"I began learning the sportswriting business very early in life." -- Dick Schaap
Richard Jay Schaap (September 27, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York –December 21, 2001 in New York City, New York) was an American sportswriter, broadcaster, and author.
"All of journalism is a shrinking art. So much of it is hype. The O.J. Simpson story is a landmark in the decline of journalism.""Also, I am driven by a wonderful muse called alimony.""Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose.""I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader.""I did not choose necessarily on the basis of significance. If you have a vote for the most significant athlete, then you have Ali, then you have Babe Ruth, then you have Michael Jordan.""I got to know Sugar Ray but I certainly would not say we were good friends.""I just can't believe all the things I did that decade.""I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.""I think on balance, Don King has been bad for boxing. I think he's done some very good things and I think he did a heck of a job of promoting Ali but I think I could have promoted Ali.""I wanted to be a sportswriter because I loved sports and I could not hit the curve ball, the jump shot, or the opposing ball carrier.""I was also in love with the English language.""I worked with Rocky Graziano and Rocky was certainly a character.""If I got paid, it was no more than five dollars a column, and I still think I was overpaid.""In fifty years of covering the sport, of course Muhammad Ali is by far the dominant figure.""It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters, boxing and horse racing, have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero.""My top three were Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Bo Jackson.""My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.""Some people who love boxing might love Mike Tyson, but people outside of the sport are generally repulsed by him and therefore, repulsed by the sport.""Sportswriters have changed more than sportswriting.""Sugar Ray and talked about doing some articles together or writing a book together but dealing with Sugar Ray was a lot like fighting him. He would fake you in and then he'd drop you.""Sugar Ray Leonard was as close as anyone came after Ali to being Ali, but he wasn't Ali.""Sugar Ray Robinson was at the top of the boxing world during the 1950's when it seemed that he would either win or lose the championship about every three or four months.""Today, it's money. There's no question about that. Unless you endorse a grill that cooks hamburgers and steaks, where else can you make the kind of money that you can make in the ring if you're good?"
Born to a Jewish family and raised in Freeport, New York, on Long Island, Schaap began writing a sports column at age 14 for the weekly Freeport Leader, but the following year he moved to the Nassau Daily Review-Star daily under Jimmy Breslin. He would later follow Breslin to the Long Island Press and New York Herald Tribune.
He attended Cornell University and was editor-in-chief of the student paper, the Cornell Daily Sun, during which time he defended a professor before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He lettered in varsity lacrosse playing goaltender. During his last year at Cornell, Schaap was elected to the Sphinx Head Society. After graduating in 1955 he received a Grantland Rice fellowship at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and authored his thesis on the recruitment of basketball players.
Schaap began work as assistant sports editor of Newsweek. In 1964, he began a thrice-weekly column covering current events. He became editor of SPORT magazine in 1973. It was there that he masterminded the inspiration for the eccentricities that surround Media Day at the Super Bowl. Fed up with the grandiose and self-important nature of the National Football League's championship match, he hired two Los Angeles Rams players, Fred Dryer and Lance Rentzel, to cover Super Bowl IX. Donning costumes inspired by The Front Page, "Scoops Brannigan" (Dryer) and "Cubby O'Switzer" (Rentzel) peppered players and coaches from both the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings with questions that ranged from clichéd to downright absurd. Schaap was also a theatre critic, leading him to quip that he was the only person ever to vote for both the Tony Awards and the Heisman Trophy. He interviewed non-sports figures such as Matthew Broderick and produced cultural features for ABC's overnight news program World News Now.
After spending the 1970s with NBC as an NBC Nightly News and Today Show correspondent, he moved to ABC World News Tonight and 20/20 at ABC in the 1980s. He earned five Emmy Awards, for profiles of Sid Caesar and Tom Waddell, two for reporting, and for writing. In 1988 he began hosting The Sports Reporters on ESPN cable television, which in later years often featured son Jeremy as a correspondent. He also hosted Schaap One on One on ESPN Classic and a syndicated ESPN Radio show called The Sporting Life with Dick Schaap, in which he discussed the week's developments in sports with Jeremy.
He wrote the 1968 best-seller Instant Replay, co-authored with Jerry Kramer of the Green Bay Packers, and I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow... 'Cause I Get Better-Looking Every Day, the 1969 autobiography of New York Jet Joe Namath. These led to a stint as co-host of The Joe Namath Show, which in turn led to his hiring as sports anchor for WNBC-TV. Other books included a biography of Robert F. Kennedy; .44 (with Jimmy Breslin), a fictionalized account of the hunt for Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz; Turned On, about upper middle-class drug abuse; An Illustrated History of the Olympics, a coffee-table book on the history of the modern Olympic Games; The Perfect Jump, on the world record-breaking long jump by Bob Beamon in the 1968 Summer Olympics; My Aces, My Faults with Nick Bollettieri; Steinbrenner!, a biography of mercurial New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner; and Bo Knows Bo with Bo Jackson. His autobiography, Flashing Before My Eyes: 50 Years of Headlines, Deadlines & Punchlines , was reissued under Schaap's original title "Dick Schaap as Told to Dick Schaap: 50 years of Headlines, Deadlines and Punchlines."
In 2002, Schaap was honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors, who awarded him the Red Smith Award. Also in 2002, he was inducted into the Nassau County Sports Hall of Fame, which created the Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Journalism.
Around 1955, Schaap befriended Bobby Fischer, who later became a world chess champion. In 2005, prompted by questions Jeremy Schaap, Fischer acknowledged that the relationship was significant. Fischer was still pointedly resentful that Dick Schaap had later written, among many other comments, that Fischer "did not have a sane bone left in his body".
The Sports Emmy division of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences renamed their writing category "The Dick Schaap Outstanding Writing Award." The 2005 Emmy in this category was won by Jeremy for a SportsCenter piece called “Finding Bobby Fischer.”
