John Feinstein: Paragon of a Bygone Era

John Feinstein, the peripatetic sports journalist, author and broadcast commentator who spent most of his career affiliated with The Washington Post, died at age 69 on Thursday, March 13. His brother, Robert, said the cause was probably a heart attack.

Feinstein was already a best-selling author in 1991 when he helped bring tennis further into the sporting mainstream with the publication of his scrupulously reported portrait of a sport experiencing growing pains, Hard Courts: Real Life on the Professional Tennis Tours. An acquaintance when he began researching the volume, John evolved into a friend and, often, sparring partner.

Feinstein’s career took wing shortly after the publication in 1986 of his sensational best-seller, A Season on the Brink: A year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers. Although John and Indiana basketball coach Knight fell out over the author’s liberal use of Knight’s unsanitized language in the book, the fly-on-the-wall story of the Hoosiers’ 1985-86 season was quickly recognized as one of those efforts that gives readers a rare degree of access—and unvarnished insight—into the intense world of big-time sports.

In a column for the Post, John would later acknowledge that the unrestricted access to the team provided by Knight, even in some hard moments, “allowed me to pick and choose book topics for the next 38 years.”

Hard Courts was one of the 40 books John wrote, most of them powered by workmanlike, no-frills prose based on deep sourcing, original anecdotal material, and a nose for controversy and intrigue.

John was one of those people often described as a “force of nature.” Loud, brassy and inquisitive, people were attracted to him like metal shavings to a magnet, and he embraced them—while also mining them for information and insights into whatever he was writing about. He was a master storyteller with an acid wit. When tennis officials hastily rewrote some rules to accommodate participation in a pro tournament by 14-year old prodigy Jennifer Capriati, he dubbed the new framework “The Capriati Rules.”

People tended to notice when John walked into the room. A former scholastic swimming champion and Duke graduate, he was a big guy. And if you didn’t notice him in spite of that, there was that booming voice announcing his presence—usually by way of a jibe or sarcastic comment meant to embarrass some present tennis personage (agents were his favorite target, although he did have a close friendship with at least one, Tom Ross).

John was highly partisan (he was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat) and very opinionated. He took pleasure in tweaking and trolling friends who did not wholeheartedly share his politics. He didn’t mind when people pushed back against his self-righteous impulses. I consistently referred to him as “John Feinstein, popular best-selling author and godless left-wing nut.”

John often cited the useful maxim that a reporter doesn’t need to be objective, but he must strive to be fair. Like many of us, he occasionally had trouble living up to that mandate—most conspicuously, in my view, in the almost visceral contempt he felt for Andre Agassi in the early years of the player’s career.

Loud, brassy and inquisitive, people were attracted to him like metal shavings to a magnet, and he embraced them—while also mining them for information and insights into whatever he was writing about.

Still, John was so self-assured that when he was around, you felt that you were at the center of all the action, that you had a seat at the cool kids’ table. One of my fondest memories is of our annual dinner during the Miami Open (back when it was played on Key Biscayne), which was always held at a basic dockside tourist restaurant, “The Rusty Pelican” (think captain’s chairs, lobster pots and fruity drinks served in fishbowls). John went out of his way every year to organize the dinner, inviting about eight colleagues from various media outlets.

If you never found yourself dining in a restaurant in close proximity to a bunch of sportswriters, I have to warn you: It isn’t always a pretty experience. I can still hear the volleys of guffaws and raucous laughter generated on so many occasions at “The Rusty”—often as accompaniment to one of John’s elaborate, funny tales.

There was always a special sort of camaraderie—mostly gone now, it seems—shared by ink-stained wretches laboring in the trenches of print journalism. John loved that aspect of the profession, for which many of us who lived through those days feel pangs of nostalgia. We will miss that paragon of the era, John Feinstein.