Remembering John Feinstein, renowned American sportswriter who was ‘larger than life’

NEW YORK — The concentric circles of John Feinstein’s life spread the news of his death Thursday.

First, John’s brother, Bob, passed along the sad news to Gary Williams, the legendary former Maryland coach. He first met Feinstein in 1978, when Williams was a 30-something-year-old coach at American University and Feinstein was a young Washington Post basketball beat writer. Williams and Feinstein remained close over the years.

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Williams then called La Salle head coach Fran Dunphy. Williams felt bad calling on a game day but felt Dunphy needed to know. Dunphy helps organize the Coaches vs. Cancer charity breakfast, an event held annually in Philadelphia at the Palestra the morning after Selection Sunday, and Feinstein was booked as a guest speaker for this year’s gathering.

Dunphy took Williams’ call while not only preparing for an Atlantic 10 tournament game in Washington, D.C., but also processing the potential final day in his 33-year head coaching career. Dunphy, 76, recently announced his retirement, and Thursday’s game against Saint Joseph’s would possibly be his last night on the sideline. After talking to Williams, Dunphy made a few calls of his own, telling those he felt needed to know. One went to longtime sportswriter Dick “Hoops” Weiss. Dunphy wanted Weiss to hear the news from him.

Weiss, sitting baseline at Madison Square Garden, answered the call during the first half of a game between St. John’s and Butler. He got up, slipping out from press row, and ducked into the bowels of the arena. Weiss first met Feinstein at the 1977 NCAA Regionals, when Weiss was a youngish columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and Feinstein was a senior at Duke. The two grew old as close friends, seeing the earth spin quickly, from broadsheet to broadband.

“He was larger than life,” Weiss said, his laptop closed.

Feinstein, the epochal American sportswriter who died Thursday at age 69, was large enough to fill 45 books, thousands of columns, endless hours on radio and television, and large enough to send ripples of phone calls and remembrances across the sports landscape on Thursday.

But too large to fit into any simple sketch.

“He was loved at the highest level and hated at the highest level,” Mike Krzyzewski said by phone. “He knew that, too, and he was OK with it. He was one of a kind.”

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A product of contradictions, really. Those who knew Feinstein say he was probably too smart to be a sportswriter. His father, Martin Feinstein, was the first executive director of the Kennedy Center and hoped his son would go to Harvard. Feinstein considered going to Yale, but instead went to Duke as a member of the swim team. After breaking an ankle, he joined the school newspaper, accidentally beginning what would become one of the most prolific careers in journalism history.

When Feinstein started at the Washington Post after graduation, he worked first as the night police reporter, meeting an editor who saw endless talent and would become a career-long mentor. That editor was Bob Woodward. Feinstein covered courts in Prince George’s County next, but soon moved over to the Post sports department in 1979, covering Maryland football and basketball.

John Feinstein the sportswriter was a giant. Nowhere was this felt more than in college basketball, perhaps the most parochial major sport of them all. He had opinions. Those opinions mattered.

“In my lifetime, he was the guy,” Jim Boeheim said Thursday. “Some people write stuff that’s opinionated, but have nothing behind it. He was opinionated about everything, but at least those opinions were rooted in something. He believed what he said, even if you disagreed with it.”

For a coach with 48 career NCAA Tournament wins and five Final Fours, Boeheim carried a tough rap for parts of his Hall of Fame career. Some very good Orange teams went home too early in March, and Feinstein, never one to suffer timidity, took aim at him. He wrote at one point that Boeheim was the worst NCAA Tournament coach in college basketball.

The worst.

Boeheim held a grudge in the way you would expect from a coach who ran the same defense for 47 years. When the two finally hashed things out, Boeheim leveled with Feinstein, saying, “C’mon, John. I can’t be the worst.” They cleared the air and grew to be friendly later.

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Every coach of a certain age seemingly has their version of the same story. So do NCAA administrators, conference administrators, Post colleagues and other media members. The thing about John Feinstein was that he was right. As longtime college basketball writer John Akers put it Thursday: “The man was an absolute force of nature. He was just so damn intimidating, even among his friends.”

