Longtime Sportswriter and Author John Feinstein Dies at 68

The Washington Post reporter also wrote 48 books, the final two on Duke basketball and Ivy League football.

Sports writer and author John Feinstein poses in Washington on Feb. 28, 2006. Caleb Jones/AP Photo

Sportswriter John Feinstein, an author of 48 books, died at age 68 on Thursday.

Feinstein became known for his writing on college basketball, and his final column appeared in Thursday’s Washington Post about Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo. The column captured Izzo’s success in a way that was typical of Feinstein’s detail-oriented approach.

“Tom Izzo did it again,” Feinstein wrote. “Just when you thought his era of Big Ten dominance might be coming to an end, he pushed this year’s Spartans to a 17–3 conference record, a 26–5 overall mark and an 11th Big Ten regular season title—winning the league by three games over second-place Maryland and Michigan.”

“Izzo turned 70 in January, but in an era when older—and even middle-aged—coaches are hanging up their whistles, he shows no sign of slowing down,” Feinstein continued.

Besides the Washington Post, Feinstein appeared in Golf Digest, The Golf Channel, Sporting News, and on numerous radio stations. Shows included “The Jim Rome Show,” “The Tony Kornheiser Show,” and “The Sports Junkies.”

“I’m a big believer in detail and background. Detail is what I do,” Feinstein told Golfweek in 2017. “I take the term reporter literally. I have access to help the reader. I’m very source dependent. I needed people to come through for me.”

Feinstein applied that to articles and his books. In the Golfweek interview, he talked about his 2016 book “The First Major: The Inside Story of the 2016 Ryder Cup.”

“My biggest problem as a writer has always been to figure out what to leave out. And that’s always good, because when I’m writing, if I’m hitting the word count every 15 minutes, I haven’t done my reporting,” he added. “If I’m writing and I look and see I’ve written 2,000 words in the last hour, then I’ve done my job. And this book was like that.”

One of his last books in 2024 was on golf figure David Feherty. Feinstein’s final two books were on Duke basketball and Ivy League football. His first book, “A Season on the Brink,” was about the 1985–86 Indiana basketball team, coached by the late Bob Knight. The book became an ESPN film in 2002. Feinstein stepped away from the Post for a year in 1985 to follow the Hoosiers day to day throughout that season.

“It was an easy sell [to Knight],” Feinstein told “In The Front Rows” podcast host Mike Vaccaro in 2021. “I had covered Knight’s Olympic team in 1984 [and] had developed a relationship with him. I was one of a handful of reporters he liked, trusted, I guess, and gave access to.”

“And I actually went out to Indiana in February of ‘85 when they were having a terrible season [and] spent several days with him and had total access during that time,” Feinstein added. “And as it happened, it was the week he threw the chair, and I wrote a very long piece about him that started with the chair … but said in the piece that on the scale of crimes being committed in college athletics today, throwing a chair was probably on a scale of one to 10, was probably about a three. And he actually called me … but he thanked me for as he said, telling both sides of the story.”

Twenty-three of his books became New York Times bestsellers. He wrote books on the Olympics, college basketball, baseball, the Super Bowl, and the Army-Navy football rivalry.

A New York City native, Feinstein was born on July 28, 1956. Feinstein attended Duke University, where he majored in history, and he joined the Washington Post in 1997 as a night police reporter. That’s where former Post editor Bob Woodward took Feinstein under his wing.

Feinstein then became a sportswriter at the newspaper, and his career took off from there. He worked with the Post full-time until 1991, and Feinstein continued to write for the Post after that year amid his many other ventures.

“John Feinstein was one of the most influential sportswriters of our time,” former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski said in a statement Thursday via the Raleigh News & Observer. “He wrote with confidence, drawing readers into his stories with prose that few could match. As so many of us knew, he was never shy about sharing an opinion or a remarkable story. A proud Duke graduate, John will be missed tremendously.”

Feinstein, who died in McLean, Virginia, at his brother’s home, is survived by his wife, Christine, and three children.