anyone “thinking that I’m rusting away.” He is the director of officiating for the East Coast Athletic Conference, arranging officials for college hockey games all over the north-east. He runs an officiating camp. He loves the game. He has always appreciated NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and deputy commissioner Bill Daly. He is not complaining. He wants people to understand what he and his colleagues went through.

“I don’t think we ever talked about (concussions), we feared for our jobs,” he says.

Fear and intimidation seem such strange notions now. The bravado of a recent past rings hollow in a sports world that is coming to grips with generations of stupidity. Today, all hockey players and officials wear helmets. Referees carry their gear in rolling bags, and homophobic slurs don’t tumble down the organizational flow chart because they do. The world has changed. A head banged on the ice doesn’t have to be ignored.

The code? How about the idiocy of silence?