John Feinstein, 1956-2025

by | Mar 26, 2025 | NPR, Outside The Beltway, Washington Post

Washington Post , “John Feinstein, sports commentator and best-selling author, dies at 69“

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 but said the cause was not immediately clear.

Mr. Feinstein, who joined The Post in 1977 as a night police reporter, soon distinguished himself on the sports beat. He covered a wide range of sports and developed a talent for deep sourcing that fed personality-driven and dramatic narratives about athletes, coaches and management. 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. Known for 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 and was acclaimed as one of the foremost coaches of the era.

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 volatile, uncontrollable temper often marked by obscenity-laden 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 .

“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 measure of journalists — but after “A Season on the Brink” appeared, he did not speak to Mr. Feinstein for eight years, “upset, of all things, with seeing profanity in the book.”

Mr. Feinstein returned to The Post, where he remained a full-time reporter until 1991, while continuing to publish best-selling books that came to include another on college basketball, “A Season Inside” (1988); “A Good Walk Spoiled” (1995), about professional golf; “Hard Courts” (1990), 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.

While I certainly read many of his columns over the years, I mostly knew him from his appearances on the many sports talking heads shows that proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably The Sports Reporters. Because that space is so competitive, sports has, for good or ill, long drawn the most talented writers in all of journalism and Feinstein was among the best of his generation.