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What: “Flashing Before My Eyes”

Author: Dick Schaap

Publisher: William Morrow/HarperCollins

Price: $25

Dick Schaap could be accused of name dropping in this 297-page autobiography. There are, by Schaap’s count, 351 names. Some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment, such as Muhammad Ali, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Namath, Billy Crystal, Lenny Bruce and Peter Falk, are sprinkled throughout his book.

In Schaap’s defense, name dropping is what he does for a living. He drops them into sentences, into paragraphs, into broadcasts.

The host of “The Sports Reporters” show on ESPN, Schaap has had a wide range of jobs in journalism--from newspapers to magazines to television to radio--in and outside of sports.

What Schaap does best is tell stories, and the book is filled with them. Some are humorous, some serious. All are well told in Schaap’s crisp writing style. His self-effacing touch enables the reader to forgive him if at times it seems as though he may be bragging about the people he knows.

Schaap is a prolific writer. This is his 34th book. “That’s six more than I’ve read,” he quipped at a recent book signing in Century City.

Asked why he wrote the book, Schaap responded: “To eliminate some of the clutter in my apartment. Also, some of the athletes I’ve written about haven’t been real accessible. I knew I could always get ahold of myself. And I couldn’t misquote myself, although I guess Charles Barkley said he was misquoted in his autobiography.”

Not everyone Schaap writes about is well known. He writes glowingly about the late Meredith Gourdine, a friend and schoolmate at Cornell who won a silver medal in the long jump at the 1952 Olympics. Gourdine, from a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, was one of the first black officers in the Navy. He earned a doctorate from Caltech in Pasadena and invented, among other things, a system to defog airports.

His description of an editor at Newsweek, where Schaap eventually moved up to senior editor, is not so glowing. The editor, referred to as the Idiot Prince, once sent his secretary out to buy as many four-cent stamps as she could because the price was going up to five cents. Think about that.

There are tons of little gems like that in the book. ESPN Classic is preparing a documentary based on the book. It will be shown on Feb. 27, with Schaap as host.