“I can save you the hassle of talking to my coaches,” he said. “The game films are in the backseat of my car.”
No promises were made, but Angelo took the metal canisters and drove back to Syracuse. A few days later, Gordy received a call asking him to visit the campus, where he would interview with Frank Maloney, the head coach.
“I had just taken a cross-country trip, but that was riding a bus,” Gordy said. “I had never driven outside of Buffalo before. I got in my car and drove to Syracuse. I was a little lighter that spring because of baseball, so the whole time before I got to campus I was eating canisters of mashed potatoes, trying to add weight. Someone had told me that instant potatoes would add five or ten pounds to you if you ate enough.”
He tipped the scale at 230, considered a decent size for a defensive tackle at the time. Gordy spoke with the young head coach for longer than expected and was finally offered the program’s final scholarship.
“I’ve always thought about how many things had to line up for my life to go in that direction,” Gordy reflected. “I was recruited by accident because of Dennis Hartman. Jerry Angelo was coming through the area and just decided to stop and see one of his prospects. It was a freak thing that I happened to be in the right place at the right time. What if Angelo had just driven home instead of stopping at our game? What would have happened if I had gone to California?”
The college newspaper, the Daily Orange, later ran an article about Gordy under the headline “The Man Who Was Recruited with a Baseball Bat.”
“My freshman year at Syracuse was great,” Gordy said. “I played as a defensive tackle and as an extra lineman in short-yardage situations.”
Although he did see significant playing time, Gordy was a relative unknown when he stepped onto campus. He was not a household name, nor a highly recruited prospect. Because he had signed with the program late, newspapers in Buffalo were not aware of the fact that he landed at a major football program. Gordy didn’t care. His $6,500 scholarship covered everything from room and board to books and tuition. Football had opened doors.
On his first play as a college athlete, Gordy lined up against the Penn State offense. Matt Suhey, who later starred with the Chicago Bears, tried to squirt through the line. Gordy stuffed him. Filled to capacity, Archbold Stadium erupted in cheers. The loudspeaker boomed, “Tackle on Suhey made by Gronkowski.” Gordy stood with his chest puffed out.
“It was a fantastic moment,” he recalled. “That was when I realized how cool it was to have made it.”
The next play was a repeat of the first. Again, Gordy jammed the ball carrier at the line of scrimmage. Plans for the Marines and Long Beach State were now a distant memory. “This is almost too easy,” he thought.
In a short time, however, his health became an issue. He aggravated an old knee injury. For a while, he played through the pain, but calcium deposits kept growing larger until it was too difficult to run. Unable to compete in spring practices, Gordy sat out his sophomore year. Determination won him a roster spot again his junior year, but he soon contracted mono and lost thirty pounds. Much of that season was washed out as well.
Finally healthy by his senior year, Gordy switched to offensive line. Before the knee trouble flared, his forty-yard-dash times had hovered around 4.9 seconds. Afterward, he had slowed to 5.1, so coaches thought he would perform better on the other side of the ball, where blocking was more important than raw speed. The new position suited him, and Gordy had a successful year.
Because he had not played as a sophomore, Gordy was eligible for another season, and he was excited to finish his collegiate career on a high note. But a number of events conspired to make his fifth year a challenge.
“When I was getting ready for my redshirt year, I was in the weight room benching 405,” Gordy said. “On my third rep I pulled my pec right off the shoulder. The team didn’t even list me on the depth chart after that because they thought I was done. But I worked my butt off and got back.”
Despite hours of rehab, he was now off the radar of Dick MacPherson, Syracuse’s new coach, because MacPherson had not seen Gordy participate at spring workouts. Although he stood on the sidelines for his first game back, Gordy was added to special teams after that. Shortly, he was playing guard in a rotation. But the offensive-line position came with a unique role: MacPherson used guards to relay plays from the sidelines to the quarterback in the huddle.
When the season ended, Gordy was proud of his accomplishments over five years. But he wondered what his football career might have been had he remained healthy. Looking back three decades later, he is at peace with the twists of fate.
“It all worked out,” Gordy recalled.
In 1982, with a college degree in hand, he wondered about the future. Was professional football an option? The NFL seemed a distant dream, but this was a young man who had scrapped and fought for everything. He recalled when his high school coach had written him off, how he bussed across the country hustling for a scholarship, then ended up playing for a college powerhouse. “Let’s give it one more try,” he thought.
Several upstart businessmen had begun the USFL in an attempt to rival the NFL. Promises were made to up-and-coming athletes, and several high-profile players were lured away from the NFL by big contracts.
“In their first year, I had a tryout with the New Jersey Generals,” Gordy said. Former Cleveland Browns star Brian Sipe, leader of the “Cardiac Kids,” was the team’s quarterback. “I traveled down to New Jersey a couple times. The training lasted a few months, but once camp started, I was released. I never stepped on the field for a game.”
Back in Buffalo, for a short time Gordy worked as a repo man, repossessing appliances for a rental company. Still fit from football, his weight hovering between 270 and 280 pounds, he was intimidating in the role, taking back washing machines and refrigerators from customers who could not pay. But the job was a stopgap until something better came along.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the Canadian Football League offered Gordy $18,000 to play there. He turned down the offer. In addition to low pay, an unfavorable exchange rate made playing in the CFL a financial disaster. With reluctance, Gordy realized his football career was over.
