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.”
