Remember John Feinstein, renowned American sports editor who was “bigger than life”

New York – The concentric circles of John Feinstein’s life broadcast the news of his death on Thursday.

First, John’s brother Bob transmitted the sad news to Gary Williams, the former legendary coach of Maryland. He met Feinstein for the first time in 1978, when Williams was a 30-year-old coach at the American University and Feinstein was a young Washington Post basketball writer. Williams and Feinstein have remained close over the years.

Williams then called the head coach of the room, Fran Dunphy. Williams felt badly calling a match day, but felt that Dunphy needed to know. Dunphy helps organize coaches against cancer Charity Breakfast, an event held each year in Philadelphia at the Palestra in the morning after the selection on Sunday, and Feinstein was reserved as a guest speaker for this year’s rally.

Dunphy took the call from Williams while preparing not only for an Atlantic 10 tournament match in Washington, DC, but also for the transformation of the last potential day of his 33-year-old coach career. Dunphy, 76, recently announced his retirement, and Thursday’s match against Saint Joseph may be his last night on the sidelines. After talking to Williams, Dunphy made some calls to him, telling those he needed to know. One went to the longtime sports editor “Hoops” Weiss. Dunphy wanted Weiss to hear the news of him.

Weiss, a basic seated at Madison Square Garden, answered the call in the first half of a match between St. John’s and Butler. He got up, slipping from Press Row and leaned over the bowels of the arena. Weiss met feinstein for the first time at the 1977 regional NCAA, when Weiss was a young columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and Feinstein was senior at Duke. The two were aged as a nearby, seeing the earth turning quickly, from the wide -band leaf.

“He was bigger than life,” said Weiss, his laptop closed.

Feinstein, the American sports writer who died Thursday at 69, was large enough to fill 45 pounds, thousands of columns, infinite hours on radio and television, and large enough to send undulations of telephone calls and memories through the sports landscape on Thursday.

But too big to adapt to any simple sketches.

“He was loved at the highest level and hated the highest level,” said Mike Krzyzewski by phone. “He also knew it, and he agreed with that. He was unique.

A product of contradictions, really. Those who knew Feinstein say he was probably too smart to be a sports editor. His father, Martin Feinstein, was the first executive director of Kennedy Center and hoped that his son would go to Harvard. Feinstein planned to go to Yale, but rather went to Duke as a member of the swimming team. After breaking his ankle, he joined the school newspaper, accidentally starting what was going to become one of the most prolific careers in the history of journalism.

When Feinstein started at Washington Post after graduating, he first worked as a night’s police journalist, meeting an editor who saw endless talent and would become a mentor of the whole career. This publisher was Bob Woodward. Feinstein covered the courts of Prince George County then, but quickly moved to the Department of Sports of La Poste in 1979, covering Maryland football and basketball.

John Feinstein, the sports editor was a giant. It looked any more like no more than in university basketball, perhaps the most parish sport of all. He had opinions. These opinions imported.

“In my lifetime, he was the guy,” said Jim Boeheim on Thursday. “Some people write things that are opinionated, but have nothing behind. He was obstinate on everything, but at least these opinions were rooted in something. He believed what he said, even if you don’t agree with that. »»

For a coach with 48 career victories in the NCAA Tournament and Five Final Fours, Boeheim wore a difficult rap for certain parts of his career at the renowned temple. Some very good orange teams returned home too early in March, and Feinstein, never one to suffer from shyness, targeted it. He wrote at one point that Boeheim was the worst coach of the NCAA university basketball tournament.

The worst.

Boeheim maintained a grudge in the way you expect a coach who organized the same defense for 47 years. When the two finally chopped things, Boeheim leveled with Feinstein, saying: “Come on, John. I can’t be the worst. “They cleaned the air and became friendly later.

