Ed Gruver, author of 12 sports books, honors late brother through his work

Ed Gruver’s dream came from his dad, his drive from his late brother.

His direction? That was provided by a complete stranger.

Nearly a half-century after the fact, the guy’s name has been lost to memory. Gruver, the former Lebanon Daily News sportswriter and the author of 12 sports books, recalls only that the gentleman in question barged into his life in much the same way he stormed into a classroom at York College all those years ago.

The man was an adjunct English professor, though Gruver and his fellow freshmen might not have guessed that, given his dishevelment (which tracks, seeing as he moonlighted as a sportswriter at the York Dispatch).

“He looked,” Gruver said, “like he rolled out of the hamper or something.”

Gruver was in the classroom only because it was a required course. His major was criminal justice, with the goal of becoming a police officer like his father John had been for over 30 years back in Kearny, New Jersey. That’s where the family had lived before moving to Millersville when Ed was 15.

His career path was forever changed when the rumpled stranger asked his students to complete a writing assignment, and upon its completion called Gruver up to his desk.

“I thought, ‘Oh man, I really messed this one up,’” he said.

But the professor asked him his major, then wondered if he had ever considered journalism. Gruver said he had not, but the man urged him to stop by the office of the student newspaper and pick up an assignment or two.

Which Gruver did. By his sophomore year he had switched his major to communications/journalism, and after beginning his newspaper career at the Evening Phoenix in Phoenixville, he landed at the Lebanon Daily News in 1984. He remained there until 1998, then spent 19 years at the Intelligencer Journal in Lancaster. More recently he has held positions outside sports; at present he is a government/business reporter at the Central Penn Business Journal.

He also turns 66 in January, and jokes that if he had become a cop he would now be retired and living off his pension.

“How did things go so wrong?” he said with a chuckle as he sat recently in a restaurant near his Manheim Township home.

In the interests of full disclosure, Ed is a friend and former colleague; we overlapped at the Lancaster paper. But his work stands on its own merits, particularly that which he has done in the publishing realm. He has written books about football and boxing, two of his greatest passions, as well as golf, baseball and hockey. His works include biographies of the legendary Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax and the almost-as-legendary Packers linebacker Ray Nitschke, examinations of events like the Jets-Colts Super Bowl in January 1969, the Athletics-Reds World Series in 1972 and the game between the Flyers and the Soviet national team in 1976.

His most recent book, a 2024 release about golfer Ben Hogan’s 1953 “Triple Slam,” is titled “The Wee Ice Mon Cometh.” That concluded a stretch in which Gruver produced four books in as many years.

He said he’s now taking a break, but that is a relative term. He still contributes to other books – he’s done that upwards of 30 times over the course of his career – and has additional projects in mind.

“I love writing,” he said. “I’ve always loved it, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I can.”

The impetus behind his first book, about the old American Football League, was a chance meeting with Weeb Ewbank, the former Jets coach and the architect of the aforementioned Super Bowl III upset of the Colts, at an Eagles practice in 1990. Ewbank was there to watch his former assistant, Buddy Ryan, put the Birds through their paces, while Gruver was on a Daily News assignment. He sidled up to Ewbank as he stood along a sideline and began discussing the AFL, and that conversation, in combination with other interviews, enabled him to write that book.

It was released in 1997, as was another he authored, “The Ice Bowl,” about the Green Bay Packers’ defeat of the Dallas Cowboys in frigid conditions in the 1967 NFL championship game. (And while most of the AFL book was finished when he undertook the one about the Ice Bowl, it is no mean feat to come out with two works the same year.)

The Ice Bowl book holds a special place in Gruver’s heart, since it connects him with one of his earliest sporting memories. Also his brother Mike.

Mike was the second oldest of four children born to John and his wife Roberta, and the older of two sons; Ed was five years younger, as well as the baby of the four. Mike was a Packers fan and urged his brother, then 7, to come watch the game, which was played on Dec. 31, 1967.

“I walked in there and saw these surreal surroundings on TV, on the old black-and-white Zenith,” Ed said. “And I’m like, ‘This is crazy that they’re actually playing this game.’ Even only being a kid, I knew there was something different about this game, just the way it played out – incredible.”

The book is dedicated to Mike, who in 1977 died of Ewing sarcoma, a cancer of the bones and soft tissues, at age 22. It has never been lost on Ed that his older brother, a promising artist, never got the chance to fulfill his dreams, to live his life out.

“And I always thought, you know what, if I don’t do something with my life, then I ought to be taken out and horse-whipped,” he said. “I don’t want to look back and think, ‘Well, I could have done this or that.’”

So he has continued to crank out books, even as he was working full-time jobs. While with the Intell, for example, he would endeavor to write three pages during the day, then work the night shift, come home and edit what he had written. Then he would repeat the process the next day, and the day after.

“If you follow that rule,” he said, “within a week you have a chapter.”

That requires uncommon discipline, but more often than not he said he has been able to pull it off. He also said he juggles research, interviewing and writing, something not easily done, and that he tries to finish as much of any given book as possible before pitching it to an agent or publisher. That way he doesn’t feel under the gun if and when his proposal is accepted.

Yes, it can be a slog. Yes, it can be a challenge to track down interview subjects, much less arrange words in their proper order. But he feels enlivened by the process, not exhausted.

“I like doing the research,” he said. “I like finding out things I didn’t know before. I like doing the interviews, and talking with a lot of these people who I grew up watching on TV. Talking to them on the phone, it was a great experience.”

So he will keep going, keep creating. Because it’s what his brother would have hoped to do, and what he expects of himself.

“I’ll never write as many books as I want to,” he said. “I’m always thinking I could do this or that, but time’s gonna run out on everybody. But I do what I can. That’s the way I look at it. I just look at these as I’m doing things that Mike would have wanted to do.”

Life turns in an instant. That was just as true all those years ago in that classroom at York College as it was in Mike’s hospital room. It’s a matter of seizing the moment and letting the story play out – one page at a time, one chapter at a time.