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Also by R. D. Rosen
NONFICTION
Such Good Girls: The Journey of the Holocaust’s Hidden Child Survivors
A Buffalo in the House: The True Story of a Man, an Animal, and the
American West
Psychobabble: Fast Talk and Quick Cure in the Era of Feeling
Me and My Friends, We No Longer Profess Any Graces:
A Premature Memoir
MYSTERY NOVELS
HUMOR
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anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New
York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
FIRST EDITION
This book was set in 12.5-pt. Centaur MT by Alpha Design & Composition of
Pittsfield, NH.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2944-4
eISBN 978-0-8021-4711-0
groveatlantic.com
19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Robert Baskin Rosen, brother in every sense
Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t
open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets
nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least
you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction
between people: not between those who have
secrets and those who don’t, but between those
who want to know everything and those who
don’t. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.
—Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
Contents
Cover
Also by R. D. Rosen
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Photo Insert
Selected Notes
Bibliography
Index
Back Cover
Introduction: The Quarterback
Next Door
In 1959, when I was 10 years old, I was fascinated by the new
occupants of a big redbrick colonial house around the corner from
my family’s quirky custom split-level. Word had spread quickly
throughout Highland Park, our suburb on the North Shore of
Chicago, that the new occupants were former Chicago Bears
quarterback Sid Luckman and his family.
This was of particular interest to me, since I had recently become
a rabid Chicago Bears fan. An embarrassing amount of my mental
and emotional life was consumed by the team and its fortunes. My
most noticeable talent in those days was my drawing ability, and my
school notebooks were filled with pictures of football players and
the hash-marked turf at Wrigley Field, where the Bears played their
home games until 1971. On autumn Sunday mornings, while I
fidgeted in confirmation class at Congregation Solel—our activist
Reform rabbi had temporarily stopped believing in the bar mitzvah
—I emerged from my football reveries only long enough to write an
occasional essay about the nonexistence of God. Judaism was my
faith, but the Chicago Bears were my religion.
And Sid Luckman was professional football’s Moses, having led
the Bears, the first modern pro football dynasty, to the promised
land. Although I was too young to have seen Luckman play, his
legendary status was reinforced every time I heard fans of my
father’s generation exclaim—usually when one of Luckman’s lesser
successors overthrew an open receiver—“Where’s Sid Luckman
when we need him?” The great quarterback presided over my
obsession with the Bears, even though I was too young to
appreciate, or even know about, his specific deeds. Only later would
I learn that he had once led the most feared team in the National
Football League—the “Monsters of the Midway”—to five national
championship appearances and four titles in seven years during the
1940s; that in his first year as starting quarterback, the Bears had
manhandled the Washington Redskins 73–0, still and probably
forever the most lopsided victory in NFL history; that Sid Luckman
was the first man to throw seven touchdown passes in a game and
the first to throw for more than 400 yards; and that he held the
record for the highest percentage of passes in a single season that
went for touchdowns. Despite the rapid evolution of the passing
game, most of Luckman’s several team records wouldn’t be broken
for 65 years.
More important, however, was this: the intricate T-formation
offense he spearheaded had ushered in the modern era of pro
football, elevating a sport that had been the grimy sideshow to the
more popular rah-rah college game. This historical achievement was
memorialized in the Bears’ fight song, “Bear Down, Chicago Bears”:
“We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation / With your T
formation.” If the song was catchier than most, that was because it
was written by the man who had already penned “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-
Boo” and “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” for Disney’s movie
Cinderella.
