Roger Treat was an American sportswriter and author. He was a vocal critic of segregation policies in both baseball and football, and was cited by his contemporaries as a key figure in the effort to integrate both sports. Treat was also the editor of the first football encyclopedia.

Treat began his newspaper career as sports editor of the Washington Daily News

Washington Daily News

The Washington Daily News is a daily newspaper serving Washington, North Carolina. It is the smallest daily newspaper to ever win a Pulitzer Prize gold medal....

 in the early 1940s and later moved to the Chicago Herald American

Chicago's American

Chicago American, an afternoon newspaper in Chicago, Illinois, was the last flowering of the aggressive journalistic tradition depicted in the play and movie The Front Page....

. He later worked at the Washington Post, Baltimore News American, and the Danbury News Times.

Treat wrote the classic book "Man o' War

Man O' War (horse)

Man o' War, is considered one of the greatest Thoroughbred racehorses of all time. During his career just after World War I, he won 20 of 21 races and $249,465 in purses....

", considered by many to be the definitive biography of the legendary racehorse. First published in 1950, the book remains in print today.

In the early 1950s, Treat launched a massive effort to document the history of professional football

Professional football

In the United States and Canada, the term professional football includes the professional forms of American and Canadian gridiron football. In common usage, it refers to former and existing major football leagues in either country...

. That work culminated in the 1952 publication of The Official Encyclopedia of the National Football League. The book represented the first attempt to document the score of every game in the league's history and every player who had appeared in a game. It was widely praised and remained the seminal reference book on the subject for more than twenty years. Treat oversaw the publication of six revised editions before his death in 1969. Thereafter, his daughter-in-law Suzanne Treat became the book's editor, publishing nine more editions between 1970 and 1979.

Among Treat's other books was a pulp novel called "Joy Ride" and a biography of his close friend Bernard J. Sheil entitled "Bishop Sheil and the CYO." Treat wrote three books for children: "Walter Johnson, King of the Pitchers" (1948), "Duke of the Bruins" (1950), and "Boy Jockey" (1953).

Treat's final book, published after his death, was a novel called "The Endless Road." It tells the story of a Chicago newspaperman struggling with alcoholism, a thinly veiled account of his own life.

Treat and his wife Gerda Dahl Treat had two sons, John Treat and Peter Treat. He died of lung cancer

Lung cancer

Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...

 in Danbury, Connecticut

Danbury, Connecticut

Danbury is a city in northern Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It had population at the 2010 census of 80,893. Danbury is the fourth largest city in Fairfield County and is the seventh largest city in Connecticut....

.