“I was banged up at the time,” he said. “I had already endured three surgeries, and I wasn’t even twenty-five. I had trouble with my shoulder, my knee, and my ankle. Football takes a toll on your body. Years later, I always told my kids, ‘If you can get through college healthy, you’ll have a great shot at the pros.’ But it’s difficult to stay healthy.”
Western New York’s economy was bleak in the early 1980s. Steel plants closed and the nation was locked in a deep recession. A connection through Syracuse University helped Gordy land a job with Pennzoil in Connecticut. After a year away from Buffalo, his young wife, Diane, felt homesick, so the couple returned to Western New York, where Gordy hoped to put his business training to use. He landed at Superior, an oil company in North Tonawanda, becoming vice president of sales. It was that job that provided a springboard into owning his own company.
“I love to work out,” Gordy said. “As part of my job at Superior, I went to a hotel in Buffalo for a conference and saw a machine in the weight room that was an impressive piece of equipment. It was solid and well built, not rickety. I used it and it was great.”
Exercise equipment is sometimes constructed cheaply to keep the price down. But for a big man like Gordy, quality is a requirement or the machine will have a short life.
Gordy remembered the brand name, Paramount, and visited a fitness-equipment sales outlet in North Buffalo. In the mid-1980s, this was the only store of its kind in the area.
“The guy I talked to smelled like a pack of cigarettes,” Gordy said with a scowl. “I mentioned Paramount but he didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Undaunted, he tracked down the company and phoned Paramount himself, hoping to make a purchase. But Paramount did not deal directly with customers. It only sold th
rough distributors. There were two in the Northeast: one in Pittsburgh and the other in Asbury Park, New Jersey. During a visit to Syracuse, Gordy decided to extend his trip into Asbury Park.
“I went to a store called Fitness Lifestyles and got talking with the owner, Leo Clark,” he said. Clark instantly bonded with Gordy, and more than twenty years later, they remain close friends. “His business was a high-end store with good-quality equipment for people who really care about fitness. The equipment could hold a big guy like me. That crap that gets sold in department stores isn’t reliable. You step on one of their treadmills and before you know it, it’s broken.”
The conversation triggered Gordy’s business instincts. Could a store like Fitness Lifestyles work in Buffalo?
“My brother and I traveled to Pittsburgh to watch Syracuse play a game against Pitt, and we visited a specialty fitness store down there,” Gordy said. “I came away even more impressed. That’s when Glenn decided he wanted to join in my venture.”
Glenn admitted that the idea to develop a fitness store in Western New York was Gordy’s vision. But this was not the brothers’ first foray into starting a business.
“We fooled around with a couple ideas,” Glenn said. “We looked into vending machines, but concluded there wasn’t a steady market for that. We realized that the guy on Hertel Avenue was the only one in the area selling weights, and it was the north side of Buffalo. There was an entire market outside of the city. I had a little more free time in my job, so I was able to do things to get our store up and running.”
In the fall of 1990, Gordy and Glenn christened their new business G&G Fitness. They rented a building on Transit Road in the town of Amherst. Both kept their day jobs: Gordy at Superior; Glenn at a company that manufactures products for heavy vehicles. More than twenty years later, Glenn remains a district sales manager there.
The early days were exciting but scary. Neither brother knew how long their fledgling operation would last.
“Between us, we pooled all our money, which was around fifty thousand dollars,” Gordy said. “That didn’t buy much. We had three treadmills, two other machines, and lots of free weights, because they were a big thing back then. Our showroom didn’t look anything like it does now. With so little equipment, our floor was pretty empty, so we spaced a bunch of trees and potted plants all around to fill it up. Any leftover money was spent on advertising.”
On opening weekend in November, Gordy dressed in a rented Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles costume and rode a stationary bicycle in the store’s parking lot, hoping to attract passersby. Getting people to visit their showroom wasn’t a problem. The place was mobbed. But by Sunday’s end, despite an impressive amount of foot traffic, few sales had been made.
“Glenn and I got together Sunday night and realized we had just made the worst mistake in our lives,” Gordy said. “We had even hired a manager, and now we wondered how we were going to pay him. That night, we tried to figure out ways we could get out of this business. I hardly slept.”
Back at Superior on Monday, with a sense of foreboding Gordy waited until lunchtime to phone the store and check in. The manager was distracted, asking if he could call back. Things were busy, he explained. Gordy hung up and scratched his head.
When they finally connected a few hours later, Gordy learned that G&G Fitness had been bustling most of the day. Apparently, the myriad visitors from Saturday had returned to purchase weights after reconsidering over the weekend.
“We’re over ten thousand dollars in sales so far today,” the manager told Gordy.
Despite the brief windfall, there were long stretches of nail biting. Could a fitness supply store survive? Glenn recalls one sale in particular that came at an opportune time.
