JEREMY SCHAAP — A FORTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD CLONE OF HIS DAD
Jeremy Schaap and his father. Two peas in a pod in most every way.
The birth of E:60 (which was created to help replace ESPN’s The Sports Reporters following the ground-breaking linchpin show’s nearly 30-year run) has vaulted the 24-year veteran of ESPN to even more rarified air.
Jeremy Schaap carefully watching, learning and honing his craft, essentially carrying on for his dad, preserving and enhancing the elder’s legacy while building his own.
“My father was a workaholic, he was considered the ultimate workaholic. I remember getting a summer job as a copyboy [sic] for The New York Times when I was 16, and my dad said, this is what you do, you get there before your boss, you leave after your boss. If they want you to carry typewriters up and down the stairs, you carry them. If they want a cup of coffee at the coffee shop down the corner, sprint, don’t walk.”
Schaap expounds when dispensing advice to the aspiring investigative journalist, once again harkening back to the words of his dad.
The willingness to work hard opens the door and sometimes can even trump raw talent and intelligence, but there’s more to it.
Says he, “More specifically about journalism, what my dad used to say was that it comes down to one thing: being fair. Be fair to your audience, be fair to your readers, be fair to your listeners, be fair to your viewers and be fair to your subject.
My father was the furthest thing in the world from a cheap-shot artist, but when someone had it coming, that fairness meant being tough at times too. Fairness means stepping back and thinking about all of that…
So: Hard work is important if you want to get a chance. And once you get a chance, be fair. That’s the most important thing.”
Schaap the younger got his start at NY1 as an analyst and government reporter. He was not involved with sports at all in those early days. Rather, he covered city government as well as whatever the cable network considered the hot button issues affecting the city’s five boroughs.
An alumnus of Cornell University, as was the senior Schaap, Jeremy was the editor at The Cornell Daily Sun (Dick Schaap was the editor-in-chief in his day, not to mention the goalie on the lacrosse team which meant he looked down the barrel of a galloping opponent by the name of Jim Brown a time or two) and a member of the historic and esteemed Quill and Dagger Society.
He joined such luminaries and fellow undergraduate selections as Sandy Berger, Barber Conable, Adolph Coors III, Ken Dryden, Austin Kiplinger, Drew Nieporent, Leah Ward Sears, Jay Walker, Seth Harris, E.B. White, Ben Scrivens and others.
[Sidebar: Notable honorary members include Edward Leamington Nichols and Ernest Wilson Huffcut who graduated from Cornell before the society was founded, as well as Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg who graduated before the Q&D accepted women].
Today Jeremy Schaap is one of ESPN’s preeminent journalists and the acclaimed author of Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History (2005) a New York Times bestseller, and Triumph: The Untold story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics, (2007) the rights to which Disney purchased.
In addition to co-hosting E:60 with the iconic Bob Ley and contributing to Outside the Lines and SportsCenter, he is the host of the award-winning weekly radio show and podcast The Sporting Life.
But perhaps Jeremy Schaap’s most powerful journalistic attributes are his reach, his scope and his basic understanding. (Genetic? Speaking to ‘fairness,’ let’s remember that he has a mother too).
In 2007 he was the winner of a National Headliner Award; in 2012 and 2014 he won two national Edward R. Murrow Awards; and in 2015 Schaap won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for his reporting on human rights and social justice issues, a first for ESPN.
The RFK Center honored Schaap for his E:60 investigative research and story entitled, “Qatar’s World Cup,” exposing the plight of migrant laborers in Qatar who live and work in barbarously inhumane conditions. It has been projected that thousands will die as the tiny gulf emirate, by some measures the richest country on earth, prepares to host the 2022 World Cup.
(Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world and is the 10th. largest net exporter — $48.798 billion USD — not surprisingly backed by the world’s third-largest natural gas and oil reserves position. The country will become the first Arab nation to host the World Cup).
