One day, when Gail Luckman was in 5th grade at Ravinia Elementary School in Highland Park, she came home and asked her mother, “Mom, who is `Sid Luckman?’ I know it’s daddy. But who is `Sid Luckman?’ “
Estelle Luckman told her daughter, now Gail Weiss, that Sid Luckman was “a famous football player who broke all kinds of records.”
That he was, and that he did. And in his time, Sid Luckman was as famous an athlete as Chicago has ever known. Mike McCaskey, president and chief executive officer of the Bears, says: “Sid Luckman was one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, an outstanding example to others and a success in business.”
“He was a true hero,” says Luckman’s good friend, Bob Tisch, current chairman and co-chief executive officer of the New York Giants.
Luckman played for the Bears owner-coach George Halas–Mike McCaskey’s grandfather. He set a number of Bears and National Football League records during his years with the team, from 1939 through 1950.
Luckman led the Bears to four NFL championships. He was named Most Valuable Player in the NFL three times and All-Pro seven times. He is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Before all that, he was a football All-American at New York’s Columbia University. He was on the cover of Life Magazine during his 1938 senior year, with the headline, BEST PASSER, printed at the bottom of the page.
“When I was young boy growing up in Brooklyn, we used to play football for hours on the cobblestone streets,” says the 78-year-old
Luckman. “It was something I felt I had to do, be part of football. My favorite team was Notre Dame where Knute Rockne was the head coach. One day , it was announced over the radio that Rockne was killed in a plane crash. I sat by the radio and cried. It taught me a lesson. You never know in life what the good Lord has in store for you.”
Luckman attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn.
“My coach was Paul Sullivan,” Luckman recalls. “He believed in discipline, dedication and desire, motivation to be successful not only in football, but in life.” (Last December, Erasmus Hall named its football field the Sid Luckman Field).
He also admired his Columbia coach, Lou Little.
“He was one of the most fantastic men I have ever known. His manner, his dress, was something very special. His charisma enchanted me,” said Luckman.
As an Ivy League school, Columbia (which had academic standards for athletes) did not offer athletic scholarships. In the middle of his freshman year, in 1935, Luckman told Little he would have to leave school because of a family financial crisis.
Little lined up three jobs for Luckman, chauffeuring Mrs. Little and university professors, baby-sitting and a government job for students in financial need. “It was like a dream come true. I played football at Columbia, stayed at college and helped my mother.” (His father, a truck driver, died when he was boy).
Halas came to scout Luckman during Luckman’s senior year. Halas had invented the T-formation offense and needed a quarterback to execute it. He believed Luckman had the right stuff.
Luckman turned down Halas’ repeated offers. He felt he was too small (5 feet, 11 inches and 190 pounds). But Halas persisted, and traded two players and a draft choice to the Pittsburgh Steelers for their first-round draft choice.
“When I read in the paper that I had been drafted by the Bears, it was certainly a tremendous surprise,” Luckman recalls. “But I had a very nice job and that’s where I thought my future was going to be.”
Halas persisted, traveling twice to New York. The second time he worked on Sid’s new bride, Estelle, and she helped convince Sid to join the Bears.
Halas offered Luckman the highest salary ever paid by the team–$5,000 a year in 1939.
An early challenge
“When he gave me the contract, and I signed it, he said, `You and Jesus Christ are the only two that I would pay $5,000.’ I said, `Coach, you put me in some pretty good company,’ ” Luckman says. “I had never been further than Buffalo. I really thought that Chicago was where cowboys were still around.
“After the third day of practice, the linemen came in and I knew then this was going to be a struggle, walking into that dressing room and seeing these `Monsters of the Midway,’ they were so big and fast.
“All my high school and college career, I had never seen anything like these athletes,” Luckman says of the Bears line.
So he practiced and studied long after the regular Bears’ practice. Then he went home where Estelle quizzed him on the plays.
While Luckman studied to be a quarterback, he played his first few games as a halfback. But when the Bears played the Giants in New York, and were losing 16-0 in the middle of the third period, Halas waved Luckman to the side and said, “Son, go in there as a quarterback.”
“You’ll never know the emotion, stress,” says Luckman of the 1939 game. “That had to be the most emotional time in my football history. My family , my friends from college, the Columbia coaches, the dean of the college . . . they were all at the game.”
