Education Quote by Dick Schaap

The line lands with the casual confidence of someone who knows the “business” is the point, not the games. Dick Schaap isn’t reminiscing about childhood fandom; he’s staking a claim to fluency in a trade where access, timing, and narrative instinct matter as much as a clean lede. “Very early in life” reads like a wink: he learned young that sportswriting is less about describing what happened than deciding what it will mean by tomorrow morning.

The word “business” does sly work. It nods to the marketplace of attention long before anyone called it that: cultivating sources, earning trust, catching a quote that turns a box score into a parable. Schaap came up when sports media was becoming a national stage - television expanding celebrity, magazines and newspapers turning athletes into characters with arcs, not just stat lines. To learn the business early is to learn the rules of proximity: how close you can get to heroes without becoming their publicist, how to stay sharp without turning cruel.

Subtextually, it’s also a defense. Sportswriting has always carried a chip on its shoulder, dismissed as the toy department. Schaap flips that hierarchy: if it’s a business, it demands craft, strategy, and an ethical spine. The sentence is modest on the surface, but it quietly asserts authority. I’ve been around long enough to know what this job really is - and what it costs when you pretend it’s only about the score.