On Christmas night, 1939, two vastly different teams from Garfield, New Jersey, and Miami, Florida collided in the historic Orange Bowl to decide the National Sports Foundation’s national championship. Garfield’s Boilermakers were children of immigrants drawn to the industrial city’s churning factories. Miami’s Stingarees were from families from all over the country settling in one of America’s most promising and thriving cities.

In City of Champions, Hank Gola, a veteran and award-winning football writer, unveils this long-forgotten game. Gola mines stories of the towns and the lives of the players and coaches—detailing the grit (and wild strokes of fortune) that led up to a Garfield victory, stunning the football world. Gola also describes how this game mirrored America, revealing some of the most pressing cultural, economic and socio-political issues of the day.

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About the Author:

Hank Gola has spent over four decades as a journalist, primarily covering professional football and golf for the New York Daily News and New York Post after starting his career at The Herald-News of Passaic, NJ, and the Daily Record of Morris County, NJ, where he covered the Cosmos of the North American Soccer League and the New York Giants of the National Football League.

A native of Garfield, NJ, Gola graduated with a BA in history from Montclair State College in 1976. He has previously authored two books, Hard Nose, (HBJ, 1987) with Jim Burt, the inside story of the Giants’ 1986 Super Bowl season and Tiger Woods, (Courage Books, 1998) an illustrated biography of the then-young superstar golfer.