GREENWICH — Of their 50 years in enterprise at Bruce Park Sports activities, the Bisanzo household has served everybody from Little League children choosing out their first gloves to the forty first president of the USA shopping for a gift.
George H.W. Bush was coming into city to go to his mother and realized a member of the family had simply had a child boy at Greenwich Hospital. Deciding he wished to get the new child a present, Bush requested one of many cops in his safety element for a suggestion.
The police captain urged an unplanned go to — to his cousin Tom Bisanzo’s sporting items store. After making it previous thorough checks by the city police and the Secret Service, Bisanzo waited on arguably the shop’s most well-known buyer.
“I helped him,” Bisanzo mentioned of the president with a nod this week. “He purchased a soccer.”
It was all in a day’s work for Bisanzo, who opened the landmark retailer on Davis Avenue subsequent to Bruce Park Grill in 1971, when he was simply 24.
“I had simply graduated from faculty, and I wished to do one thing totally different,” he mentioned.
A couple of years, later the store moved to an East Elm Road storefront that’s now dwelling to Good Children Toys, after which Bruce Park Sports activities settled finally on the nook of Mason and Lewis streets in 1993.
Like his father earlier than him, Mark Bisanzo began working full time at Bruce Park Sports activities after he graduated from Boston School. And, like his siblings, he had spent many summers and after-school hours earlier than that serving to out: There are pictures of Mark Bisanzo on the money register and making an attempt out new bats and balls from early childhood in a cherished household photograph album.
“I all the time labored within the retailer,” he mentioned. “I helped transfer in in 1993.”
The character of promoting sporting items has modified about as a lot as the character of youth sports activities lately, in response to each Bizanos, who work collectively every day, together with Tom’s spouse, Sue. Baseball, basketball, hockey and different sports activities are extra structured and staff sports activities are king, Mark Bisanzo mentioned.
In consequence, the store caters to native college and neighborhood groups, inviting captains to return in and customized design uniforms and different attire from a wall of inspirational designs over-the-counter. When star gamers graduate, they typically suggest Bruce Park Sports activities to their faculty squads, that means the Bisanzos use their many years of expertise to finest outfit preteen basketball gamers, Greenwich Excessive Faculty athletes and collegiate athletes from Colgate and different high faculties, the youthful Bisanzo mentioned.
Greenwich residents are nonetheless their bread-and-butter clients, although. Some are present and former members of the youth baseball groups that Mark Bisanzo coaches on the town.
“It’s cool to listen to fathers bringing their sons to the identical place the place they first purchased their first baseball glove,” mentioned Mark, who was captain of the soccer and baseball groups at GHS and a university rugby alum.
In between the racks of youngsters’s hoodies and batting gloves is a signed photograph of Steve Younger, a standout Greenwich Excessive Faculty quarterback who went on to Tremendous Bowl fame with the San Francisco 49ers. The household discovered the photograph — taken when he gained certainly one of many Participant of the Week honors at GHS — throughout certainly one of their strikes and despatched it to Younger, who signed it and despatched it again with a small plaque.
“It mentioned ‘Earlier than I used to be an MVP for the NFL, I used to be Participant of the Week for Greenwich Excessive Faculty,’” Mark mentioned.
The Bisanzos had hoped to have a good time their fiftieth anniversary extra publicly, however the COVID-19 pandemic has created too many challenges for that. As a substitute, Mark and his spouse, Megan, are having fun with a quieter celebration with their practically 12-week-old son, Jack.
“This isn’t how we imagined celebrating this milestone,” Mark mentioned. “However we’re joyful to nonetheless be right here.
“And it’s enjoyable to return in on daily basis and get to work along with your mother and father. Not everybody will get to try this.”
