LE GRAND ORANGE WAS AN ORIGINAL
Expos fan favourite, who was beloved for contributions on and off the field, dead at 73
You never forget your first sports hero. For me, that was former Expos outfielder Rusty Staub. Le Grand Orange.
So there were tears in my eyes Thursday morning when I learned Staub had died at age 73.
He died early Thursday morning at the Good Samaritan Medical Center in Palm Beach, Fla., due to multiple organ failure. He was initially admitted to the hospital with pneumonia, dehydration and an infection after collapsing on a golf course in February and had spent the last eight weeks in the hospital. He would have turned 74 on Sunday. Staub survived a heart attack on a flight from Ireland to New York in October 2015.
When the Expos arrived in Montreal for the 1969 season, I was about to turn six. My birthday is in late April and every year I celebrated the same way when the Expos were in town: a game at Jarry Park and dinner at the Bar-B-Barn.
When Staub came to the plate, I prayed he’d hit one over the right-field fence and into the swimming pool. It would be the perfect birthday gift, along with a bag of peanuts thrown to me from a few sections over by “The Peanut Man.”
I had a Staub poster on my bedroom wall that I saw every morning when I woke up and again at night when I went to bed, often listening to an Expos game on my transistor radio with Dave Van Horne calling the playby-play action. For my birthday one year, I got a full Expos uniform — including blue stirrup socks just like Staub’s — and I still have a bobblehead of him at home today. I wish I had kept the uniform.
Staub was one of the original Expos in 1969, quickly becoming a fan favourite by hitting .302 with 29 home runs and 79 RBIs during that first season. It was the late Ted Blackman, who was sports editor of the Montreal Gazette at the time, who coined Staub’s Le Grand Orange nickname because of his bright, orange hair and six-foot-two, 190-pound frame.
Staub was an all-star in each of his three seasons with the Expos before being traded to the New York Mets after the 1971 season in exchange for Tim Foli, Mike Jorgensen and Ken Singleton. Staub cried after the trade. So did I.
I was one of more than 150,000 kids across Canada who opened their first bank account by joining Staub’s Young Expos Club, which was sponsored by the Bank of Montreal. I still have that account.
Staub returned to the Expos for an encore performance in July 1979 after being traded from the Detroit Tigers and was greeted with a standing ovation from a crowd of 59,260 at Olympic Stadium throughout his first at-bat. He called it “one of the most memorable moments of my entire life.”
One of the reasons Montrealers loved Staub so much is that he worked hard to become part of the community, which included learning to speak French.
“I was in Quebec, I couldn’t talk to a child,” Staub recalled in a phone interview I had with him seven years ago. “I couldn’t say something encouraging. I felt like I was not doing my job, not being able to respond to the media at least in some basic form.
“I took about 25 French classes after the first season and the next year I took longer classes. There’s not a question that my making that effort is part of the reason that whatever Le Grand Orange represented to Montreal and all those fans, they knew I cared and I tried. I tried to be a part of their community and I always tried to do that wherever I went. I thought it’s what you should do.”
Staub retired from baseball after spending the 1985 season with the Mets and then became a New York institution through his Rusty Staub Foundation, raising millions of dollars for the widows of police officers, firefighters and first responders, while also feeding thousands of homeless people through his Catholic Charities.
Bill Madden of the New York Daily News reported Staub’s foundation, which in 1986 established the New York Police and Fire Widows’ and Children’s Benefit Fund, distributed more than $11 million in the first 15 years of its existence to the families of firefighters killed in the line of duty and since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the foundation had received more than $112 million in contributions. Staub announced in January, in conjunction with Catholic Charities, his foundation had served more than nine million meals to the hungry and homeless over the last 10 years.
Seven years ago, Staub was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Marys, Ont. When I spoke with him a few months before that, I asked Staub if he had a message he wanted to pass along to Montreal fans who still remember him fondly.
“Just tell them I thank them for their love and caring during the time I was there,” he said. “The way they treated me was spectacular and I have a special spot in my heart that will never leave because of those fans in Montreal.”
RIP, Rusty.