When John Feinstein, author, sports columnist and commentator, died last week (March 13, 2025) at the age of 69, it brought me up just short of a string of profanities. Not because we spent our careers in two of the same rackets—I never had a television gig—but because our best work had an indelible link that Feinstein almost certainly would have recognized.
Feinstein probably would not have been able to place me as someone he knew; this despite having shared space in media rooms of renown sporting events such as the NCAA Final Four, the Masters and other major golf events. Feinstein worked for The Washington Post for years and continued to contribute to its pages after writing more than 40 books, when he wasn’t at an event for TV or on a television studio set.
Feinstein occupied a higher chair on the sports food chain than me. So I can’t offer insights as to how he wrote so well or convinced both big-name, big-time and lesser-known sports figures to let him get so close to them that it might have appeared he was sleeping with them— figuratively, that is. There is a well-known story about how Feinstein came to write A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indians Hoosiers, the book that lifted him to the heights of his profession and opened countless doors for the remainder of his writing life.
If you were not a Bob Hammel, sports editor of the Bloomington (Ind.) Herald-Telephone, and on Knight’s short list of media friends, you were probably one of the others whom Knight considered scummy, barnacles who latched onto a high-floating ship sailing the sporting seas and ruined its luster. Those of us in that category were legion.
I worked for the Akron Beacon Journal, a northeast Ohio newspaper that would have had a natural interest in Knight, even if had not turned out to be one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time. The Beacon Journal was the first Knight newspaper (no relation to Bobby Knight) and merged with Ridder newspapers to become Knight-Ridder, a group nearly as decorated as Knight himself as a Hall of Fame basketball coach.
A champion swimmer in high school, Feinstein continued his interest in sports in college at Duke, particularly in the workings going on behind what people saw in the venues where games entertained and charmed fans. That led Feinstein to seek entrée to the Indiana star chamber via an endorsement from Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, former Knight player at the United States Military Academy and successor to his coaching legacy. Coach K opened the door to Knight.
The result produced a New York Times bestseller that changed Feinstein’s life. A Season on the Brink verified not only a how well Feinstein could write and tell a nonfiction story but also made him an author. First books that succeed on the scale of Feinstein’s, financially and critically, literally are the key to publishers’ willingness to accept, even compete, for his work.
“I can’t possibly overstate how important Knight was in my life,” Feinstein wrote when Knight died in 2023. “The access he gave me . . . allowed me to pick and choose book topics for the past 38 years.” It also proved to be something else to Feinstein that was more problematic.
Feinstein’s 1986 book became a success because he captured all aspects of his subject, the admirable coaching skills and devotion to his players and the price those players paid for that devotion. Knight could be volcanic. It was as if he never graduated from the terrible-twos, much less grew up. When he got in the faces of players, coaches, media, he didn’t only lace his language with profanity but also used it like a terrible swift sword. It hurt. Heads rolled.
When the book with all those words the mainstream media mostly does not print appeared, Knight stopped speaking to Feinstein and did not do so again for eight years. When my book, The Indomitable Don Plusquellic: How a Controversial Mayor Quarterbacked Akron’s Comeback—was published in 2015, Plusquellic did not suddenly shut up or throw a trauma-inducing tantrum every bit as bad as Knight’s. It was Plusquellic’s kind, gentle, usually gracious mother, Betty (Plusquellic) Channel, who did. She lit first into my wife and then me.
Feinstein faced the same situation when he rightly decided to pull no punches or words when it came to the totality of Knight. During the four years I was researching, interviewing, and writing about Plusquellic, he returned stubbornly to what was the essence of his first question to me: “Who’s book is this?”
“It’s mine,” I told him. “It’s about you, but I make the editorial decisions.” In other words, how it is written—what is used and what isn’t. I had learned a lesson from my first book, about Gerry Faust, who jumped from Moeller High School to head coach at Notre Dame, only to find himself attempting to resurrect his career by becoming the first coach to take from then Division I-AA team to what was then I-A, now Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. Like Knight, Faust granted me access to his team for a newspaper magazine story about his first season at Akron. He did not, however, have to worry about his language—unless it involved praying too many Hail Mary’s on the sideline. Gerry’s language was as pure as the driven snow.
Not so Plusquellic’s.
After being an All-State quarterback at Akron’s Kenmore High School, Plusquellic’s college career at first Pittsburg and then Bowling Green was derailed by injuries that were enough to make him swear like most sportswriters. Since I swear more than Faust and almost as much as Plusquellic or even Knight, I had little high ground from which to make my case for the reason there are words in the book about him that his mother didn’t like but apparently could not break him of using. He argued until the last to insert “expletive deleted” or use symbols—#*&X! after a first letter—as newspapers sometimes do with “offensive” words.
I know that my decision to use language that Plusquellic prevented or discouraged some from buying the book. That apparently did not happen to Feinstein’s best-seller. Colorful, even off-color, language can be part of sports. I was more critical of Knight for such antics as hurling a chair onto the court as an expression of his unhappiness. That could hurt a person. Feinstein recognized that the way Knight wielded words—spit-shined or dirty—could do the same.
“He could be cruel, and he could be downright mean,” Feinstein wrote. “There were times, though, when he could be as loyal of a friend as you could have. I saw both sides.”
That takes a steam-shovel of digging. But because a writer’s first obligation is to the reader, that’s the Knight portrait Feinstein painted, and what I attempted with Plusquellic. It requires the truth, which can be elusive and differ from what the subject—or his mother—sees. As tricky as truth can be and as much as it might hurt, it’s worth the search . . . even if too few actually want it.
