John Feinstein, an indefatigable sportswriter for The Washington Post and the author of more than 40 books, including the best sellers “A Season on the Brink” (1986) and “A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour” (1995), died on Thursday at his brother’s home in McLean, Va. He was 69.
His brother, Robert, said the cause was probably a heart attack.
Mr. Feinstein’s last column, about Michigan State men’s basketball coach, Tom Izzo, appeared in The Post on Thursday.
Mr. Feinstein became one of America’s best-known sportswriters after “A Season on the Brink,” which focused on the 1985-86 Indiana University basketball team led by the mercurial coach Bobby Knight, became a best seller. The book gave readers the kind of journalistic access to Mr. Knight, a brilliant tactician but a complicated personality, that sports books usually did not offer.
Although Mr. Knight didn’t speak to Mr. Feinstein for eight years after the book’s publication — angry about all the profanity that spilled from his mouth and onto its pages — Mr. Feinstein praised the coach after his death in 2023 for boosting his career.
In a column for The Post, Mr. Feinstein wrote that the open door Mr. Knight gave him made “A Season on the Brink” an enormous success, “which has allowed me to pick and choose book topics for the past 38 years.”
“Not once did Knight back away from the access,” he added, “even during some difficult moments for his team.”
The book was adapted into a television movie in 2002, starring Brian Dennehy as Mr. Knight.
With astonishing speed, Mr. Feinstein wrote and reported books on basketball, baseball, tennis, football, golf and the Olympics. He was especially well known for his insightful portraits of athletes and coaches.
His most recent books include two published last year: “Five Banners: Inside the Duke Dynasty” (he graduated from Duke University in 1977) and “The Ancient Eight: College Football’s Ivy League and the Game They Play Today.” He also wrote novels for young readers; his “Last Shot: A Final Four Mystery,” won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best young-adult book in 2006.
And he contributed commentary to NPR, ESPN and the Golf Channel.
At his death, he had been working on a book about what makes a successful coach.
His family knew about his work ethic from a young age.
“He was a cuckoo head — seriously,” Robert Feinstein said in a phone interview. “He would watch Met games and keep a box score of every game he watched — and he did that forever.”
John Feinstein was born on July 28, 1955, in Manhattan. His father, Martin, was the executive director of performing arts at the Kennedy Center and general director of the Washington Opera. His mother, Bernice (Richman) Feinstein, was a music professor at George Washington University.
In high school, John was on a champion swimming team. And while attending Duke, he wrote about sports — initially fencing and wrestling — for The Chronicle, a daily student newspaper, and eventually contributed freelance articles to The Washington Post. He recalled having the idea for “A Season on the Brink” years before Mr. Knight let him follow the Hoosiers.
“While I was in college, because I was an ex-jock, I hung out with a lot of basketball players, though Duke wasn’t any good back then,” he said in an interview with the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. “I knew the inner workings most people didn’t know. It gave me the idea that a book about what’s really going on behind the scenes would be great.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1977, Mr. Feinstein joined The Post as a summer intern in the sports department; over his first two years, he worked as a night police reporter, then covered the police and the courts before returning to sports to cover the University of Maryland’s football and basketball teams.
“He was a challenge, he was feisty, and he had a lot of good ideas,” George Solomon, The Post’s former sports editor, said in an interview. “One time he threatened to kill my night editor, Mark Asher, if he changed one word of his story. Asher, of course, cut the last paragraph.”
Mr. Solomon said he got a call from Mr. Knight after the publication of “A Season on The Brink.”
“Knight says, ‘Why did you hire that guy?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t give you an answer.’”
For the rest of his career, Mr. Feinstein juggled writing books with his work at The Post, first as a reporter and then as a columnist.
His other books included “A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball” (1988); “Hard Courts: Real Life on the Professional Tennis Tour” (1991); “Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember” (2008), which focused on the pitchers Tom Glavine of the Mets and Mike Mussina of the Yankees; and “The First Major: The Inside Story of the Ryder Cup” (2016).
His book on professional golf, “A Good Walk Spoiled,” taking its title from a line by Mark Twain, profiled about a dozen players over 15 months on the PGA Tour.
Esther Newberg, Mr. Feinstein’s former agent, said in an interview that his nearly ceaseless work took a physical toll on him.
“He had gout and diabetes,” she said. “He hated to fly and would drive to places like the Final Four from D.C. if it were in Indianapolis, which didn’t help his bad eating habits.
“But he was a reporter on deadline. He couldn’t help himself.”
In addition to his brother, Mr. Feinstein is survived by his wife, Christine (Bausch) Feinstein, and their daughter, Jane Feinstein; a son, Danny, and a daughter, Brigid Feinstein, from his marriage to Mary Givens, which ended in divorce; and a sister, Margaret Feinstein.
In 2004, Mr. Feinstein collaborated with Red Auerbach, the cigar-wielding architect of the Boston Celtics, on “Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game” (2004). The book was an outgrowth of Mr. Auerbach’s storytelling at luncheons with friends at a restaurant in Washington, which Mr. Feinstein joined as a regular.
In a column in 1999 recounting an early lunch, Mr. Feinstein recalled Mr. Auerbach talking about his best transactions, which landed him superstars like Bill Russell, Kevin McHale, Larry Bird and Robert Parish.
“Like Russell and Bird, McHale and Parish had Hall of Fame careers and had their numbers retired by the Celtics,” Mr. Feinstein wrote. “Of course, Auerbach has a retired number, too: No. 2. ‘Someone asked me why I wasn’t No. 1,’ Auerbach says. ‘I told him, in Boston, Cardinal Cushing was always No. 1. I took 2.’
“Everyone laughs. The check is delivered to Auerbach. He lights his cigar — once it was to announce a victory, now it is to announce that lunch is over — waves the cigar and says, ‘Let me tell you a story about the cardinal. …’”
