Remembering 'The Baron'
In paying tribute to legendary sports journalist George Gross this week, friends and colleagues remembered a man who demanded excellence from his reporters, who maintained an unrivalled black book of sports contacts, and who, most of all and without exception, took pride in his appearance.
"We called him the Baron because he was always impeccably dressed - he looked straight out of GQ, making the rest of us look like slobs," laughed longtime friend and fellow Toronto Sun founding editor and columnist, Peter Worthington, who started working alongside Gross in 1959 at the Toronto Telegram.
"He had a way of walking slowly through the newsroom, like he was greeting the serfs and recognizing the adulation of the crowd. He'd hold court for a little while, then go off into his office and have a snooze - it was a pretty good life."
Gross died of a heart attack last Friday in his Etobicoke home. He was 85.
Born in Bratislava, Slovakia in January 1923, Gross was an avid sportsman who excelled in basketball, tennis and soccer, to name a few.
"If it hadn't been for Hitler and the Second World War, he might have even been on the Czech Olympic basketball team," Dave Fuller, the Sun's sports editor, told The Guardian this week.
Legend has it that at age 27 Gross escaped from his home to Austria by rowing (or swimming - the story varies depending on who you ask) across the Danube River. He moved to Canada in 1950 with a limited knowledge of English and just $4.50 in his pocket. He worked for a short time on a farm for $30 a month, then put his love of sport to use as a freelance journalist at the Telegram and on radio stations CKFH and CFRB.
After covering the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, Gross was offered a full-time job with the Telegram in January 1959. He stayed with the paper until its demise in 1971, when he became sports editor of the Toronto Sun.
Fuller, who Gross hired in 1977, remembered the Baron as a great, yet demanding, boss.
"He was one of those guys that when he walked into a room, you knew he was there. He was really friendly, with a hard edge," he said.
"George had no trouble being boss," Worthington added. "He could be fairly demanding, and wasn't always easy to work for, but he made a lot of young reporters better for that."
Touted as an invaluable resource at the Sun for his near encyclopedic knowledge of and relationships with all the key players in the sporting world, Gross' infamous 'little black book' of contacts included everyone from Anna Kournikova and the entire roster of the 1967 Maple Leafs team, from Mats Sundin to the head of the International Olympic Committee, Fuller said.
"If there was someone in sports you needed to get in touch with, all you had to do was go to George - and they all called him back, too," he said.
Gross also put his contacts to good use here in Etobicoke, said Jim Sturino, chairman of the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame. As an inductee (2002), acting governor, vice-chair of both the Selection and Dinner committees and a founding father of the Hall in 1993, Gross worked tirelessly to make each and every year's event one to remember.
"George was always, always there for the Hall in so many ways," Sturino said. "If we needed someone for the head table, he would call Red Kelly, and last year he brought Michael Burgess to sing the National Anthem - he could just pick up the phone and they were there for our organization."
"His passing was a real shock to all of us here at the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame," added Louise Poulos, executive director. "He came to our last meeting in the middle of March and was working up until the end - showing right up at 7:30 a.m., dressed impeccably and ready to co-chair our annual dinner again this year."
Throughout a career spanning nearly 50 years, Gross won the 1974 National Newspaper Award, as well as his newspaper chain's Dunlop Award and authored three books: Toronto Olympiad For The Handicapped (1976), Donald Jackson, King of Blades (1977) and Hockey Night in Canada (1982-83). He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1985 and is the only Canadian journalist who received the Olympic Order (1994).
Despite his achievements, Gross was reluctant to retire and continued contributing to the Sun as a columnist up until the day before he died, Fuller said.
"George was in the office last Thursday," he said, noting that Gross' last column, a piece on veteran figure skater Kurt Browning, ran in that day's paper. "The surprising thing about George was that his writing only got better as he got older, and recently we upped his column to three times a week."
"They couldn't get rid of him," Worthington laughed. "There was a time when the Sun wanted to get rid of all us old guys, but they did a survey of readers and everyone loved him."
"But his most outstanding quality was his loyalty to his friends - it superceded his obligation as a journalist, even," he added. "George would always opt to protect a friend over getting a dirty story, and that speaks volumes about the person he was. It was a form of integrity."
Visitation for George Gross will be held at Turner and Porter Yorke Chapel, 2357 Bloor St. W., on Wednesday from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. His funeral service will be held at Humber Valley United Church, 76 Anglesey Blvd. on Thursday at 1 p.m.
