Joe Zagorski

Joe Zagorski is a U.S. Army veteran, a former schoolteacher, a former park ranger, and a former sportswriter for two newspapers in Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA) and the Pro Football Researchers Association (PFRA). He is also an associate member of the NFL Alumni Association. He has written four previous books, each of which deal with pro football’s past.Zagorski’s first book, The NFL in the 1970s: Pro Football’s Most Important Decade, was rated by the Library Journal as one of the Top 10 Football Books in America in 2016. His second book, The Year the Packers Came Back: Green Bay’s 1972 Resurgence, was declared by the Milwaukee Record as one of the top Christmas books for Packers fans in 2019. A year later, his third book, America’s Trailblazing Middle Linebacker: The Story of NFL Hall of Famer Willie Lanier, recounted the exploits of the first fulltime African-American middle linebacker in pro football history. Zagorski won the Pro Football Researchers Association’s Ralph Hay Award for Lifetime Achievement for Pro Football Research and Historiography. He is also a contributing writer for the website Pro Football Journal and the Facebook page The NFL in the 1970s. His most recent accomplishment involved writing his first screenplay entitled Town Teams, which he finished in 2021. In 2022, he began to work on a biography of former Miami Dolphins Hall of Fame offensive guard Larry Little.Zagorski was born and raised in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.