Tough Luck, R. D. Rosen
Tough Luck, R. D. Rosen
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Tough Luck
Sid Luckman, Murder, Inc., and the Rise of the Modern NFL

Author: R. D. Rosen

Narrator: Jonathan Todd Ross

Unabridged: 9 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/03/2019

Synopsis

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.

About R. D. Rosen

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jill on July 13, 2019

Late in his biography of Chicago Bear's legend, Sid Luckman, author Richard Rosen writes, "Well, that explains Sid's whole personality. He spent his entire life trying to undo what his father had done". That quote was made by an old family friend of Luckman's, and referred to a tightly kept secret i......more

Goodreads review by Mark on August 05, 2022

The biography of Sid Luckman and his rise to fame from the home of a Brooklyn Jewish mobster to the heights of the NFL and the Chicago Bears...Just wonderful, even though I own three shares of the Green Bay Packers!!......more

Goodreads review by Jake on April 27, 2022

Interesting sports/mob crossover story come to life; certainly one I wasn’t infinitely familiar with. A few redundancies and inaccuracies but overall, it’s mostly well-told and kind of sad, though it does seem like Sid Luckman turned out okay.......more

Goodreads review by patrick on September 25, 2019

This book combines two of my favorite subject’s football and mafia stories. One begins with Sid Luckman who goes from a Brooklyn kid to Columbia University and then is drafted by the Bears. Halas wanted him for the new T formation offense that was going to be put in place. The author takes you throu......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on September 15, 2019

I, for one, really liked this book. It's a fascinating, well-research dive into two disparate topics, but that's also the main fault. Most of the time, when you have alternating chapters, the writing ties together at the end; but here, the link between the mob and Sid Luckman is only at the beginnin......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List