The Washington Post database shows that John Feinstein wrote his first story for the newspaper in 1977. It was about college basketball. Feinstein also wrote a story about college basketball that ran in the Post on Thursday, the day he died.
Between his first and last Post pieces, Feinstein went from a local D.C. reporter to a national powerhouse and back. He’d recently moved to Farmville, Va., but was back in town to cover the A-10 Conference basketball tournament being held in the nation’s capital when he died, and had already filed a preview piece for the event that ran earlier this week.
As a young reporter at the Post—he was 21 years old when he filed his first story—nothing sports-related was too small for Feinstein to cover; his clips file from his first year at the paper includes a profile of a Northern Virginia teenager hoping to make it on the junior girls tennis circuit and football game stories involving my alma mater, Falls Church High School.
But within a decade he’d begun cranking out hyper-reported, made-for-Father’s-Day blockbuster sports books, including Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled, and was billing himself in all self-promotional materials as “the best-selling sportswriter.” He’s since been called some version of “egotistical blowhard” by more sportswriters than any sportswriter I’m aware of. He’d earned both designations.
And, man, did he work hard. For 1986’s career-defining Season on the Brink, Feinstein took a sabbatical from the Post and spent half a year embedded with Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers basketball team. Knight, who along with being a rotten human being was himself an egotistical blowhard of legendary proportions, had taken to Feinstein when the latter covered the former during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Knight, known for bullying media members into giving him only the coverage he wanted, allowed Feinstein unprecedented access to practices, players and himself. The coach nicknamed “The General” apparently assumed the writer would pay him back by only printing the favorable stuff. But the author did his profession proud by showing enough of Knight’s warts in the book that, according to Feinstein, the coach “didn’t speak to me for eight years” after its publication.
Season on the Brink ultimately sold more than eight million copies. Even after the smash book, Feinstein continued to write for the Post, with a focus on national college hoops and golf. In the mid-1990s, he was part of one of the most star-studded sports sections in the history of newspapers, along with a gaggle of future national media figures including Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon and Christine Brennan. And he continued writing books. Lots and lots of books. His website says he's the author of 48 books, including 13 teen mysteries and 23 "New York Times Best-Sellers." His last book, The Ancient Eight: College Football’s Ivy League and the Game They Play Today, was published in November 2024.
Most of my exposure to Feinstein for the last several years came from his radio gigs. He made weekly appearances on The Sports Junkies, a very popular and long-running morning zoo–type show on D.C. sportstalker WJFK. Feinstein had returned his focus to out-of-the-spotlight athletes in recent years. He’d disclosed on the station that his second marriage had broken up and he'd moved to Farmville, where he served as a writer-in-residence and basketball commentator at Longwood University, a school with a mid-major program. (He'd previously done color commentary for the Navy football team, but only got attention on that job for cussing out a ref who he felt had wronged the Midshipmen during a 2005 tilt and then quitting in a huff in 2011 after the Naval Academy left him out of a documentary on the Army-Navy game.)
Feinstein made his final appearance on the WJFK show in January, just one day after learning from station management that he was being cut loose after 12 years. Radio guys don’t usually get a chance to say goodbye over the air after a firing, out of fear dirty laundry and bitterness will spill out on. But god bless the station for giving Feinstein a last spot, which allowed him to attend a sort of mini-memorial for his own amazing career. His voice was a lot thinner than I remembered, and he was uncharacteristically downbeat and wistful throughout the 10-minute segment, and less boastful than usual, although he did mention a few times that he was the best thing about the station. As Feinstein would appreciate, I made it about myself as I listened. I thought about how I was a teen paperboy for the Post when Feinstein started his career, and how fast all that went by. Feinstein never seemed angry or bitter during the farewell, but hearing him sad made me sad for both of us.
“Things change in life,” Feinstein said. “I’ll move on. You guys will move on. Hopefully we’ll stay in touch.”
“We’ll see you around for sure,” a WJFK host said.
Feinstein was 69 years old. No cause of death has been released.