I knew the words by heart because I was lucky enough to go to
several Chicago Bears games in the late 1950s and 1960s, when the
song was blared scratchily over the loudspeaker. Of all the
memorable experiences of my childhood, nothing captured my
imagination quite like Bears games at Wrigley Field. In those media-
deprived days, before home games were even televised, attending a
Bears game was a rare glimpse of a special kingdom full of
pageantry and armed battle. As my father and I walked up North
Sheffield Avenue, the air crackled with the pregame chatter of Jack
Brickhouse and his sidekick, newspaper columnist/color man Irv
Kupcinet, pouring out of hundreds of Sony transistor radios—a new
phenomenon. And now we were through the clicking turnstiles and
mounting Wrigley’s ramps until the scene was revealed in all its
glory: the brilliant green turf; the meticulously limed lines; the fans
in their seats already unscrewing their thermoses of coffee and
nipping from their flasks to stay warm; the ivy on Wrigley’s outfield
walls turning brown, yellow, and orange, or gone altogether, leaving
a spindly network of vines stuck to the brick. Most exciting of all
were the Bears players themselves, warming up, military in their
navy-blue jerseys and helmets and immaculate white pants;
immense in their shoulder pads; practicing passes, pinwheeling
placekicks, and high revolving punts; running phantom plays under
the cold sun. And everything was in saturated color, not the faded
hues of our first Zenith color television.
I knew Luckman only from a few photos—old publicity shots in
which he was poised to pass, right arm cocked while the left pointed
downfield to an imaginary receiver, or of his big, square handsome
head stuffed into a flimsy leather football helmet. In the town that
Carl Sandburg had labeled “City of the Big Shoulders,” no shoulder
was bigger or more revered than Sid Luckman’s right one.
That Luckman now lived a mere 100 yards from my house—and
across the street from where I was developing into a sticky-fingered
receiver in neighborhood touch football games—didn’t quite make
sense to me. Powerful figures lived in our midst, but they were
doctors, lawyers, and small titans of business whose achievements
were obscure and uninteresting to a 10-year-old boy. Sid Luckman,
however, was part of history—a treasured relic of an era before face
masks, before the integration of American sports, before television
came along to broadcast pro football’s appeal. And that name! Was
there a better one in all of sports, joining two of the most vital
elements of athletic success at mid-century, luck and manliness? It
was so perfect that he hadn’t needed a nickname, unlike other early
pillars of Bears history such as Harold “Red” Grange, aka the
Galloping Ghost; Bronislau “Bronko” Nagurski; or George “One-
Play” McAfee—or future pillars like “the Kansas Comet,” Gale
Sayers.
The only aspect of Luckman’s arrival in my neighborhood that
made any sense to me was that he was Jewish. Highland Park was a
lush, lakeside, liberal suburb that had opened its doors to Jews
years before, while neighboring towns like Kenilworth and Lake
Forest discouraged upwardly mobile refugees from the crowded
Jewish ghettos of Chicago. Even so, I was too young to fully
appreciate the irony and pathos embodied by a Jewish quarterback
who had led the meanest team in professional football during the
very years the Nazis were murdering two-thirds of the Jews in
Europe. Like boxer Barney Ross and baseball greats Hyman “Hank”
Greenberg before him and Sandy Koufax after, Sid Luckman
symbolized the strength, endurance, and greatness of the Jewish
people.
I was even too young to have heard him give a talk to the
Highland Park High School student body. In any other profession,
Luckman would have been hitting his stride, but by 1959 he had
been retired from football a decade already, done with playing at
33, his best years behind him a few years before that. He was still
young and looked like a movie star, perhaps like Gregory Peck, born
the same year, 1916. If the students expected to hear about some of
Luckman’s triumphs, they were disappointed. Decades later, my
older brother told me that Luckman had regaled the teenagers with
the story of his first NFL game at quarterback, in 1939, during
which he said he had done almost nothing right. All kids like a story
about the fallibility of adults, especially one who rose to the very
top of his profession.
More than half a century later, my interest in Sid Luckman was
reignited by the discovery that I could watch him in action during
the 1940s on YouTube and see at last what everyone had been
talking about when I was child. I was seized with the desire to know
more about this figure who had remained just beyond my reach for
so long.
And not only beyond my reach. For some reason, Sid Luckman
had never been the subject of the documentary or biography he
deserved. Where was his valedictory autobiography? More than
most famous athletes, he had revolutionized the game he played,
pioneered the modern role of quarterback, and set several enduring
records. There have been countless refinements since the 1940s, and
better athletes, but Luckman was the prototype of the modern
quarterback. Yet he remained something of a marginal figure in the
panorama of the 20th century’s greatest sports figures. Among that
tiny subgroup of Jewish hall-of-fame athletes, Hank Greenberg,
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