Richard “Dick” Schaap ’55 is well remembered as one of America’s best loved sports journalists. “He has walked with kings, ridden shotgun with legends, dined with the power elite and gotten drunk with some of the biggest sports stars of our time,” wrote fellow sportswriter Mitch Albom. “And what he comes away with is not a swelled head, an inflated sense of his own importance, or a need to lecture the world with an opinion much richer than ours. What he comes away with are stories.” Those stories were not just about sports figures, however: in the 1960s, he covered civil rights murders, the Los Angeles riots and the funeral of Malcolm X. He interview subjects ranged from Muhammad Ali and Tom Wolfe to Bobby Fischer, who described him as a “father figure.”

Schaap loved people and loved telling their stories: of his 33 books, many were co-written biographies of some of the most influential sports figures of the day. Two of these were New York Times bestsellers: Instant Replay (with Jerry Kramer) and Bo Knows Bo (with Bo Jackson). The books sold well because they were lean of flowery prose and instead sold their characters in their own voices: locker room colloquial that favored honesty over political correctness, and which showed the struggle along with the triumph.

Schaap’s craftsmanship in storytelling won him five Emmys and innumerable other awards. His career started before he even went to college, when he wrote a weekly sports column for the local paper. At Cornell, he quickly rose through the ranks and became editor in chief of The Sun, after which he went on to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on a Grantland Rice Memorial Fellowship. He would go on to be a senior editor at Newsweek, and would later turn to broadcast journalism, with spots on 20/20 and several of his own shows at ESPN, including The Sports Reporters and Schaap One on One. Though the medium was different, the Schaap style continued to entertain without sensationalizing. “He loved people, and words, and literature, and fairness,” said Billy Crystal, a close friend of Schaap, in a statement. In modern journalism, perhaps no greater compliments could be paid. Schaap passed away in 2002, at the age of 67.