TORONTO — Steve Stavro, the Canadian entrepreneur and sports enthusiast whose interests once included the Toronto Maple Leafs, died on Monday, news reports said.
Stavro, 78, apparently suffered a heart attack.
The founder of the Knob Hill Farms grocery store chain, was a major supporter of Canadian sports from hockey to soccer to horse racing and was known to travel around the world to attend top events.
But his biggest love was the Toronto Maple Leafs, in which he became the controlling shareholder in the early 1990s. He became chairman of the board of parent company Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment in 1991. He also served as an NHL governor and sat on the board of the Air Canada Center, the home arena of the Maple Leafs. He eventually sold his stake in MLSE in December 2003.
Born on September 27, 1927 in Macedonia, Stavro immigrated to Canada as a child where he worked at his father's grocery store. In the early 1960s he parlayed his small Toronto fruit store into the Knob Hill chain of big box grocery stores in southern Ontario.
Stavro closed the Knob Hill chain in 2000 citing intense competition from national grocery chains.
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