Sports Business
Sports commentator and author John Feinstein died Thursday at the age of 69.
The Washington Post, which Feinstein wrote for, first reported the news. Feinstein was at his brother’s house in McLean, Va., and the cause of death is not immediately known, the Post reported.
Feinstein started his career in the 1970s at The Washington Post as a night police reporter before covering sports. He also contributed to NPR, ESPN, the Golf Channel and Sirius XM, and wrote more than 40 books on a variety of sports, in addition to novels for young readers. Most famously, Feinstein followed Indiana University’s basketball team for a season for his renowned 1986 book “A Season on the Brink.”
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The Washington Post published Feinstein’s final column Thursday morning. Per the Post, Feinstein filed the piece Wednesday, the day before he died. The column centered around Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo.
“Tom Izzo did it again,” Feinstein wrote in his final column. “Just when you thought his era of Big Ten dominance might be coming to an end, he pushed this year’s Spartans to a 17-3 conference record, a 26-5 overall mark and an 11th Big Ten regular season title — winning the league by three games over second-place Maryland and Michigan.”
Feinstein had not yet turned 35 when he authored one of the most seminal books written on basketball. His reporting on the 1985-86 season of Indiana’s men’s basketball team, fronted by a repellent basketball genius named Bob Knight, was a revelation for readers due to the amount of access afforded Feinstein. Reading “A Season On The Brink” transformed you into Knight’s world, warts and all, given the almost unprecedented access. It created an exciting new genre of writing — spending a year with a high-profile sports team. You can draw a line from Feinstein’s book to H. G. Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights” (1990) to any insider book that has thrilled you over the last 30 years.
In a December 2002 issue of Sports Illustrated that published a list of the Top 100 Sports Books Of All Time, “A Season The Brink” ranked No. 6, nestled between “You Know Me Al” by Ring Lardner and “Semi-Tough” by Dan Jenkins. Writers can often live on the glory of one seminal book, but Feinstein was a prolific writer and commentator. He wrote over 40 books, and works such as “A Good Walk Spoiled” were acclaimed best-sellers. His was a career where he was known equally by NPR listeners as he was on ESPN or in the pages of The Washington Post.
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Notably, his work also offered inspiration to those who came long afterward. On this somber day, I found myself re-reading a piece in the Indiana University student newspaper published in 2020 that looked at how Feinstein survived a year with Knight. It’s a great remembrance, written by a then-student journalist, on the winter Feinstein spent in Bloomington and how his career was so defined by it. — Richard Deitsch, sports media writer
(Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)
