The Schaap Shop

As journalists go, Dick Schaap has gone pretty far. He was city editor of the New York Herald Tribune at 29, and became a columnist for that paper less than a year later. He has written five newsbooks on his own, including Turned On, R.F.K., Mickey Mantle, and now, at 34, appears well on his way to becoming the single most prolific mass producer of new reading matter since Alexandre Dumas put his friends to work preparing plot outlines and sketching scenes--a bit of largesse that prompted a 19th century French journalist to remark: "No one has ever read the whole of Dumas, not even himself."

Schaap had no intention of becoming a latter-day Dumas when he agreed to edit the tape-recorded diary of a professional football player in early 1967. But when that exercise resulted in Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer, breaking sales records for a sports book (over 2,000,000 copies in print), Schaap took to buying his recording tape wholesale and signed up a whole new bibliography of authors.

The first of the new Schaap books off the presses (published last week) is Jerry Kramer's Farewell to Football, a sort of Son-of-Instant-Replay that brings Kramer fans up to date on the articulate behemoth's final (1968) season, his biography and his future plans. Next (mid-October) will come The Year the Mets Lost Last Place, a 75,000-word treatise put together by Schaap and Newsweek Editor Paul D. Zimmerman in six weeks during July and August. It will be followed by I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow . . . 'Cause I Get Better-Looking Every Day, the Joe Namath biography that Schaap culled from some 50 tape hours of Broadway Joe's reflections.

After the Namath book, the transcriptions are backed up like 707s at J.F.K. The next two, set for late March publication, are diaries of professional Golfer Frank Beard and Detroit Tiger Bill Freehan, who were chosen, as Schaap puts it, "as much for their ability to articulate as for their ability to play the sport." One would-be football diarist from the Pittsburgh Steelers who wrote to ask for the Kramer treatment was rejected out of hand because he misspelled Pittsburgh. Diaries of Hockey Player Derek Sanderson, Basketballer Dave DeBusschere, Concert Violinist Erick Friedman, a Long Island rabbi, a Marine captain in Viet Nam, an airline pilot and a single career girl are coming along nicely too.

Minute Fact. What was once a lonely confrontation between Schaap and his tape recorders has gradually expanded into a community of scribes and transcribes. In the three-room Manhattan headquarters of the shop he calls Maddick* Manuscripts, the tape machines whir and the typewriters maintain a near-constant staccato. Some of the diaries now in the early stages have been subcontracted to friends like LIFE'S Steve Gelman and Harper's Magazine Editor Willie Morris, allowing Schaap more time to juggle phone calls and pursue other projects. For example: a golf and repartee match between Kramer, Beard, DeBusschere and Mets Pitcher Tom Seaver, to be filmed this winter for TV.

So professional has Maddick become that prospective diarists now receive Schaap's "General Guide to Maintaining a Diary for Publication," a five-page instruction manual on achieving literary immortality. Excerpts: "The little detail, the minute fact, creates reality. The more little details the reader is provided with, the more he feels a total sense of reality ... It can be helpful to go on the assumption that most of life, or at least much of life, is absurd, and that each man's preoccupation with what he himself does is even more absurd. Don't be afraid to poke fun at yourself and to poke fun at your particular field." And most important of all, Schaap adds. "BE SURE YOUR TAPE RECORDER IS WORKING PROPERLY."

The Schaap shop turns out books that are not written; they are spliced together. Nor are they really read, in the traditional sense; going through these fragile works is more like listening than reading. Still, Instant Replay has many of the elements of good fiction; it offers real tension, arising from the Packers' march to an unprecedented third successive National Football League championship. At his best, Schaap has drawn ingenuous and appealing narratives from people whose stories might otherwise never be told. And by keeping his function as an editor within bounds (no direct rewriting), he has helped to chase the ghost out of ghostwriting.

As for the instant bookmaking process itself, "it's a great way to learn a new field," says Schaap, "and there's always plenty of material left over for future novels." A final plus comes from the psychic stimulation of having a whole wardrobe of identities at his disposal. "You wake up in the morning," he says, "and ask yourself who will I become today. Will I be Joe Namath and get vicariously drunk? The rabbi and feel saintly? The violinist and feel aesthetic?" What about a diary of his own? "I tried that," he says, "but I'm just not as interesting as my subjects."

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