Overview

In the long annals of sports and crime, no story compares to the one that engulfed the Luckman family in 1935. As eighteen-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 twenty-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 America's favorite pastime; and the demise--triggered by Meyer Luckman's crime and initial cover-up of the Brooklyn labor rackets and Louis Lepke's infamous organization Murder, Inc.

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9781665205399

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Jonathan Todd Ross is a writer and an Earphones and Audie Award-winning voice actor. He has lent his voice to numerous anime television shows, including Yu-Gi-Oh! and Sonic X. R. D. Rosen's many books include recent nonfiction that connects America's 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 Holocaust's 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. Jacopo della Quercia is the pseudonym for a former Obama staffer. He is the author of The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy and License to Quill, a scholar with the New York Council for the Humanities, and a history writer who has authored more than 100 articles for the comedy website Cracked.com.

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