“When we opened in November, we didn’t sell much of anything,” he noted. “Maybe we sold a couple thousand dollars between then and Christmas. We didn’t have money to pay our bills. The son of a prominent restaurant owner came in on Christmas Eve looking to buy a treadmill for his wife. He wanted a good one, not some piece of junk, and he was willing to spend money. He liked one that cost five thousand, and he paid cash on the spot. That saved the business for a while. We were off and running.”
Despite the difficult days, Gordy began with a strong belief in G&G Fitness. That belief is still present, more than two decades later. He knows the business contributes something positive to his customers.
“I worked out all my life, and it’s a passion of mine,” he said. “When you sell oil, as I did at Superior, it’s a commodity product. You’re not helping people. When someone comes into my store and buys a two-thousand-dollar treadmill, I know for a fact that they’re going to use it. People don’t spend that kind of money and let it go to waste. So I just helped make that person’s life better, because when you work out, you feel so much better about yourself. It’s a great feeling. I’ve had people who are out of shape come back later and say they’ve lost significant pounds. There are so many success stories. To know that I helped make that person’s life better and they’re leading a more healthy lifestyle is an incredibly rewarding feeling.”
But in the early 1990s, with each brother holding a different day job, the double duty began to take its toll.
“For a year, I was working sixty or seventy hours a week at Superior, then I’d come to G&G and work some more,” Gordy said. “It was getting harder and harder to maintain that pace.”
The tipping point came one night when Gordy nearly split his brother’s head open because of a simple mistake.
“We were working long hours,” Glenn said. “It was around one in the morning when Gordy and I were putting a machine together. We were twisting screws into this multipurpose set. I was assembling a seat, and he was attaching an overhead bar that weighed twenty or thirty pounds. He dropped it and I was right beneath him. It conked me pretty good.”
Glenn believes that the corduroy baseball cap he was wearing at the time offered his scalp a tiny bit of protection. The bar glanced off the cap and clattered to the floor. Gordy cursed and checked on his brother.
“Let me see if you need stitches,” he said.
Glenn waved him off. “I don’t need any damn stitches,” he spat angrily. “But I’m exhausted. I’m going home.” He hopped in his car and drove away, wiping off the blood that trickled down his forehead.
“That’s when I knew this wasn’t working,” Gordy said. “At the time, I had three little kids at home. I couldn’t do this anymore. I made Glenn an offer. If he gave me a certain amount of money, he could have the business.”
“I don’t want the business,” Glenn replied.
Both men thought about putting G&G Fitness up for sale and considered ways to break their building lease. After several days of deliberation, Gordy decided to flip the scenario.
“Someone needed to get serious with this,” he said. “The business wasn’t going anywhere, because we kept half-assing it. This time I offered Glenn the same amount of money I had proposed giving him. When he accepted, I took over.”
Gordy explained the situation to his boss at Superior. He wanted to step back from the oil business but would stay long enough to help train his replacement. Although his hours were cut back, Gordy stayed with Superior for another six years.
Over time, G&G Fitness has shown the results of hard work. By the end of 2011, the company had fifteen stores spread among three states, with prominent locations in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. It had commercial accounts with fire companies and schools, from high school to college. It has also designed workout areas for professional teams in every major sport. The Sabres, Bills, and Bisons are Buffalo customers. Other examples are a soccer team in Rochester and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“To his credit, Gordy always had a more grandiose plan than I did,” Glenn said. “My idea was one store in Williamsville and maybe a second one if we had enough success. Maybe something in Rochester, or if we pushed it, Syracuse. I always thought
it would be limited to the two of us and a store manager, but he took it further. The whole thing was Gordy’s idea, and he ran with it. I’m really proud of my little brother’s vision.”
The shirtless Gronkowski boys ham it up for the camera, circa 1996.
May 2012: Rob, Chris, and Dan pose for a Muscle and Fitness photo shoot in the family’s Amherst, New York, basement.
3
The Evolution of Training
“My goal in life was to get [my boys] to college and get that paid for . . . Anything after that was a bonus.”
—GORDY GRONKOWSKI
THE SPORTING WORLD IS a different place now than it was in the early 1980s when Gordy played college football. When he was released from the New Jersey Generals, he tipped the scales at between 270 and 280 pounds.
“I was considered huge back then,” Gordy said. “In 1982, there were two three-hundred-pound guys playing in the NFL. Contrast that with today. I went through stats for 2010, and there were a hundred and eighty-six guys over three hundred pounds and two who weighed more than four hundred. At this rate of change, what will things be like in another thirty years?”
During Gordy’s playing days, defensive ends routinely weighed 235, and a big nose tackle was 240. Carrying forty pounds more than most of the men he lined up against, Gordy seemed like a monster on the offensive line.
Many factors contributed to players getting bigger and stronger as time passed, according to Gordy.
“Nautilus equipment came into play in the early eighties,” he said. “And there were steroids. People got real big real fast. The people around me who used steroids all ended up playing at the next level.”
Sports fitness has come a long way in a few decades. When Gordy first began playing football at Syracuse University in 1977, the weight room contained two bench presses and little else.
Growing Up Gronk: A Familys Story of Raising Champions Page 3