Secret to John Feinstein’s golf- and sportswriting success wasn’t complicated
John Feinstein believed that honest reporters did way more good than anything else.
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Fearing his wrath even at this distance, I will do my best to make sure this tribute to the man is not bland. John Feinstein had no tolerance for the banal, the bland, the placid. He was in your face. Whatever he said or wrote, it was straight. That’s why he and Bobby Knight, the legendary Indiana coach Feinstein revealed in such depth in A Season on the Brink, were such a good match. In football, Doug Williams, the same. In golf, Tom Watson. In newspapering, Bob Woodward. That’s some fivesome. Straight, straight, straight, straight, straight.
One quick note about Brink, which was published in 1986. It’s one of best sports books ever and paved the way for Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and other landmark books with sports running through them. The book was edited by Jeff Neuman, who until recently edited The Met Golfer, a publication of the Met Golf Association, in New York. Feinstein and Neuman worked together again on A Good Walk Spoiled, a time-capsule report on professional golf as it was in 1994. Both books reached a wide and eager audience. About 30 years ago, my wife and I were visiting John and his wife, Mary, on Shelter Island, N.Y., where John had spent many summers. (Christine and I were married on Shelter Island.) The house was new, airy and spectacular, although I was somewhat taken aback by how close it was to the high-tide mark. John said, “This is the house that A Good Walk Spoiled built.” Mary got the house in the divorce. Life is never one straight line. John would be the first person to tell you that.
If you were seated next to John, as a stranger on a train, you’d know before the conductor’s arrival that your seatmate had no use for Tiger Woods. He’d also tell you, a humblebrag for sure, that the feeling was mutual. Feinstein was drawn to athletes (and those in their orbit) who understood that the reporter was a proxy for the fan, and that the fan added immeasurably to the athlete’s life. In other words, our collective awe is an immense part of the whole equation. Feinstein found Woods and his camp to be selfish and aloof. His love of sport and his admiration for sport done right is what made John so good at writing up sport and those in it.
In everything Feinstein covered — and that was pretty much every mainstream sport including swimming, Patriot League basketball and military-academy football — he was drawn to athletes you might call pathological truth-tellers.
A stranger on a train, by the way — not a plane. Feinstein stopped flying after the Sept. 11 attacks. But he must have logged a million air miles before that. Feinstein was a full-fledged reporter even before he graduated from Duke in 1977. He died, from natural causes, at his brother’s house in McLean, Va., on March 13. He was 69. He was not, remotely, a healthy eater. He had more than his share of stress, deadline and otherwise. But into his sixties he could swim a mile in 20-odd minutes. Most people can’t swim 200 yards. Go figure.
You can’t. You can’t figure out anything, though for some reporters the fun, and the challenge, is trying. Feinstein was not built for that. He didn’t play personality-disorder detective. His thing was to reveal people as they are, as he found them.
He believed that honest reporters — in sports, in politics, in war zones, in the arts and everywhere else — did way more good than anything else. He came up at the Washington Post, where sunshine as a disinfectant is in the paper’s DNA. It is not ironic that Feinstein himself had to be exceedingly careful in the sun. It is simply an observed fact. He often wore floppy hats while covering golf and tennis tournaments. His thing was to get the athlete to talk, transcribe the words, and use them judiciously — or not.
He was always on deadline. Every day of his life. It was the life he chose. A sportswriter is a public person who works behind the scenes. His father, in his own way, led a similar life. Martin Feinstein was the first executive director of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a lifelong music impresario. He booked acts, he raised money, got musicians into hotels and restaurants and taxicabs. He did what he needed to do to make sure the show went on. He loved opera. March Madness is a sort of opera; Martin’s son, who covered dozens of the tournaments, would tell you that.
John Feinstein wrote 50 books, including novels for young readers, and if you put all his acknowledgement pages into a single volume, you’d have 51. He wrote thousands of magazine and newspaper pieces and offered a thousand hours (a rough guess) of TV and radio commentary. He was a word machine, written and spoken, whether he was getting paid for those words or not.
If you only knew him from his regular NPR visits with the legendary baseball broadcaster Red Barber, you got a sense of Feinstein as a listener. Barber knew things and had seen things that Feinstein never would, and John engaged the old man beautifully. All good reporters are good listeners.
But he loved talking, and I imagine that line between talking and writing was a thin one for John. In various press tents over the years, many of us in the typing trade have encountered something my colleague Alan Shipnuck and I called “getting Feinsteined.” That referred to John planting himself, like an oak, in front of you, his stomach practically on the back of your laptop’s screen as he would pontificate about some semi-interesting subject for 20 minutes or far longer. Shipnuck and I devised a system by which if either of us was being Feinsteined we would call the other, thereby creating an easy out.
Sorry, John — gotta take this.
By the way, the verb is FINE-steened. John FINE-steen. There was one high-brow editor who somehow got both parts wrong and turned John’s surname into FEEN-stine. Well, mistakes are part of life. Every now and again, somebody would tell me about how much they enjoyed A Good Walk Spoiled and would ask if I had plans to write another basketball book or tennis book or detective novel. I always let it slide.
There will be a memorial service for John at Congressional Country Club, outside Washington, D.C., on Tuesday afternoon. John lived for years in and around Washington. You couldn’t go to a golf event at Congressional and not see Feinstein. A press-tent joke was that John could get a year’s worth of GOLF Magazine columns (12, back then) from a single visit to the Kemper Open in its years at Congressional and other D.C. courses. Give the man some slack. His output was the eighth wonder of the world, in a tie with the Astrodome.
The GOLF gig morphed into a similar one with Golf Digest. He was a Golf Channel regular for a while. You’d read him in Tennis mag and other magazines. John had a 50-year relationship with the Washington Post. For years, wherever you saw John, you saw Dave Kindred, a legendary get-it-right Post sports columnist and one of John’s closest friends. Harvey Penick used to say that if you want to become a better putter hang around good putters. John started practicing a journalism version of that in the 1970s.
Just as Feinstein got a heavy dose of the late, great Post sports columnist Shirley Povich (Maury’s father) as a college reporter, two of my young colleagues, Zephyr Melton and Dylan Dethier, encountered Feinstein when they were in college.
After John died, Zephyr wrote this on X: “John Feinstein was the first sportswriter I ever looked up to. As a kid, I devoured his YA books and later read every golf book he ever wrote. It’s not an exaggeration to say I wouldn’t have pursued this career path if not for his work. RIP to a legend of the industry.” Zephyr wrote a profile of Feinstein for a class as an undergrad at the University of Texas — and got Bob Woodward to comment on Feinstein for this piece. That’s the spirit, kid! Email makes the world more democratic.
In the spring of 2012, when Dylan was a sophomore at Williams, Feinstein visited the rural campus in upstate Massachusetts to give a talk. Dylan offered this report by text 13 years later:
“I had dinner with Feinstein. He came to Driscoll dining hall with a group of us that worked in Sports Information — then gave a talk that night. I remember thinking that he was somehow two things at once: a cantankerous sportswriter but also absolutely elated to be on the campus of a D3 school. We talked about his favorite player on every basketball team: the last man on the bench. He was keen to point out that the best stories come from the guys who aren’t good enough to obviously be there. He so clearly loved and believed in sports.”
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