He brings his hands to his face. He seems to be reliving the moment.
“I didn’t know left from right or right from left, I was so high-strung.
“The football in those days was fatter and bigger, rounder and harder to grip. I threw the greatest pass of my life–wobbly, end to end. The Giant player who was defending Bob MacLeod was completely faked out of the play. MacLeod saw the ball, caught it and went in for a touchdown.”
The Bears would lose the game 16-14. But Luckman was from that point on the Bears’ starting quarterback, and the next year led the team to a 73-0 slaughter of the Washington Redskins for the NFL championship.
A lifelong association
“Halas was a tough disciplinarian, a human being beyond anyone’s imagination, a best friend,” says Luckman. “He was and always will be the NFL. He made it. His dreams and visions came true.”
A letter Halas wrote Luckman in 1983, the year Halas died, says, in part, “My boy, my pride in you has no bounds. You were the consummate player. You added a luster to my life that will never tarnish.”
Luckman has the letter framed on the wall of his apartment in a building on the banks of the Chicago river.
When he stopped playing football in 1950, Luckman’s salary was $23,000, the highest in the NFL, matched only by Redskins’ quarterback Sammy Baugh.
He then began a 14-year part-time coaching career for the Bears and other teams Halas wanted to teach about the T-formation, including Notre Dame. But Luckman never accepted a coaching salary from the Bears; “I can never repay the Bears for making my life a more enchanting life,” he says.
“George Halas told us that football was a means to an end,” Luckman observes. “All of us had to seek a way to keep up our income, because you never really know in professional football what could happen on any given Sunday.” (There was no pension plan in the NFL then.)
Luckman was, by all accounts, a super salesman who loves a good time, and loves showing others a good time. He is also an extraordinary networker.
“Sid has done what most coaches in the league hope players will do. He was a role model in his new home (Chicago) and became very successful, a multi-millionaire,” says his longtime friend, Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet.
Making a name in business
Luckman went to work for Cellu-Craft Inc. in 1940, and in 1946 bought a half interest in the company, which manufactured wrapping materials for companies including Kraft Foods, Quaker Oats, Sara Lee, Superior Coffee and Morton International. The firm is now owned by Lawson Mardon, based in Canada. Luckman continues as consultant for some of the salespeople at Lawson Mardon, but will retire soon. He says he is seeking other business opportunities.
” Jay Pritzker keeps teasing me. He says the only reason I stayed with them 55 years is no one else would give me a job,” says Luckman, who has invested in businesses with the Pritzkers over the years.
Bob Luckman, Sid’s son, the national sales director for Lawson Marton, says humility is the most important thing he learned from his father.
“How to get along and how to treat people,” he says. “He makes people feel like they are important. He’ll do anything for a good friend.”
There are countless stories of Luckman giving gifts, obtaining Super Bowl tickets and otherwise helping people.
“He goes out of his way to help people,” Tisch says.
“He likes to give of himself,” adds longtime friend, developer and financial adviser Zev Karkomi. “I learned from him how to forgive. He doesn’t carry any grudge.”
“Everything he sees, he sees fresh and new. He’s like a kid getting excited,” says restaurateur Steve Lombardo, a partner of Luckman’s at Gibsons Steak House, where Luckman is a major investor.
Luckman has slowed down a bit in the past two years, following blood pressure-related illnesses. But he is still active. He watches his weight, walks and works out 30 to 40 minutes a day, using “resistance training” with towels.
“He just keeps going, like the river,” says his former neighbor, developer Jack McHugh, former president of the Chicago Park District. “He still pursues life and still loves competition, whether it’s gin rummy or business. He’s legendary for his gin controversies. He gets very irritated that he can’t control the cards. And when a person makes a bad play, he goes crazy over it. But it always ends with a laugh.”
“He is a champion card player, one of the great gin players,” adds Kupcinet. “His gin playing ability almost matches his football playing ability. I’m not sure where he made more money.”
The Bushes, Sinatra et al.
The den of Luckman’s apartment has a wall lined with photos and plaques including a picture of Luckman with President and Barbara Bush, accompanied by personal letters from both. President Bush had approached Luckman at a Washington fundraiser and said, “You were my hero in college!”
Another picture is of Luckman, McHugh, Frank Sinatra and late Sinatra pal Jilly Rizzo, at Sinatra’s Palm Springs home. It’s a great beefcake shot, with the four men in bathing suits and brimmed hats.
