Dick Schaap and I met nearly 30 years ago in, of all places, Iceland, where we had both stopped off on route to the Munich Olympics to cover the denouement of Bobby Fischer's celebrated chess match against Boris Spassky.
We spent several nights carousing in what would pass for pubs in 1972 Reykjavik, at the time a dank city. The most startling reminder that we were in another world came the night Dick got lucky and was taken home by an attractive woman. The next morning he found himself surrounded at the kitchen table by three generations of curious family members, including, to his embarrassment and chagrin, the parents of the husband of the lady who was by now making Dick's breakfast.
In the days since Dick died, at 67, of acute respiratory failure in a New York hospital last week, it has occurred to me that an inordinate number of my Schaap reminiscences involved members of the opposite sex. On the other hand, since they pre-dated his marriage to the former Trish Kennedy of Dornoch, Scotland, they might be considered fair game.
In its obituary the morning after he died, the New York Times described Schaap as "ubiquitous", and indeed, the word might have been invented to describe his life. A Renaissance man for our times, he toured Harlem with the young Cassius Clay, chased skirts with Joe Namath, numbered among his friends comedians from Lenny Bruce (whom he took to his first baseball game) to Billy Crystal.
He wrote, in all, 34 books, ranging from the 1960s football classic Instant Replay to RFK, his well-received biography of the late Robert F Kennedy, to .44, the novel he co-wrote with his best friend, Jimmy Breslin. As a young columnist for the New York Herald Tribune (where he worked alongside Breslin) he had interviewed and befriended the young Malcolm X.
He was also the man who coined New York's pre-"Big Apple" sobriquet, "Fun City". Even after making the switch to TV 30 years ago he continued to write - and, for a time, edit - Sport magazine out of, literally, his office at NBC. He would later graduate to ABC and ESPN, and although he would win six Emmy awards for his television work, he self-deprecatingly described the medium as "generally not for adults - on either side of the screen".
As New York Post scribe Wally Matthews wrote last week, "of all the remarkable accomplishments of Dick Schaap's long career in two of the most viciously competitive fields (newspapers and television) the most amazing is this: no matter how hard you look, you will not find a single person in either field that has a bad word to say about him - and that goes for while he was still alive".
A quarter century or so ago a forlorn young female photographer showed up at the Super Bowl Media Centre in Miami, lacking credentials or a letter of assignment. Since I'm a compassionate fellow by nature (and it didn't hurt that the lady in question was a rather stunning blonde), I told her I could probably use a stringer that week, and took her along to that morning's Dallas Cowboys interview session in Fort Lauderdale, where I introduced her to Schaap. To say that the lady was upwardly mobile is something of an understatement. By noon she was no longer working for me but for Sport, and accompanied Dick to a luncheon appointment that day at Bachelors III, a saloon owned, like its New York namesake, by Namath.
When I ran into Dick at the bar that night he explained that the photographer and the quarterback had experienced an immediate attraction and that he'd been forced to leave her behind with Namath. That was the last we heard of her that week, until moments before kick-off, when we trained our binoculars on the sidelines and spotted our once-credentialless photographer on the Pittsburgh Steelers' bench.
A few years ago Schaap decided to enter a team in a charity golf tournament sponsored by The Flamingo, a strip club in Lawrence, Kansas. At what must have been enormous expense to himself, he put together a squad which included myself, the heavyweight boxer Lou Savarese, the infamous sports imposter Barry Bremen, and, for balance, an actual golfer - Ned Steiner, the New Jersey amateur who shared (with Jack Nicklaus) the course record at Baltusrol.
We flew into Kansas City, where Dick had us met by stretch limo and whisked away to that evening's pre-tournament auction. The Calcutta itself raised tens of thousands of dollars for the charity, and also served as a job fair of sorts for the club's employees, who were hiring themselves off as topless caddies for the next day's activities.
Dick was surely the only man alive to have simultaneously been a qualified voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Heisman Trophy, the Emmys, and the Tony Awards - and for all I know he may have had an Oscar ballot as well.
His most recent book was his biography, Flashing Before My Eyes: 50 Years of Headlines, Deadlines and Punchlines, which he jokingly described as "Dick Schaap as told to Dick Schaap." In the biography the names of the rich, the famous, and the infamous spill from every page. Only Schaap could have gotten away with it, and at one point in the book he asks, "Have I broken the record for name-dropping yet?"
Recently we spoke by telephone just a few times a year, and got together when Dick was in Boston, but the one time I could count on seeing him was the night before the Super Bowl. No matter what far-flung spot the NFL had assigned its biggest game, Schaap managed to nail down the city's most interesting restaurant, at which he and Trish would host their Super Bowl eve party.
Dick entered the hospital for what seemed to be routine hip-replacement surgery three months ago, but complications set in and he never left.
My surmise is that, given the time and preparation the Schaaps put into their annual soiree, they'd already picked out this year's venue in New Orleans. A few weeks from now I'll ring Trish to find the spot, and sometime on the evening of February 2nd, I plan to drop by and hoist a glass to Dick's memory.
My guess is I'll have plenty of company.
