SAN JOSE — It was shortly after midnight, early Christmas eve morning in 1995. I picked up my notebook and pen, walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” my wife asked.

“An interview,” I answered.

“Now?” she asked. “On Christmas Eve?”

“Yes, now,” I said. “This is when George Gund wanted to do it.”

And a few minutes later, there we were — Gund, owner of the San Jose Sharks, and me. We sat in an HP Pavilion conference room, just outside the apartment Gund had constructed inside the arena even though it was against city zoning codes. No one else was in the building other than a couple of security guards. It was downright eerie.

“What do you want to know?” Gund asked in his quiet murmur of a voice, as if we were having a casual noon lunch in a busy restaurant.

Owners of professional sports teams are always interesting people. But I have never met one who dwelled in even the same hemisphere of unconventionality as Gund, who died Tuesday at age 75 in Southern California.

Gund, who brought the Sharks to the Bay Area as a NHL expansion team in 1991, seldom stayed in the same city for more than one night in a row. An heir to a wealthy Midwestern banking family, he had business interests across North America and was a distributor of Eastern European movies. He traveled in his private plane to various film festivals across the planet. He woke up in Sweden, stopped for coffee in Iceland and then ate dinner in London. He was a personal friend of actor Robert Redford, who once joked about Gund’s strange lifestyle: “I think George is a spy.”

He might well have been, for all I knew. Sometimes, my home phone would ring at 3 a.m. and it would be Gund, wanting to discuss something I’d written about his hockey club.

“George, I’m always happy to talk about anything in my column,” I said. “But do you know what time it is here? Would you mind calling me back in five or six hours?”

“Oh, sorry,” he would apologize. “I’m in Prague at a hockey tournament. Lost track of time.”

Yes, Gund was beyond quirky. He had enormously thick eyebrows that he never trimmed and they protruded cantilever style across his brow. At breakfast, he poured orange juice over his cornflakes, prompting one Sharks executive (who was seeking favor) to do the same thing.

However, Gund was also one of the most sincere and unpretentious people I’ve ever met, inside or outside sports. He would just as soon chat about hockey with the team mascot or a fan as with a fellow multimillionaire. Ultimately, that was Gund’s saving grace. He dressed up as Santa Claus at the team Christmas party and arranged for one road trip per year to take a detour so the team could visit his Idaho vacation home for a party.

Gund might have been too nice of an owner, in fact. He could be easily talked into giving people too many chances and paying them too much money. The Sharks had trouble winning consistently during Gund’s ownership tenure, which ended in 2002 when he sold the team to Silicon Valley businessmen. The Gund years, however, did see plenty of thrilling moments — especially that first season at what was then called San Jose Arena, when the Sharks shocked the NHL in their first playoff appearance by upsetting top-seeded Detroit.

I remember seeing Gund’s smile after that series as he wordlessly soaked it in from the edges, never putting himself in the spotlight. He would watch games standing at the Zamboni entrance on ice level rather than from a luxury box. This was a man so modest that in 1991 when the team’s first line of team merchandise was rolled out at a publicity event — Gund had chosen the Sharks nickname — he shyly asked afterward if it would be OK for him to leave with one of the jackets.

“He was one of a kind, quiet and unassuming,” said Patricia Ernstrom when she heard of Gund’s passing Tuesday. She’s executive director of the San Jose Sports Authority and noted correctly that Gund’s primary legacy is the downtown arena that “would not have been the premier venue it is today” without his involvement.

History gets muddled. Today, many people believe HP Pavilion was specifically built for the Sharks. Not so. In 1988, San Jose voters approved $100 million in redevelopment funds for an arena. But there was no sports tenant attached to the project until two years later when Gund and his brother, Gordon, met with San Jose Mayor Tom McEnery to strike a deal.

Back then, the Gund brothers owned the Minnesota North Stars hockey team. They traded that franchise for expansion rights to the Bay Area, where the NHL had already failed once in Oakland. The brothers considered both that city and San Francisco before deciding to take a risk in San Jose. The city was willing to grant the Gunds a favorable arena deal but had an upper limit on the budget. George and Gordon agreed to invest almost $40 million of his family’s money for upgrades to the existing plans, making it major-league-worthy.

Where’d the extra money go? It was used to improve the building’s amenities and concession areas, install marble floors (rather than concrete) and enlarge the bathrooms with additional toilets (allowing the between-periods lines to move faster than at most arenas). All of this is why HP Pavilion stands up pretty well today compared to other 20-year-old buildings.

Once the deal was set, George became the Gund brother who supervised the hockey operation while Gordon (who survives his brother) ran the family’s other sports franchise, the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers. George had played college hockey and after Sharks home games, he would often ask the arena operations people to use the rink. Those of us in the press box would look up from our writing and Gund would be happily skating down the ice all by himself in the semi-dark building, stick in hand as he moved the puck, the sound of his slashing blades carrying up to the rafters.

I’ll remember him for that. And for those very late-night interviews. On Christmas eve morning of 1995, Gund wanted to tell me that although the Sharks were struggling that season, it wouldn’t last. And he was more certain than ever that San Jose was a city where hockey could thrive.

“I thought we’d have a honeymoon here,” Gund told me. “But the honeymoon period lasted longer than I anticipated.”

When he died Tuesday at his home in Palm Springs, there were Sharks team pictures from his ownership period hanging on one wall. The players were smiling in the pictures. In the front row of each one, so was he.