The commentator and sports author John Feinstein died Thursday at the age of 69.
The Washington Post, for which feinstein wrote, first reported the new. Feinstein was with his brother’s in McLean, Virginia, and the cause of death is not immediately known, the post reported.
Feinstein began his career in the 1970s at the Washington Post as a night police journalist before covering sports. He also contributed to NPR, ESPN, The Golf Channel and Sirius XM, and wrote more than 40 books on a variety of sports, in addition to the novels for young readers. More famous, Feinstein followed the Basketball team at the University of Indiana for a season for its famous 1986 book “A season on the brink”.
The Washington Post published the last feinstein column on Thursday morning. According to the post, Feinstein filed the play on Wednesday, the day before his death. The column was focused on the Basketball coach of the Michigan State, Tom Izzo.
“Tom Izzo did it again”, Feinstein wrote in his last column. “Just when you thought that his era of the domination of the Big Ten could end, he pushed the Spartans of this year to a conference record of 17-3, a brand of 26-5 in total and a 11th regular season Big Ten-winning the League by three games on Maryland and Michigan in second place.”
Athletic The media writer remembers
Feinstein had not yet been 35 years old when he is the author of one of the most seminal books written on basketball. His report on the 1985-86 season of the Indiana male basketball team, led by a basketball repellent named Bob Knight, was a revelation for readers due to the amount of access offered to Feinstein. Reading “A Season on the Brink” has transformed you into Knight’s World, Warts and everything, given the almost unprecedented access. This has created a new kind of exciting writing – spend a year with a high -level sports team. You can trace a line from the Feinstein book at HG Bissinger “Friday Night Lights” (1990) to any initiate book that has delighted you in the past 30 years.
In an issue of December 2002 of Sports Illustrated which published a list of the 100 best sports books of all time, “A season The Brink” classified n ° 6, nestled between “You Know Me Al” by Ring Lardner and “Semi-Touch” by Dan Jenkins. Writers can often live on the glory of a founding book, but Feinstein was a prolific writer and commentator. He wrote more than 40 pounds and works such as “a good spoiled walk” were acclaimed bestsellers. It was a career where he was also known by NPR listeners only on ESPN or in the pages of the Washington Post.
In particular, his work also inspired those who came long after. On this dark day, I found myself rereading an article in the student newspaper of the University of Indiana Posted in 2020 It looked at how Feinstein survived a year with Knight. It is a great memory, written by a journalist of the time, in winter, Feinstein spent Bloomington and how his career was so defined by her. – Richard DESTH, Sports media writer
(Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)