Each a certain age coach apparently has its version of the same story. The same goes for the administrators of the NCAA, the administrators of the conference, the colleagues of the post office and the other members of the media. The thing about John Feinstein is that he was right. While the longtime basketball editor John Akers said on Thursday: “Man was an absolute force of nature. He was so intimidating, even among his friends. »»

A large part of this aura stems from “A season on the brink”, the portrait of Bob Knight in 1986 of Feinstein and the Hoosiers de l’Insiana. Subject to an endless imitation in the four decades that followed, the book was an original at the time. As a Fly-on-the-Wall for the whole season of the Hoosiers from 1985-86, Feinstein attended each training, each speech and each match, at home and outside, in a year that has ignited with an exit from the NCAA in the first round. When he accepts access, Knight considered a book presenting IU as a model program that did not handle and put the players in classrooms. Instead, an intensely human story took place, a revealing the real life of the players and the different levels of dissonance and genius of Knight.

Involving in his presentation of Knight, the book was a phenomenon. Knight, incredulous that Feinstein has not watered his quotes loaded with explanive or buffer his most volatile moments, went to the offensive. Throughout the next season, he took the odds to shoot guns in Feinstein, going so far as to call it the “worse whore that I have ever seen”. Feinstein, meanwhile, has planned a tour of books that traveled in unison with the Indiana calendar, going to each city in which the Hoosiers played. The more the Knight attention paid the book, the more its sales increased.

“Season on the Brink” has found itself as one of the best -selling sports books of all time.

Now, seen through the objective of the death of Feinstein, it is not the success of the book that stands out. This is the story behind.

Feinstein was only 30 years old when he wrote what could be considered one of the best American works of non-fiction of his generation. He acquired unremitted access to Knight as a by-product of his relationship with Krzyzewski. Feinstein knew the Duke’s head coach as a student in Durham. Krzyzewski, who played for Knight at West Point and then replaced Knight as a chief coach of the army, has always taken a liking to Feinstein because he understood it.

“We were very close friends because he never treated me like someone he wrote,” Krzyzewski said. “I always thought he was brilliant. One of the great writers. Really intelligent. His ability to recall facts and events was incredible. It was easy to recognize early that it was simply exceptional. »»

This is why Krzyzewski won Feinstein with Knight.

This is why Knight was furious with Krzyzewski too, when the book was published.

While this relationship has been repaired, Knight and Feinstein never gather the songs. The two did not speak for about a decade. Finally, there was a fortuitous meeting in Hawaii, and they had a conversation, but what was done was done.

“Season on the Brink” has changed the career of Feinstein, both professionally and financially, and established the course for a writer who did not produce pages, but rather expelled volumes. Among the works that followed, there was “a good spoiled walk”, another classic, this one preparing it for a long series of golf books. The style of Feinstein was intelligent while apparently effortless, the kind of copy that bulls the confidence of other writers. He produced a catalog that lasted the American sports, policy and arrangement.

But again, there are these contradictions. What has always been the most unique in Feinstein’s career is that he had rooted parts where no one would expect. He liked the Philadelphia Big 5 and worked for years as a Beat writer almost-Palestra. He loved basketball of small schools and wrote a whole book (“The Last Amators”) on a season of the Patriot League, a Little-Suivi conference made up of Bucknell, Colgate, Holy Cross and other schools that have embarked on without sports scholarships until 1998. He spent years as a radio football for the naval football.

By far, it was often difficult not to wonder why.

Krzyzewski offered a theory. A very successful success in his career, and had to operate with unshakable confidence in his opinions and his writings, perhaps Feinstein did not know how, basically, there was indeed a humility in there. So, instead of saying it, he did it by showing it. He put his weight where he could wear the most.

“I’m not sure that his criticisms admitted that he had done it,” said Krzyzewski.

In this, his last season, Feinstein, born in 1955 on the west side of Manhattan, called home television matches at the University of Longwood in Farmville, Virginia, where he also taught journalism.

His latest column at Washington Post ran Thursday morning. It was a nod to Tom Izzo refusing to change some of his ways in these new days.

“He called me the other evening,” Michigan’s state coach said on Thursday by phone in Indianapolis. “To be honest, I thought we were only bulls. I didn’t even know that he was writing a column. I just answered his call because I wanted to hear what he had to say. »»

(Photo of Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)