JOHN FEINSTEIN (1955-2025) - Sportswriter shone a light on both titans, underdogs


14 mar 2025 - The Washington Post
BY MATT SCHUDEL
Brian Murphy contributed to this report.

John Feinstein, a Washington Post sportswriter who became the best-selling author of more than 40 books, including “A Season on the Brink,” an inside look at volatile Indiana University men’s basketball coach Bob Knight, died March 13 at his brother’s home in Mclean, Virginia. He was 69.

His brother, Robert Feinstein, confirmed the death and said the cause may have been a heart attack.

Mr. Feinstein (pronounced Fine-steen) joined The Post in 1977 as a night police reporter but soon distinguished himself on the sports beat.

He covered a wide range of subjects and developed a talent for deep sourcing that fed personality-driven and dramatic narratives about athletes, coaches and management. One of the most popular sports authors of his era, he also became a frequent commentator on NPR, ESPN and the Golf Channel and had radio programs on Sirius XM.

He wrote books about baseball, football, tennis, golf and the Olympics, as well as novels for young readers, but he was perhaps best known for his coverage of college basketball. With an indefatigable work ethic, Mr. Feinstein filed a day before his death a column for The Post on Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo.

In 1985, Mr. Feinstein took a leave of absence from The Post to follow the Indiana Hoosiers and their coach, Knight, for the season.

Knight, who had already won the first two of his three national championships, was at the height of his career.

When “A Season on the Brink” appeared in 1986, it was immediately recognized as a breakthrough in sports writing. Instead of deifying a successful coach, Mr. Feinstein portrayed Knight in all his complexities, which combined a sensitivity toward his players with a violent, uncontrollable temper often marked by obscenity-laced tirades.

“Knight was an almost Shakespearean character: brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed,” Mr. Feinstein wrote in a 2023 column after Knight’s death.

The book, often cited among a pantheon of unblinkered sports books such as Jim Bouton’s irreverent “Ball Four,” spent 17 weeks as a No. 1 bestseller and was later made into a TV movie starring Brian Dennehy.

The year Mr. Feinstein spent shadowing Knight and the Hoosiers ended in a disappointing first-round loss in the NCAA tournament to unheralded Cleveland State.

“There were no tears in the Indiana locker room,” he wrote. “People don’t cry when they are in shock. Knight didn’t rant. It would take a while for his anger to escalate, although it surely would. He told them he was disappointed, that they had backed down — again. No screams. But it would get worse.”

After “A Season on the Brink” appeared, Knight did not speak to Mr. Feinstein for eight years, “upset, of all things, with seeing profanity in the book.” Later, when Mr. Feinstein was working on “Let Me Tell You a Story,” a book co-written with former Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach, Knight happily gave him a twohour interview.

“I can’t possibly overstate how important Knight was in my life,” Mr. Feinstein wrote in 2023. Knight allowed total access to his team and coaches — a rarity for a coach who often took a scathing view of journalists.

As a onetime competitive swimmer, Mr. Feinstein felt at ease around athletes and knew that outward success in sports depended on a complicated set of factors rarely seen by the public.

“It gave me the idea that a book about what’s really going on behind the scenes would be great,” he said in an oral history interview for the University of Maryland’s Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism. “So I proposed the idea to Knight, and he said, ‘ Yes.’ That’s when I started writing … ‘ A Season on the Brink.’”

After the book’s publication, Mr. Feinstein returned to The Post, where he remained a fulltime reporter until 1991. He continued to write best-selling books that came to include another on college basketball, “A Season Inside” (1988); “A Good Walk Spoiled” (1995), a No. 1 bestseller about professional golf; “Hard Courts” (1991) about the pro tennis tour; “A Civil War” (1996), about the Army-navy football game; and “Where Nobody Knows Your Name” (2014), chronicling a year with minor league baseball players and managers.

His primary approach — some critics complained that it became an overused formula — was to immerse himself with a team or, in tennis and golf, a touring group of professional players. He was a constant presence in the locker room, in coaches’ meetings and at practice sessions where athletes spent hours polishing their skills and developing the confidence to succeed.