“Frank would dress up in a chef’s cap and cook dinner and we’d talk all night,” Luckman recalls. He also talks, emotionally, about Sinatra visiting his late wife, Estelle, in the hospital when she was dying of cancer in 1981.
A poster soon to go up on the wall is autographed by the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. Luckman met them when he helped promote an air and water show in Ft. Lauderdale in May. But this also turns into a football story for Luckman, who spends winters in the Miami area.
Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino flew with one of the Thunderbird pilots. “There isn’t any doubt that Dan Marino will break every passing record in the NFL,” Luckman says, adding that Dolphins coach Don Shula’s face went “a little white” when Luckman told him Marino flew with the Thunderbirds. “I think Marino will not be going up again.”
Luckman has received countless awards and honors for football and contributions to numerous charities. He is proud of them all and has a story to relate about most of them.
But a unique plaque on the wall in Luckman’s kitchen reads, “Interior Design by Cindy Pritzker Associates, Ltd.” His living room, with a terrific view of Navy Pier and Lake Michigan, is comfortable, with big beige sofas and a big oblong ottoman cum coffee table upholstered in plaid fabric.
“My friend, Sid,” Cindy Pritzker says with obvious affection. “He’s a winner. He really is. He is a very kind, sweet guy. There is nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for a friend. Once we were at Gibsons. I said, `This is good bread.’ The next day, 12 loaves of bread came to the apartment.”
She tells of walking with him to the State of Illinois Building, where Pritzker was renewing her driver’s license. There was a long line, and she planned to return later. But Luckman said, “Wait right here.” “Everybody came out to shake his hand. They go ape over this guy. He eats it up.” She got her driver’s license.
One of the photos in Luckman’s den shows him with Michael Jordan, whom Luckman calls “one of my heroes.” Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf asked Luckman to toss up the first basketball for the beginning of the Bulls’ Three-Peat season in 1992.
Helping others
There is a huge blowup of an Oct. 2, 1994, Bears ticket from the Buffalo game with Luckman’s picture on it; he is in uniform, throwing a pass. Luckman tells how he tossed the coin with Dick Butkus for the Bears’ 1,000th game, on Oct. 3, 1993, against the Atlanta Falcons. And the McCaskeys asked Luckman to toss the coin before the Bears-Vikings game last Sept. 18, during the team’s 75th anniversary season.
“There was such a joy in Sid that day,” relates McCaskey. “He loved football. He loved the Bears. His ability to take wonderful joy in the game of football stands out in my mind.”
“I cannot wait from one season to another to watch the National Football League,” Luckman says, “and particularly the Chicago Bears.”
Every year, he hosts a breakfast for 100 or so friends and takes them to a Bears game, usually against the Green Bay Packers, relates Dr. Edward Newman, his friend and physician for 40 years. Newman tells how “Everybody gets a zipper health club bag stuffed full of stuff,” gifts from the host, including sweatsuits, pens and perfume for the ladies and sweaters for the men.
In a conversation with a reporter he mentions literally dozens of friends, doctors and others including “my girlfiend,” Sandy Jordon. He talks about the woman’s “patience and love” while he was ill. He talks with obvious pride of a scholarship fund set up by friends for young doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. The clinic wanted to name a physical therapy building for Luckman, but Luckman preferred to help medical students, “in hopes that someday, one of the recipients of this scholarship will do something for the betterment of mankind.
“If I had to do it again, I would never change my life or lifestyle. Throughout my life, having been in sports, I always try to be a role model to the young as well as to the old in our nation.”
He says fame “never entered my mind. My total dedication was to be an athlete who looked in the mirror, who gave it everything I possibly could. It sometimes is sad to see people so outstanding who don’t put their heart and soul into it. Later, they look back and see they could have been better.
“In my lifetime, I’ve been blessed to have been fairly successful in the business world and other endeavors of my life. They can take away everything in my life but they can never take away . . . the smell of the grass . . . the roar of the crowd . . . the camaraderie between players and the friendships that developed . . . the enormous victories I was fortunate to have played with the Chicago Bears.”
At the door of his apartment, he says that he wants “three little sentences” on his tombstone: “He had it all. He did it all. He loved it all.”
As he says goodbye, he pivots gracefully and brings his right arm forward, as if throwing one more football.
