1918-1971

"Chronicles the lives of four incredible men, the racism they experienced as Black players entering a segregated sport, the burden of expectation they carried, and their many achievements, which would go on to affect football for generations to come"--Provided by publisher.

Many know the story of Jackie Robinson integrating major league baseball in 1947. But few know that the NFL integrated a year earlier, when Kenny Washington stepped on the field for the Los Angeles Rams. He wasn't the only one. Four men broke pro football's color line in 1946, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode with the Los Angeles Rams and Bill Willis and Marion Motley with the Cleveland Browns. Lost Champions traces this history from the early 1930s--when NFL owners first instituted a ban on black players--through pro football's re-integration, to the 1950 NFL Championship Game, which pitted the Rams and Browns against each other in a showdown of the most prolific and advanced offenses pro football had ever seen.

The author was on his second World War II mission as a top-turret gunner when his plane was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the plane to escape immediate death or capture. He was able to run from the plane wreck and knock on the door of an isolated farmhouse whose owners, fortunately, had a firm connection to the underground French Resistance group, Morhange, and its founder, Marcel Taillandier. Meyerowitz's escape to freedom was hair-raising and included a masquerade as a deaf-mute, a periolous trek over the Pyrenees, and a voyage aboard a fishing boat with U-boats below and Luftwaffe fighters above.