Engrossing. Engaging. Meticulous. Impassioned.
Those are among the many adjectives you could use to describe Gregg Ficery’s magnum opus, “Gridiron Legacy: Pro Football’s Missing Origin Story.”
But, perhaps the one I would lean into is “authoritative.”
This hardbound coffee table tome comes in at a weighty 350 pages and almost five pounds of an unadulterated, century-old history that fills in the gaps of professional football’s forgotten origins.
By tracing his family connections, Ficery follows the sport’s professionalization across a three-decade journey that takes us from the diamond to smoke-filled bookie backrooms to courtrooms and the collegiate gridiron — and then to the hard scrabble, working class immigrant neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, and before ultimately landing in the sport’s Mecca: Ohio.