The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter's Tale of Family and Football

Anyone can write. Not everyone can tell a story. Ms. Leachman definitely had a story to tell and she tells it with strength and honesty. I grew up in the football obsessed region of SW Pennsylvania. I grew up as one of those obsessed fans. As an adult in a career where I regularly worked with the NFL, I saw some of the other side. I was stunned when a friend took his life when a coaching job did not materialize. While working for a hotel in a Super Bowl city, I was delighted to meet a few of my favorite Steelers even though I was puzzled by Mike Webster's behavior. Years later I was sickened to learn how he died and how his death led to Dr. Omalu's conclusions about CTE. It is unbearable to me that I enjoyed watching Mike play when in reality, he was literally killing himself. Ms. Leachman opens another window of this story, allowing us to experience a football family's life. In the end, we learn that the only true team is one of fami!y and that the only thing that matters is love.

Normally one reads a book involving a sports character expecting to find either glorification and glossing over faults or one finds a "tell-all" hit piece designed to dig up as much mud to besmirch the person in an attempt to sell books to those looking for the most prurient of details. Dr. Leachman did neither of these.I appreciated the inside look from a family member's point of view that was not bitter and hostile toward her father, blaming him for all of her quirks and ills. Instead, she shared the love of the family, highlighting the good times while not ignoring the not so good. I'm happy to recommend this enjoyable insider's view of American football.

While reading Lori Leachman's outstanding story of growing up in the South in a football family, I kept experiencing deja vu. Like her father, I was a student at the University of Tennessee 1953-1957 and got to know Johnny Majors in a European History class. I was an avid college football fan then and that passion continues to this day. Lori has chronicled with love and accuracy the quirks of a Southern family and their relationships during that period in time and, with heartbreaking tenderness, outlined her father's struggle with health problems resulting from his football injuries and concussions. She has captured the flavor and nuanced behaviors of Southerners so perfectly that I often felt I could be reading about my own family. I absolutely adored this book!

With humor, honesty, and tenderness, Lori Leachman opens a window on the world of football from the 50s through the 90s that shaped and controlled the destiny of her father, her mother, and her family. Her father’s athleticism and obvious talent as a high school football star plucked him out of small-town Georgia to a football scholarship at the University of Tennessee. From there he slowly worked his way up through high school football coaching, to college football coaching, to a frustrating and financially disastrous foray into the World Football League — which failed in its efforts to challenge the NFL — to the Canadian Football League, to the NFL as defensive line coach for the New York Giants and A Super Bowl victory in Super Bowl XXI IN 1987, and finally to the Detroit Lions where a devastating injury on the side lines (on top of multiple concussions over his years of playing) within a few years ended his career. Football was their life, ruling the seasons, shaping their world, and eventually destroying the mind and spirit of this strong, athletic, man’s man. The life football dictated for them was a hard scrabble life to start but always nomadic, taking their family all over the South, to Long Island, to Canada, to New York City, and at the end to Detroit. Eventually the constant struggle to make ends meet gave way to more comfort, but in the end the world of football abandoned Lamar Leachman, and left his body and brain ravaged. It is a tale full of love and laughter, but the price it extracted from this strong man and his family is devastating. Lori’s honest, sad, and painful description of her father’s and her family’s last years is touching. This story will cause any football devotee to question whether the excitement and the pageantry of football, especially pro football, and the grooming of young men to seek a place in that world, is worth the destruction of the futures of these young men and the creeping trauma imposed on the lives touched by CTE.

Lori Leachman zooms into a southern family’s life with her impeccable, honest and humorous writing. It is a beautiful story, a bitter sweet one, and quite entertaining and gracefully told. It is a story about everything that makes Leachman’s family in the rural south, love and struggles, good times, bad times, football, concussions and injuries, and their life-long consequences. I guess most would find familiarities in Leachman’s story, but even those coming from a different cultural background like myself will gain familiarity and a close understanding of life in rural south in 50s-60s. Highly recommended.