[Deathwatch] Dick Schaap, sports writer, 67

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Friday December 21 10:31 PM ET 

Famed sports writer Dick Schaap dies in New York

By Kevin Krolicki

LOS ANGELES(Reuters) - Dick Schaap, an award-winning journalist known
for profiling and befriending some of the biggest stars in a
half-century of American sports, died Friday in New York. He was 67.

Schaap died of complications from a hip replacement surgery at a New
York hospital, according to ESPN, the network that carried a weekly
radio program co-hosted by Schaap and his son Jeremy.

Schaap rose to fame in the era of New Journalism in the 1960s, along
with other fabled writers and editors at the defunct New York Herald
Tribune, including Tom Wolfe and Gail Sheehy, borrowing from the
techniques of a novelist.

When the Tribune and its successor folded, Schaap went on to write more
than 30 books, including some of the best-selling ghostwritten
biographies in sports, notably ``Instant Replay,'' a 1968 collaboration
with Green Bay Packers tight end Jerry Kramer, and ``Bo Knows Bo,'' the
story of Bo Jackson's carer straddling professional baseball and
football and marketing in the 1980s.

He combined his career as an author with that of a successful TV and
radio commentator as well as a magazine editor.

Schaap was admired for his ability to tell a story while striking up
lasting friendships with the subjects of his profiles, including boxing
legend Muhammed Ali, comic Lenny Bruce and Joe Namath, who led the
upstart New York Jets to a Super Bowl victory in 1969.

Schaap firmly believed in focusing on the subject of the story rather
than himself. ``(It's) not about me,'' he said in a television
adaptation of his autobiography, ``Flashing Before My Eyes.''

``He lived each day to the fullest, and during the course of an amazing
life, encountered almost every major figure that impacted our culture
over the last 40 years,'' ESPN president George Bodenheimer said in a
statement.

WIDE-RANGING CAREER

Schaap, a Brooklyn native, graduated from Cornell University in 1955
and studied journalism at Columbia University. He began writing sports
news at age 15 for a Long Island newspaper under the tutelage of Jimmy
Breslin, then a 20-year-old night sports editor for the Nassau Daily
Review-Star and later a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist.

``I always had an eye for athletic talent, and I knew from an early age
that I did not have that talent,'' Schaap wrote last year. ``I did not
have the speed, strength or hand-eye coordination I needed to be a
great baseball, basketball or football player, or a good one. I decided
I want to be a sportswriter.''

Schaap was also an editor at Sport magazine and Newsweek, before a
career in television that included stints at ESPN and at ABC's ``World
News Now,'' where he was a theater critic.

Schaap won two Emmy awards for feature reporting on ABC's 20/20 news
program and two Sports Emmys for his work on ESPN.

He once boasted that he was the only reporter to vote for both the
Heisman Trophy for college football and Broadway's Tony Awards (news -
web sites), capping a wide-ranging career in which he covered
everything from the murder of civil rights leader Malcolm X to the the
bullpen politics of the New York Yankees.

``The journalistic principles are the same for covering a pennant race
or a race riot,'' Schaap wrote of his craft. ``You use your eyes, your
ears, and, as Jimmy Breslin has always preached, your legs. You go to
the scene. You talk to the people involved. You ask questions. You look
for the small details that reinforce credibility, and then, using those
details, using quotes, using the richness of the English language, you
tell the story as vividly, as honestly, as compellingly as you can.''

Schaap is survived by his wife, Trish, and six children.

Reuters/Variety REUTERS