Iconic retailer Reitmans looks to the next generation after emerging from bankruptcy protection

Stephen Reitman is a self-described “sports nut.” As such, he wasn’t quite ready to discuss business first on a recent December day, because it was the Monday after arguably the greatest World Cup soccer final ever played.

“You take the seventh game of a Stanley Cup, you take a Super Bowl — and I could name lots of them — and you take Muhammad Ali and the phantom punch, but I thought Sunday’s spectacle was one of the greatest sports spectaculars I have ever seen,” the 75-year-old chief executive of Reitmans Canada Ltd. said from his Montreal office. “What an unbelievable match.”