John Feinstein, the Washington Post sportswriter and columnist who famously spent a season with temperamental Indiana University men’s basketball coach Bobby Knight to write the admired 1986 book A Season on the Brink, died Thursday. He was 69.
Feinstein died in McLean, Virginia, at the home of his brother, Robert Feinstein, the Post reported. The cause of death was not immediately clear.
On Wednesday, he had filed a column for the newspaper on longtime Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo.
Feinstein wrote more than 40 books, including 1988’s A Season Inside, also about college basketball; 1995’s A Good Walk Spoiled, about the PGA Tour; 1990’s Hard Courts, about pro tennis; 1996’s A Civil War, about the season that led to the 1995 Army-Navy football game; 2004’s Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story, about Tom Watson’s caddy and his death from ALS; and 2014’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name, about minor league baseball.
Both A Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled were No. 1 New York Times Best Sellers.
Feinstein was known for taking readers to places most fans have no access to — like locker rooms, coaches’ offices, team planes and bus rides.
One of three kids, Feinstein was born in New York City. His father, Martin, oversaw programming at the Kennedy Center as its first executive director before serving as general manager of the Washington National Opera from 1980-95.
After graduating from Duke University in 1977, Feinstein joined the Post as a night police reporter that year, covered courts and politics, too, before joining the sports department.
After covering Knight in his role as the national college basketball writer for the Post, Feinstein took a leave of absence from the newspaper in 1985 to spend six months living in Bloomington, Indiana, embedded with Knight and the Hoosiers.
“I expected to lose money doing the book. I just wanted to do it. I wanted to write a book. I thought this could be a good book,” he said in a 2011 interview. “And my goal in writing it was for it to do well enough that someone would give me a chance to write a second book. And I never dreamed of anything beyond that.”
The author later noted that the coach did not speak to him for eight years after the publication of A Season on the Brink, “upset, of all things, with seeing profanity in the book.”
A Season on the Brink was adapted for a 2002 ESPN telefilm that starred Brian Dennehy as Knight.
Feinstein, who also wrote a series of sports-mystery novels for youngsters, was a full-time staffer at the Post through 1991. He also wrote for Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated and was a commentator for NPR, ESPN, The Golf Channel and SiriusXM.
He was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, and he’s also a member of the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame and the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame.
