At some point during the 1987-88 academic year, Gary Williams — then the men’s basketball coach at Ohio State — was planning on taking a recruiting trip to Sparta, New Jersey, to see a 6-foot-7 shooting guard named Chris Jent. At that time, John Feinstein — the prodigious sports reporter and author who died Thursday at 69 — was working on his second book, the follow-up to the groundbreaking “A Season on the Brink.”
The book’s premise: show everything that went on behind the scenes in college hoops. In those days, there were no restrictions on who could come to these visits. Feinstein called Williams: Can I accompany you on an in-home visit? Williams’s response: Sure.
“He was good,” Williams said. “He didn’t try to dominate anything. He just sat there and took notes.”
Jent committed to Ohio State.
“John never let me forget that,” Williams said. “He wanted credit for his outstanding recruiting ability.”
There’s Feinstein, in one story: Gaining the trust of a coach, turning that into access, dutifully letting the scene play out before him, then documenting for readers to give them a peek behind otherwise closed doors.
“You could have a conversation with him, and he was staunch in his beliefs,” Michigan State Coach Tom Izzo said in a phone interview Thursday from the Big Ten tournament in Indianapolis. “But he wasn’t arrogant about it. He would listen to what you’re saying. He’d see the other person’s point, even when he was convinced he was right.”
“God, I was sad today when I heard this,” he said.
That was the reaction around men’s college basketball as the most important month of its calendar truly cranked up. Feinstein wrote books and columns on all sorts of sports — tennis, golf, baseball, the NFL, almost any game you can think of — but men’s college basketball was woven into who he was. From the blue bloods such as his alma mater, Duke, to the many small schools with unknown coaches just trying to find their way, he went anywhere there were stories to tell.
“It’s confusing,” said Griff Aldrich, the coach at Longwood in Farmville, Virginia. “John is this monster in the basketball industry. I read all of his books. Literally, ‘A Season on the Brink’ was one of the main reasons I fell in love with college basketball. And this titan of the basketball world is reaching out to me saying, ‘Hey, can I come to Farmville?’”
Feinstein met Aldrich through a connection because Feinstein had nothing but connections. He got to know Dave Odom when Odom was an assistant to Terry Holland at Virginia. Odom’s son Ryan must have been about 10. As Dave Odom became the coach at Wake Forest and later South Carolina, Feinstein kept tabs on the younger Odom. When Ryan ended up as an assistant on Jeff Jones’s staff at American, Feinstein was around. When Jones held his annual dinner at the Final Four for all of his former assistants who spread out around the country, Feinstein was invited.
And when Odom became the coach at Maryland Baltimore County, Feinstein cared.
“We started a tip-off banquet just to create some momentum and excitement around the team, and he was the first speaker for it,” Odom said. “He just really did everything he could to help us get it going. He started doing our games on TV, and that gave us another shot in the arm because he was doing the games.”
This was before Odom and 16th-seeded UMBC knocked off top-seeded Virginia in the 2018 NCAA tournament. Feinstein always seemed to be in on the ground floor, there before anyone noticed, then sticking around after other storytellers moved on.
He wrote entire books that captured those themes: “The Last Amateurs,” about a season of Patriot League hoops; “Where Nobody Knows Your Name,” about the struggles of minor league baseball players and managers; “Tales from Q School,” on the PGA Tour’s nerve-racking qualifying system.
Did he write a book about legendary coaches Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Valvano? About the Baltimore Ravens? About aging ace pitchers Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine? Yep. I bet he liked working on the Patriot League book more.
Among his early jobs in the sports department at The Washington Post was covering the American University men’s team, coached from 1978 to 1982 by Williams. Feinstein would go to practices. He gained Williams’s trust.
“The thing about John, I think he rooted for the underdog a lot,” Williams said Thursday. “I think he liked that side of sports. Root for the underdog, and there was always a chance that something good was going to happen.”
Williams remembered early in his tenure at Maryland — where he took over his alma mater in 1989 — the Terrapins had a game at Duke. Feinstein asked Williams to come speak to the sports journalism class he was teaching there. In that class: me.
(It’s worth noting that, at the end of the spring semester, I asked John for a letter of recommendation. He gave me a blanket form to send to any sports editor in the country, singing praises for a kid he had known all of a few months. Thirty-something years ago, he helped start my career.)
There’s no overstating how lucky I felt to take a class from Feinstein at that time. And it quickly became obvious how skilled Feinstein was at building relationships that afforded him reporting opportunities. He brought Williams to class — on a game day, no less — to talk about what it was like to deal with the media. On the same day, legendary tennis writer and TV personality Bud Collins visited. Feinstein got longtime television analyst Billy Packer to drop by. He had Bob Woodward phone in.
“People liked to talk to him,” Izzo said.
That was true in so many venues. But on this day, as March Madness really gets rolling, I can’t help but think about how many people in the college basketball world were absolutely gut-punched by the news. It’s because he understood that world. He knew that world. He kind of lived that world.
“I think he kind of understood the frustration of coaches, which I think is the reason why a lot of coaches liked him,” Williams said. “John understood what we were going through. You knew he knew basketball, but he knew what we faced as coaches, too. And I think that’s why coaches opened up to him a lot of times.”
Because he stayed connected. Back to that: Feinstein knew Aldrich because Aldrich was on Odom’s staff at UMBC. When he went to Longwood to talk to Aldrich, he fell in love with Farmville — so much so that he eventually moved there. Feinstein’s last chapter was doing color commentary on Longwood’s games and teaching a journalism class on Longwood’s campus. This season, he had breakfast with Aldrich a couple of times a month.
“He understood the challenges,” Aldrich said. “He’d give me counsel. He’d cheer me up. What I loved about him: He’d text me after games, and if we sucked, he would say, ‘Man, that was awful to watch.’ But he would also send the best texts after a big win.’”
It’s so fitting that his final column for The Post — the paper for which he had his first full-time job, the paper for which he continued to write columns for decades — was on Izzo, who is 70 and in his 30th season coaching the Spartans. Last week, he told Feinstein he wasn’t retiring because, as that final column said, “I do still love the job.”
The Post published that column the day John Feinstein passed. Later that day, he was supposed to go to the Atlantic 10 tournament at Capital One Arena. One of the giants of sports writing wasn’t working the opening rounds of a mid-major tournament because he had to. He was doing it because, till his last day, he did still love the job.
