Lost Lakers: Grosse Pointe to Grand Valley—Cake Eater Meets Convict

Using the Detroit sports scene of the 1960s and early '70s as the backdrop, Motor City native Bob Evancho's memoir, "Lost Lakers: Grosse Pointe to Grand Valley-Cake Eater Meets Convict," is a tale that brings him full circle from his three years with the Grosse Pointe St. Paul High football team in the late 1960s, to Grand Valley State College (now University) as a member of the school's fledgling football program, to his current home in Idaho and back to a Michigan state prison where he reunites with former Laker teammate Reginald "Hook" Johnson, who is serving a life sentence for his involvement in five Detroit-area homicides committed in 1975.With the book's foreword written by Pro Football Hall of Famer and Detroit native Joe DeLamielleure, "Lost Lakers" recalls the author's dogged and persistent-but largely unfulfilling-pursuit of sports during his 22? years in Michigan before he moved to Idaho in 1975.With humor and candor, Evancho writes about his aversion to the outdoors, his general ineptitude in most things related to sports, and his mostly misguided efforts to play football at St. Paul and Grand Valley-Michigan schools that shared not only the same nickname but also a distinct lack of gridiron cachet at that time.It was at Grand Valley that Evancho and Johnson (aka Amin Abdullah Mu'min), an ex-con from the Detroit area, first met. In May of 1974 Johnson was elected the college's student-government vice president and had seemingly turned his life around-only to play a role in five murders less than a year later.And as Evancho writes about his reconnection with Johnson, "Lost Lakers" takes a much more serious tone. With Johnson's help, the author tells an intriguing and compelling story of how two divergent lives came crashing together-literally-on a football field, went in starkly opposite directions and reconnected more than 40 years later.