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 America's favorite pastime; and the
demise--triggered by Meyer Luckman's crime and initial coverup--of the
Brooklyn labor rackets and 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 and
pro football's unsung intellectual genius Clark Shaughnessy; from the
lethal Lepke and hit men like "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum, to Sid's powerful
post-career friends Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio--Tough 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.
