Tough Luck

R. D. Rosen

"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 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, after Sid became a star at Columbia and then led the Chicago Bears to multiple NFL championships, all while Meyer wasted away in Sing Sing, the connection between sports celebrity son and mobster father was ignored by the press and then overlooked for eight decades. Tough Luck traces two historic developments connected by a single immigrant family in Depression-era New York: the rise of the National Football League through 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-of the Brooklyn labor rackets and of Louis Lepke's infamous organization Murder Inc. Filled with colorful characters-from ambitious district attorney turned governor Thomas Dewey and legendary columnist Walter Winchell, to Sid Luckman's rival quarterback "Slingin'" Sammy Baugh; from hit men like "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum, to Sid's powerful post-career friends Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio-Tough Luck unforgettably 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 Hall of Fame legend with a hidden past"--