Dick Schaap

Richard Jay Schaap was born in Brooklyn on September 27, 1934, and took the fast route into the trade. He graduated from Cornell in 1955, went to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism on a Grantland Rice fellowship, and was assistant sports editor of Newsweek while still in his twenties. From there he moved through the Long Island Press and the New York Herald Tribune, where he was city editor for a stretch, a job that had nothing to do with sports and shaped everything he did in them afterward.

That is the point about Schaap. He was never only a sportswriter. He covered politics, wrote about the city, profiled comedians and doctors, and treated a locker room as one more place where people said interesting things if you asked. The generalist's range showed up in the books and later on television.

The range also produced a remarkable address book. As a young Newsweek writer in 1960 he met an eighteen-year-old Olympic boxer from Louisville named Cassius Clay and stayed on friendly terms with him, under both names, for the next forty years. He knew Namath, Kramer and Lombardi's Packers, the Knicks of the early 1970s, and a long run of politicians and entertainers who had nothing to do with sports. Schaap's stock in trade was that people talked to him, and kept talking.

In 1968 Schaap and Green Bay Packers guard Jerry Kramer published Instant Replay, a diary of the 1967 season that ended with the Ice Bowl and the second Super Bowl. It was a bestseller and it made the as-told-to athlete book respectable. Before Instant Replay those books were mostly padding; afterward publishers wanted the real thing, and Schaap spent the next three decades supplying it.

He edited SPORT magazine in the early 1970s and kept writing at a pace few daily columnists could match. Joe Namath's autobiography, Bob Beamon's story in The Perfect Jump, Bo Knows Bo with Bo Jackson, a Steinbrenner biography, a memoir of his own. Some of the books are better than others, and he knew it. What they share is an ear for how athletes actually talk, which is rarer than it sounds.

Instant Replay made the athlete's diary a real book. The genre has been trying to live up to it since 1968.

Schaap moved into television in the 1970s as a correspondent for NBC Nightly News and the Today show, then in the 1980s for ABC, appearing on World News Tonight and 20/20. His profiles won five Emmy Awards, among them pieces on Sid Caesar and on Tom Waddell, the physician and decathlete who founded the Gay Games. Neither subject was a sports story in the usual sense, which was rather the point.

From 1988 he hosted The Sports Reporters on ESPN, a Sunday-morning half hour in which three or four newspaper columnists argued with each other on camera. It sounds unremarkable now because every network copied it. Schaap ran it as a moderator rather than a star, letting the panel talk and stepping in with a question when it drifted. He also hosted Schaap One on One and The Sporting Life with Dick Schaap on ESPN.

The Sports Reporters is the reason the APSE, an organisation of newspaper editors, could honor a television host without embarrassment. The panel was drawn from their own ranks. Mitch Albom, Mike Lupica, Bob Ryan, Bill Conlin, John Feinstein and the rest were columnists first, and the show treated them as such. Schaap gave the printed sports column a Sunday audience it had never had, and several of the regulars went on to receive this award themselves.

Schaap went into Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan for hip replacement surgery in September 2001. Complications followed, and he died there on December 21, at sixty-seven. The Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award for 2002, making him one of the few recipients honored after death. The citation covered a career that had touched nearly every form sports journalism takes: newspaper, magazine, book and broadcast.

His memoir, Flashing Before My Eyes, had appeared earlier in 2001, and it reads now as a tidy summary of the case. Fifty years of headlines, datelines and punchlines, as the subtitle puts it, from a man who never settled on one form because he was good at all of them. The award citation could have been shorter. It could simply have listed the mastheads.

His son Jeremy Schaap carried on at ESPN as a reporter and anchor, and the family name is still on the air. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association inducted Dick Schaap into its Hall of Fame in 2015, and an award for outstanding writing was established in his name.