A daughter discovers herself while uncovering her father s legendary past in football. At the age of thirty Jael Ealey Richardson travelled with her father -- former CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey -- for the first time to a small town in southern Ohio for his fortieth high school reunion. Knowing very little about her father s past Richardson was searching for the story behind her father s move from the projects of Portsmouth Ohio to Canada s professional football league in the early 1970s. At the railroad tracks where her father first learned to throw with stones Jael begins an unexpected journey into her family s past. In this engaging father-daughter memoir Richardson records some of her father s never-before told stories: his relationship with his absentee father memories of his high school and college football victories - including a winning record that remains unbroken to this day - and his up-and-down relationship with the woman he would one day marry. As Richardson begins unravelling the story of her father s life she begins to compare her own childhood growing up in Canada with her father s US civil rights era upbringing. Along the way she also discovers the real reason - despite his athletic accomplishments - her father was never drafted into the National Football League. The Stone Thrower is a moving story about race and destiny written by a daughter looking for answers about her own black history. Using insightful interviews archival records and her personal reflections Richardson s journey to learn about her father s past leads her to her own important discoveries about herself and what it really means to be black in Canada.