City of Champions
An American story of leather helmets, iron wills and the high school kids from Jersey who won it all
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.
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. An award-winning sportswriter, Gola most recently was named the 2018 recipient of the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association’s Lincoln Werden Award for golf journalism. A native of Garfield, New Jersey, he now lives in Parsippany, NJ, with his wife, Lillian. He has two children, Henry and Julianne, and three grandchildren, Rose, Ruby and Elliot and a loyal pug, Freddie.
