Tough Luck: Sid Luckman, Murder, Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL. Questo articolo non è disponibile.Tough Luck: Sid Luckman, Murder, Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As 18-year-old Sid Luckman made headlines across New York City for his high school football exploits at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, his father, Meyer Luckman, was making headlines in the same papers for a very different reason: the gangland murder of his own brother-in-law. Amazingly, when Sid became a star at Columbia and a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback in Chicago, all of it while Meyer Luckman served 20-years-to-life in Sing Sing Prison, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was studiously ignored by the press and ultimately overlooked for eight decades.

Tough Luck traces two simultaneous historical developments through a single immigrant family in Depression-era New York: the rise of the National Football League led by the dynastic Chicago Bears, whose famed owner George Halas convinced Sid Luckman to help him turn the sluggish game of pro football into Americas favorite pastime; and the demisetriggered by Meyer Luckmans crime and initial coverupof the Brooklyn labor rackets and Louis Lepkes infamous organization Murder, Inc. Filled with colorful charactersfrom ambitious district attorney-turned-governor Thomas Dewey and legendary columnist Walter Winchell, to Sid Luckmans rival quarterback Slingin Sammy Baugh and pro footballs unsung intellectual genius Clark Shaughnessy; from the lethal Lepke and hit men like Tick Tock Tannenbaum, to Sids powerful post-career friends Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggioTough Luck memorably evokes an era of vicious Brooklyn mobsters and undefeated Monsters of the Midway, a time when the media kept their mouths shut and the soft-spoken son of a murderer could become a beloved legend with a hidden past.

R. D. Rosens many books include recent nonfiction that connects Americas past and present, including A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the American West and Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocausts Hidden Child Survivors. He won an Edgar Allan Poe Award for his first of five mystery novels featuring retired Jewish major league baseball player-turned-detective Harvey Blissberg, and has written about sports for many national publications. He has served as a senior editor for both ESPN Books and Workman Publishing, and once upon a time wrote or performed comedy for PBS, HBO, and Saturday Night Live. He grew up across the street from Sid Luckman in Highland Park, Illinois, and lives in New York, where he still roots for the Chicago Bears.