RETRO PICTURES: As Sheffield gets set for a new sports shop, can you remember Sugg and GT Sports?
JD Sports is set to open in The Moor later this month - but for many, mere mention of the words "sport" and "shop" will transport them back to another era.
Sugg Sport, once a veritable lynchpin of city centre trading on The Moor (as well as having another outlet in Doncaster), sadly closed for good in 2000.
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Hide AdThe store was a go-to outlet for anything sports related, and the brand can trace its origins back to sporting legacy: the ancestors of the business’ founders include Derbyshire cricketing legend Walter Sugg and his brother Frank Sugg.
Stars were drawn to the place many years down the line - one picture shows boxer Naseem Hamed with a young Ryan Rhodes, at age 15, at Sugg Sport, after Ryan won a place on the England training course in July 1992.
Readers were equally fond of the store.
Jeremy White said: “Best sports shops around, restringing tennis rackets, new handles on cricket bats, at the time the only place you could get decent goalie gloves. So sad it went.”
Neil North added: “This was the place to buy your trainers from. “I bought my first pair of Nike trainers, Head sports bag and Cabrini coat from Suggs with my first Christmas money, top place”
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Hide AdAnd Barrie Rees added that the store sold ‘Everything from jock straps to 12 bore shot guns.’
Derek Cantwell added: “Such a sad day when Suggs closed for good.”
Meanwhile, GT Sports which had a branch on Fargate, was another stop-off for sports lovers of the 90s.
Born as an off-shoot of the GT News empire of newsagents, the firm had a chain of stores across northern England nearly 30 years ago.
The firm opened its first GT shop in Sheffield 120 years ago and while the news name lives on, the sports branches are long since gone.