Jim Leeke is a former journalist, copywriter, and retired creative director. He interviewed Ron Luciano during Luciano’s first book tour in 1982. Leeke is the author of several books, including The Gas and Flame Men: Baseball and the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I (Potomac Books, 2024) and From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball during the Great War (Nebraska, 2017), winner of the SABR Larry Ritter Award. He lives in Columbus, Ohio. His new book Big Loosh: The Unruly Life of Umpire Ron Luciano (Nebraska, 2025) was published this month.

Ron Luciano was a college football star, baseball umpire, TV broadcaster, and best-selling author. He barged through the world with an outsized personality, entertaining many, offending a few, and hiding behind a cheerful and outrageous persona until life somehow proved unbearable. Everyone knew him, but nobody really did.

In Big Loosh Jim Leeke recounts Luciano’s unlikely career, detailing his life as athlete, arbiter, sportscaster, writer, and mythmaker while separating fact from fiction amid the fanciful stories he loved to spin. As a friend said of Luciano, “If you didn’t like this man, you didn’t like people.”

1. All-Star

A charity football game between collegiate all-stars and the top National Football League (NFL) team is unthinkable today. No good young player would risk significant injury at such an event. No agent would let him play. And the Las Vegas odds on a group of college players beating the Super Bowl champions would be too ludicrous even to post. But in 1959 the College All-Star Game was both possible and popular. Sponsored since 1934 by the Chicago Tribune, the annual late-summer classic occasionally even provided a good contest. In 1958 an outstanding batch of All-Stars had embarrassed the Detroit Lions, 35–19. This year’s opponents, the Baltimore Colts, weren’t about to let such a thing happen again.

Led by blue-collar quarterback Johnny Unitas, the Colts were among the finest teams ever to take the field. They had beaten the New York Giants in overtime three days after Christmas to win the 1958 championship. Many considered it the best game ever played in the NFL, and the historically minded say it was the moment that football began its ascendancy over baseball as the country’s most popular sport. Now the Colts were set to play the collegians August 14 in Chicago. “We have tried to choose a team with the weight and speed necessary to meet the pro champions on nearly equal terms,” said All-Star head coach Otto Graham.

Tackle Ron Luciano from Syracuse University was a third-round draft pick by the Detroit Lions and a late addition to the All-Star squad. He knew that it was an opportunity to show what he could do on a national stage before joining the professionals. The game was scheduled for a Friday night at venerable Soldier Field. Seventy thousand fans were expected to fill the stands, with millions more watching from home on television. Luciano was nervous, and he privately wondered whether he was good enough to play pro ball.

The big man seemed jinxed in Chicago. In a best-selling memoir written nearly a quarter century later, Luciano recalled Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to the All-Stars’ suburban practice facility. The veep was a onetime scrub on the Whittier College football team and an avid fan. Luciano wrote that his cleats slipped on the locker-room floor when he jumped up to shake Nixon’s hand. He grabbed Nixon for support and brought them both down. The Secret Service quickly untangled the pair, and all was forgiven. On the field a few minutes later, Luciano wrote, he made a perfect crossbody block, hurtled out of bounds into a knot of spectators, and neatly cut Nixon’s legs out from under him again. He recounted how the vice president looked at him from the ground, shook his head, and said, “You’ve just got to be a Democrat!”

Game night was sultry, the fans sitting in shirtsleeves. Despite what he told writers, Graham doubted that his college squad could pull off a second consecutive victory. When someone proposed at a pregame banquet “May the better team win,” the coach gloomily replied, “They probably will.” Graham had said before that All-Stars should never beat pros. The Colts were a stronger club than the Lions the previous year and had never played in the All-Star game. “On pride alone,” Graham said, “they figured to be up.”

Coach Weeb Ewbank’s Colts roster overflowed with gridiron greats and near greats: Unitas, Berry, Marchetti, Parker, Moore, Donovan, Lipscomb, Dupre, Ameche. The pros took the field in white road uniforms with the blue horseshoe logo on their helmets. The collegians wore jaunty blue jerseys with red stars across white shoulders. Looking back, it was a wonder that they actually took the field against the professionals. But nearly all were bound for the pros too and still possessed the optimism of youth.