The Best American Sports Writing 2000

Introduction I bring certain credentials to this guest editorship. I always had an eye for athletic talent, and I knew from an early age that I did not have that talent. I did not have the speed, strength, or hand-and-eye coordination I needed to be a great baseball, basketball, or football player, or a good one. I decided I wanted to be a sportswriter. When I was fourteen, I began writing a sports column for a weekly newspaper called the Freeport (New York) Leader. I think I was paid five dollars a column. I have recently reread some of those pieces. I think I was overpaid. My column was called "Spanning theSports Scene" alliteration was my strong suit and one of my early efforts began (typically, I"m afraid), "The local football season is about to open with a bang! Two of the local titans, Hempstead and Freeport, clash ..." In subsequent columns, the prose did not markedly improve. When I was fifteen, I went to work for a daily newspaper, the Nassau Daily Review-Star. I was in high school. My boss was Jimmy Breslin, who became a Pultizer Prizewinning columnist. Jimmy was the night sports editor, and he was twenty years old. He was in college. You can imagine how good a newspaper it was. At first I covered only my own high school"s games. I started by phoning in results. Then I began going to the office and writing the game stories. My weaknesses included an inability to type. I hunted and pecked with one finger. I took hours to write a story two or three paragraphs long. As my typing improved, I was given more responsibility. I wrote about other high schools" games. I worked four nights a week, four hours a night, for a dollar an hour. I became the paper"s resident horse- racing handicapper, even though I was not old enough to go to the track. I picked five winners one day. One night, in the infancy of my career, I went to work, and Breslin had written a script for me. He told me I was to call Fred McMorrow at the Long Island Press, which was then a sister paper to the Review- Star, and I was to repeat his words to McMorrow with feeling and precisely as he had written them. I did as I was told. "Mr. McMorrow," I said when I reached him on the phone, "my name is Dick Schaap and I am fifteen years old and I am working in the sports department at the Nassau Daily Review-Star, and when Mr. Breslin came in to work tonight, he took one look at the layouts Mr. Stirrat [the sports editor] had left for him and said they were a bunch of shit and threw them in the wastepaper basket and walked out, and I"m here all alone, trying to put out the sports section." "Oh, you poor kid," McMorrow said, and then he cursed Breslin for his character flaws. "Mr. McMorrow, I"ve written a headline that says, "Brooklyn Baseball Club Defeats Pittsburgh Baseball Club by Score of Three to One,"" I said, resuming Breslin"s script. "And I have another one that says, "Giants One Helluva Ball Club." Is that okay, Mr. McMorrow?" "Oh, you poor kid," McMorrow said again. "I"m gonna get you some help." McMorrow then called the city desk at the Review-Star and asked them to assign someone to help me. Breslin, the possessor of a very good if warped mind, had thought ahead and informed the city desk of what he was doing to McMorrow. "We can"t spare anyone," the desk told McMorrow. He called me back and told me to do my best. "You poor kid," he said. Meanwhile, of course, Breslin was putting out the sports section as well as could be expected on a paper with a twenty-year-old assistant sports editor and a fifteen-year-old reporter. McMorrow called me again. "I"veThe Best American Sports Writing 2000, 0 was published 2000 under ISBN 9780618093946 and ISBN 061809394X.