So much of that aura stemmed from “A Season on the Brink,” Feinstein’s 1986 portrait of Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers. Subject to endless imitation in the four decades since, the book was an original at the time. As a fly-on-the-wall to the Hoosiers’ entire 1985-86 season, Feinstein attended every practice, every speech and every game, home and away, in a year that flamed out with a first-round NCAA exit. When agreeing to the access, Knight envisioned a book presenting IU as a model program that didn’t cheat and put players in classrooms. Instead, an intensely human story unfolded, one revealing the players’ real lives and Knight’s various levels of dissonance and genius.

Unflinching in its presentation of Knight, the book was a phenomenon. Knight, incredulous that Feinstein didn’t water down his expletive-laden quotes or tamp down his most volatile moments, went on the offensive. Throughout the next season, he took every chance possible to fire shots at Feinstein, going so far as to call him the “worst whore I’ve ever seen.” Feinstein, meanwhile, scheduled a book tour that traveled in unison with Indiana’s schedule, going to each city the Hoosiers played in. The more attention Knight gave the book, the more its sales spiked.

“Season on the Brink” ended up as one of the greatest-selling sports books of all time.

Now, seen through the lens of Feinstein’s passing, it’s not the success of the book that stands out. It’s the story behind it.

Feinstein was only 30 when he penned what could be considered one of the best American non-fiction works of his generation. He gained the unfiltered access to Knight as a byproduct of his relationship with Krzyzewski. Feinstein knew the Duke head coach from his days as a student in Durham. Krzyzewski, who played for Knight at West Point and later replaced Knight as Army head coach, always took a liking to Feinstein because he understood him.

“We were really close friends because he never treated me like somebody he was writing about,” Krzyzewski said. “I always thought he was brilliant. One of the great writers. Really smart. His ability to recall facts and events was incredible. It was easy to recognize early that he was just exceptional.”

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That’s why Krzyzewski vouched for Feinstein with Knight.

That’s why Knight was furious with Krzyzewski, too, when the book was published.

While that relationship was mended, Knight and Feinstein never put the pieces back together. The two didn’t speak for about a decade. Eventually, there was a chance encounter in Hawaii, and they had a conversation, but what was done was done.

“Season on the Brink” changed Feinstein’s career, both professionally and financially, and set the course for a writer who didn’t produce pages, but instead pumped out volumes. Among the works that followed, there was “A Good Walk Spoiled,” another classic, this one setting him up for a long run of golf books. Feinstein’s style was smart while seemingly effortless, the kind of copy that bulldozes other writers’ confidence. He produced a catalogue that spanned sports, politics and the American disposition.

But again, there are those contradictions. What was always most unique about Feinstein’s career was that he kept parts of it rooted where no one would expect. He loved the Philadelphia Big 5 and operated for years as a quasi-Palestra beat writer. He loved small school basketball and wrote an entire book (“The Last Amateurs”) about a season in the Patriot League, a little-followed conference comprised of Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross and other schools that went without athletic scholarships until 1998. He spent years as a radio commentator for Navy football.

From afar, it was often hard not to wonder why.

Krzyzewski offered a theory. Wildly successful in his career, and required to operate with unwavering confidence in his opinions and his writing, perhaps Feinstein didn’t know how to show that, deep down, there was indeed some humility in there. So, instead of saying it, he did so by showing it. He put his weight where it might carry the most.

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“I’m not sure his critics recognized that he did that,” Krzyzewski said.

In this, his final season, Feinstein, born 1956 on the west side of Manhattan, was calling televised home games at Longwood University in Farmville, Va., where he also taught journalism.

His final column in the Washington Post ran Thursday morning. It was a nod to Tom Izzo refusing to change some of his ways in these new days.

“He called me the other night,” the Michigan State coach said by phone from Indianapolis on Thursday. “To be honest, I thought we were just bulls—ing. I didn’t even know he was writing a column. I just answered his call because I wanted to hear what he had to say.”

(Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images)

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