Potomac resident and sportswriter John Feinstein–whose prolific career included more than 40 published books, reporting for The Washington Post and serving as a sports commentator—died Thursday at age 69, according to published reports.
Feinstein, a father of three died of natural causes at the home of his brother, Robert, in McLean, Virginia, according to NPR.
Feinstein, who joined the Post as a nighttime police reporter in 1977 and then gravitated to sports, wrote fiction and nonfiction and earned fame with his first book, Season on the Brink. The nonfiction book published in 1986 about Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Bob Knight was “immediately recognized as a breakthrough in sports writing,” according to the Post. The No. 1 bestseller was later made into a TV movie.
That first book “helped turn the rumpled but respected sportswriter into a virtual industry,” freelancer David Elfin wrote about Feinstein in a Bethesda Magazine interview in 2013. “A New York Times best-seller, it chronicled a season behind the scenes with volatile Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight, and it’s still considered by some to be the best book ever written about basketball.”
Feinstein, a competitive swimmer in high school, said he got interested in writing while a student at Duke University in North Carolina. A swimmer, he broke his ankle during his freshman year and started working at the student newspaper because a friend told him “it was a good place to meet girls,” Feinstein told Bethesda Magazine.
He was hooked.
Feinstein said his love of sports led him to become a sportswriter.
“There’s musical ability on both sides of the family, and I got none of it. I got the ability to listen,” Feinstein told Bethesda Magazine. “I have loved watching and playing sports for as long as I can remember. We played baseball, touch football, basketball, stickball and punchball in the schoolyard and in Riverside Park, which was across the street from where we lived.”
Feinstein, who worked full-time at the Post until 1991, also was known for his work as a sports commentator for media outlets such as ESPN and the Golf Channel, according to NPR. His career also included hosting a CBS Sports Radio show.
When asked by Bethesda Magazine who he most wanted to interview, Feinstein said:
“If I could interview anyone, my first choice would be Jesus Christ because I’d like to know the real story. If it’s someone living, I would pick Barack Obama because I don’t think we’ll understand what a historic figure he is until many years from now.”
