Greg Growden (1959/1960 – 14 November 2020) was an Australian sports journalist, author and biographer.

Life

Growden was born in Adelaide, the son of Port Adelaide Football Club player Kevin Growden.^[1] The family moved to a rice farm at Coleambally in the Riverina where Growden spent his teenage years.^[2]

He joined the Sydney Morning Herald in early 1978 soon after leaving school.^[3] He was chief rugby union correspondent for the paper from 1987 to 2012, and was the Australian rugby union correspondent for ESPN from 2012 to 2018.^[4] He is one of just two international rugby writers to cover all of the first eight World Cups.^[5]

Growden died of cancer on 14 November 2020, aged 60.^[6]^[7]^[8]

Books

The Wallabies' World Cup! (1991, with Spiro Zavos, Simon Poidevin and Evan Whitton)
A Wayward Genius: The Fleetwood-Smith Story (1991)
With the Wallabies (1995)
Gold, Mud and Guts: The Incredible Tom Richards – Footballer, War Hero, Olympian (2001)
Rugby Union for Dummies (2003, 2011)
The Snowy Baker Story (2003)
My Sporting Hero (2004, editor)
It's Not Just a Bloody Game! Timeless Rugby Union Stories (2007)
Jack Fingleton: The Man Who Stood Up to Bradman (2008)
Inside the Wallabies: The Real Story – the Players, the Politics, the Games from 1908 to Today (2010)
More Important than Life or Death: Inside the Best of Australian Sport (2013, co-editor with Peter FitzSimons)
Wallaby Warrior: The World War I War Diaries of Tom Richards, Australia's only British Lion (2013, editor)
Bowled by a Bullet: The Tragic Life of Claude Tozer (2015)
The Wrong 'Un: The Brad Hogg Story (2016, with Brad Hogg)
The Wallabies at War (2018)
Major Thomas: The Bush Lawyer Who Defended Breaker Morant and Took On the British Empire (2019)
Cricketers at War (2019)

References

^ Growden, Greg (7 March 2016). "Son of a Ports gun: Greg Growden's life as a bush footy player". ABC News. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
^ Growden, Greg (24 May 2008). "Lawn bowls is best thing since man discovered the ball". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 16 November 2020.
^ "Greg Growden". Cameron's. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
^ Greg Growden, Cricketers at War, ABC Books, Sydney, 2019, p. i.
^ "Greg Growden". HarperCollins. Retrieved 10 December 2019.
^ "Untitled". Twitter. Retrieved 14 November 2020. Very sorry to report that Greg Growden passed away at 8 pm tonight.
^ FitzSimons, Peter (13 November 2020). "The Fitz Files: Dazed and confused - mixed messages on concussion in NRL, State of Origin a big problem". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
^ FitzSimons, Peter (14 November 2020). "Vale Greg Growden, you will be long remembered". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 15 November 2020.