It helped that Mr. Feinstein shared with many high-achieving figures in sports a confident, even assertive personality. In the Post newsroom, he was given the nickname “Junior,” after tennis star John Mcenroe Jr., a fellow New Yorker known for his abrasive manner.


Tony Kornheiser, a onetime Post sports colleague who became an ESPN host, recalled a locker-room encounter between Mr. Feinstein and former NBA coach Pat Riley, who said: “You’re loud and you’re large. Don’t quit doing that.”

“Let me put it this way,” Kornheiser added about Mr. Feinstein. “At the end of the evening, nobody would have said, ‘I didn’t catch that guy’s name.’”

Mr. Feinstein seldom wrote about superstars, preferring to explore the struggles of obscure, even marginal athletes.

In 1995’s “A Good Walk Spoiled” — the title comes from Mark Twain’s description of golf — Mr. Feinstein alluded to such top golfers as Greg Norman, Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, but his primary focus was on littleknown players trying to maintain their places on the PGA Tour.

In “The Last Amateurs” (2000), “Where Nobody Knows Your Name” (2014) and “The Ancient Eight” (2024), he told the stories of, respectively, college basketball players, baseball bush leaguers and Ivy League football players who were devoted to their sports, despite having little chance of becoming stars.

“I’ve always been … someone who thinks that the unknown fighting for his life is a better story than the millionaire fighting for his next million,” Mr. Feinstein wrote in his introduction to “A Good Walk Spoiled.” “I’ve always been fascinated by the struggle of sports.”

John Feinstein was born July 28, 1955, in Manhattan. His father, Martin, once a top assistant to arts impresario Sol Hurok, became general director of the Washington National Opera and the first executive director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His mother, the former Bernice Richman, taught music history.

In his youth, Mr. Feinstein played baseball and tennis and learned golf from his mother. The green “was the only place she would use profanity,” her son told People magazine in 1995. “I’d be stunned, and she’d say, ‘On the golf course, it’s allowed.’”

Mr. Feinstein helped his high school swim team win the New York City championship, and he competed in swimming at Duke University as a freshman. After breaking his foot, he decided to join the school newspaper. Eventually he became sports editor and contributed stories on college basketball to The Post, which named him an intern after graduating in 1977.

He impressed the sports editor but, because there was no job opening in the section, he was hired to cover police and courts in Prince George’s County. Bob Woodward, who helped unravel the Watergate conspiracy and was then an editor in the Metro section, became his mentor.

When Mr. Feinstein moved to the sports section, he was determined to apply the diligent reporting methods of Woodward to covering athletes and coaches. He was also influenced by the long, elegant stories of Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford, for whom Mr. Feinstein briefly worked in the early 1990s at the National, a short-lived daily sports newspaper.

While writing an average of one nonfiction sports book a year, Mr. Feinstein also began to publish novels, including a sports-based mystery series, for young readers; in 2006, his “Last Shot” won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for best young adult mystery novel. He wrote for golf magazines and other publications but maintained a close association with The Post through the years, contributing columns on basketball or appreciations of noteworthy sports figures.

His first marriage, to Mary Clare Gibbons, ended in divorce. He married Christine Bauch in 2010.

In addition to his brother and his wife, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Daniel; two daughters from his second marriage, Brigid and Jane; and a sister.

One of Mr. Feinstein’s favorite experiences was, typically, about a less-than-famous athlete. During the 1984 Summer Olympics, he learned that American Jeff Blatnick was in the gold medal match of Greco-roman wrestling.

When he asked Post Sports Editor George Solomon if he could cover the match, Solomon turned him down. Mr. Feinstein went anyway and saw Blatnick win the gold medal. He learned that Blatnick had overcome cancer, and that his brother, David, had been killed in a car crash.

“Then, he takes the gold medal off his neck and puts it around his mother’s neck and he says, ‘ This is for David,’” Mr. Feinstein recalled in the University of Maryland oral history. “I’m standing there crying — I mean, you couldn’t not cry.”

When he reached Solomon, Mr. Feinstein said: “‘I was interviewing Blatnick! Did you hear that he won? You’ve got to give me more space, it’s a great —’

“He said, ‘Shut up and start writing.’”

The story ran on Page One.

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