Over the course of his 50-year career, Annis Stukus was a standout quarterback, a brilliant marketer, the founder of two professional football teams and the general manager who lured NHL superstar Bobby Hull to the World Hockey Association. And that is only a snapshot of a gregarious sports lifer who also worked for basketball and soccer clubs and lent his outsized personality to the airwaves and newspaper pages.

Football fans of a certain vintage will remember “Stuke” as the eldest of the Stukus brothers, who formed a fearsome presence on the backfield for the Grey Cup winning Toronto Argonauts teams of 1937–38. With help from brothers Bill and Frank, Annis was named an all-star in 1938, the year he led the lead in scoring.

Stukus honed his promotional abilities at an early age. While an Argo he had a day job reporting for the Toronto Star, an arrangement that sometimes saw him play in a game and then write about it in the sports section.

After his seven-year CFL career was cut short when the league suspended operations at the outbreak of the Second World War, Stukus became a player-coach with the Toronto Indians and Balmy Beach of the Ontario Rugby Football League, as well as the HMCS York Bulldogs, a navy team he played with while in the service.

Back from the war, Stukus consulted for the Toronto Huskies basketball team during its lone season. In 1949, with his pro playing days behind him, he went west to make his mark on two future CFL clubs as an executive. He first took on coaching and GM duties for the Edmonton Eskimos, overseeing that club’s return to the Western Interprovincial Football Union. “Stuke” recruited top players and added some flair to the proceedings when he came out of retirement to handle the Eskie’s place kicking.

Having resurrected football in Edmonton, Stukus next headed for the coast. He was coach, GM and promotions director for the B.C. Lions from 1953 until 1955, and his energy and drive laid the foundation for the club’s future success. His efforts to revive the sport in Western Canada earned Stukus a spot in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame as a builder. The CFL’s coach of the year award is named in his honour. The versatile executive ran the Western Hockey League Vancouver Canucks before moving to the Winnipeg Jets, which offered Hull a then-unthinkable million-dollar contract to jump to the WHA. Stukus’ flashiest gamble yet stunned the sporting world and gave the nascent league instant credibility. For a man called “the loquacious Lithuanian,” commentary was a natural fit.

Stukus wrote for the Vancouver Sun and worked the sports desk at CFUN Radio in Vancouver among other broadcasting jobs. Newspaperman Peter Worthington called his one-time Toronto Telegram colleague “arguably the most colourful sports personality in the country…with a gift for making headlines wherever he went.” The Toronto native and Canadian Sports Hall of Famer died in 2006 at age 91 at his home in Canmore, Alberta.

In a tribute, veteran sports journalist George Gross quoted a colleague who described Stukus as a fun-loving storyteller: “He loved to tell stories about the good old days of playing and coaching and he loved to have a group around him. He would go out at a drop of a hat to any function that asked him, whether it was two people or 200 people. He would soon have them laughing.”