A winner of eleven national Sports Emmy Awards in journalism and an eight-time Emmy Award winner for his work on E:60, SportsCenter and Outside the Lines, Schaap’s profile of Bobby Fischer for ESPN garnered him the national Sports Emmy Award for writing — named for his father. (In addition to his contributions for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, Schaap’s writing has graced the pages of The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic).
Then there was the first interview with Bob Knight after his firing by Indiana University in 2000 which turned confrontational, and was described by Phil Mushnick of the New York Post as “a slam dunk…one that should be stored in the annals of sports broadcast journalism.”
First and breaking interviews with Darryl Strawberry in his Yankee days after his colon cancer diagnosis; with Plaxico Burress of the New York Football Giants after he shot himself in a New York City nightclub; and with Manti Te’o after it was reported and then clearly substantiated that his highly-publicized “girlfriend” was a figment of his imagination.
In February 2003 Schaap broke the story — not to mention the hearts of Dawgs fans spanning the globe — when he systematically unveiled and proved a pattern of misconduct by the University of Georgia’s Men’s Basketball coaching staff which ultimately resulted in the team’s withdrawal from both the SEC and NCAA tournaments and the departure of coach Jim Harrick.
John Jackson of the Chicago Sun-Times matter-of-factly commented at the time that “the report was the kind of first-rate reporting rarely seen on TV. Jeremy Schaap’s reporting was fair and balanced.”
But here’s the thing. It’s bigger than sports for Schaap.
When ESPN signed him to a long-term extension in 2015 he remarked, “At ESPN, I have been afforded the opportunity to develop as a journalist and a broadcaster…I have been encouraged to pursue stories that transcend sports, that sometimes are only tangentially about sports, but that speak to larger issues. I will continue to seek out those kinds of stories…”
It’s about issues. Current events. The earth’s axis.
Certainly sports has become his bailiwick. If there’s a co-mingling of the world with sports, then so be it. If not, then that’s okay too. His instinctive recognition of what’s newsworthy is approaching the stuff of legend, as is the recognition of Schaap himself.
One of his best-known stories emerged from an investigation that took him to Serbia in search of a basketball player accused of a brutal assault; this effort earned him the national Sports Emmy Award for journalism.
In 2011 Schaap was honored by the United Nations, recognized with a special commendation for his report on so-called ‘corrective rape,’ the sexual attacks committed against lesbians in South Africa.
In 2006 he received the annual journalism award of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications saluting his story about the Morgan State University lacrosse team, the only lacrosse team ever fielded by an historically black college.
In 2001 Schaap was honored by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for his two-part piece on a white Florida high school football coach whose use of a racial epithet fueled local fury.
In 2015 he won a PRISM Award for his work focusing on addiction issues highlighted by an incisive report on Dallas Cowboys Tight End Jason Witten and his alcoholic, abusive father.
And also in 2015, Schaap was nominated for a national News and Documentary Emmy Award for an E:60 profile of a survivor of extreme domestic violence. To be nominated in this category was a first for ESPN.
As for his charitable endeavors, included are longstanding relationships with the ALS Association whose annual sports award dinner he emcees and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America which has honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.
At 48, he seems hell-bent for election to surpass the grandiose achievements of his father, the silver-bullet, husky-voiced avuncular (and a bit too self-important) New Yorker who introduced an 18-year-old Cassius Clay to Harlem; coined the moniker, “Fun City” for New York; and was said to have “collected people the way the Collier [sic] brothers squirreled away decades-old newspapers, a vast assemblage that formed the foundation of his 2001 autobiography, Flashing Before My Eyes.”
Perhaps best known for his 12-year run as the host of ESPN’s The Sports Reporters aptly punctuated by his closing, often tart and not-to-be-missed “Parting Shots” segment, Dick Schaap — who died in 2001 at the age of 67 — wrote two of the best-selling sports books of their respective eras, Instant Replay (with Jerry Kramer of the Packers) and Bo Knows Bo (with Bo Jackson).
His son Jeremy — humble, deferential and respectful of course — is in hot pursuit.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in December 2017.]
