John Feinstein died a sportswriting legend. He started out a fiery Chronicle reporter

In the walkway off the basketball court in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome, John Feinstein was making a scene. 

He had just found out that the media at the 2013 NCAA men’s basketball Final Four had been moved out of courtside seats. The NCAA figured it could make a pretty dollar pushing journalists several rows up and selling those coveted courtside seats as tickets — a preposterous idea to Feinstein, which he made very clear to the unlucky tournament official he found in the hallway between the court and the media room.

Feinstein’s indignation, if expressed poorly, was not unwarranted. If there was a writer who harnessed national attention for college sports, it was Feinstein. He wanted a good view of the game, and he was not used to taking no for an answer.

Feinstein was stubborn and easy to anger. It is easy to find people who hated working with him, or with whom he never agreed. But it is difficult to find anyone who did not respect Feinstein. He cared about what he cared about as passionately as anyone in the world. He spent 51 of his 69 years devoted to sports writing, publishing more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. His book “A Season on the Brink” formed lines of eager buyers down city blocks upon its 1986 release.

John Feinstein died March 13. He and his career — which might have been the same thing — began at The Chronicle. 

The Chronicle’s office on Duke’s campus sprawls across the top floor of a building tucked between the Duke Chapel, dining hall and auditorium. It has for about 70 years. Feinstein had to walk up three steep flights of stairs to get to his first newspaper office. Like most things in his work life, they could not discourage him.

That was where Feinstein started writing about the thing he had always loved.

“Sports have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember,” he wrote in his senior Chronicle column. “When I was little if my parents wanted to punish me they wouldn’t let me watch the Mets or the Jets on the television.”

Honigberg spent his time outside the office with his fraternity brothers. Feinstein moved off campus at the start of his sophomore year and hung out with his cat, Venus. He called him “Veni.”

But the two young men were always together, toting typewriters across ACC territory to write game stories, sharing late meals at the Cambridge Inn — a snack bar on campus — and watching nights in the office become early mornings. Feinstein drove them to football and basketball games in a beat-up Pontiac Bonneville. Honigberg would wait for him in the press box after they filed their stories for The Chronicle, because local papers around North Carolina paid Feinstein to sling college sports for them. He would hook up the portable fax machine that “usually worked” to the telephone line and send his stories.

Feinstein was virtually as prolific in college as he was in his professional career. He often wrote more than one story a day for The Chronicle, along with his weekly column “Consider the Source,” while freelancing and stringing. As a sophomore, he started calling George Solomon, The Washington Post’s sports editor, to pitch ACC basketball stories. Solomon would concede, mostly because he got tired of the phone ringing.

Feinstein edited a small-but-mighty sports staff for two years. A Duke course load on top of editing is no small task, but Feinstein’s ability to work was unmatched. 

He was a tough but fair editor. He didn’t write over his reporters, though it must have been tempting for a guy who took his own convictions as fact. Instead, he taught them how to be better. He would remind Honigberg that he was writing too much like a fan, when this was supposed to be serious stuff. His critiques were helpful, his compliments treasured.

“When you wrote a good one, and he said, ‘This is really good,’ or, ‘You asked a really good question’ … you felt like it meant something,” Honigberg told The Chronicle.

“You couldn’t help [but] love him while he was hell-bent on making his way in the world,” Newman said.

His senior year — still sports editor — he would argue with Howard Goldberg, the 1976-77 editor-in-chief, about the length of his pieces. 

“He pounded out these disproportionately long stories on a typewriter with astounding speed and refused to trim them, insisting people on the University campus would read every word,” Goldberg wrote in “Connecting,” the AP retiree newsletter. 

Goldberg stopped trying to control their length when Feinstein threatened to throw him out of a window. The Chronicle’s offices are on the third floor.

Feinstein made The Chronicle a better paper. He wrote about athletes, coaches and fans. He wrote about sports with a hard focus on the people inhabiting them. He wrote with an irreverence seasoned by dry humor. 

Previewing the men’s basketball ACC Tournament in March 1975, Feinstein wrote, “Then at 8 p.m., after the Duke-Clemson clash and several cocktail parties for the moneyed gentry that will be in attendance …” A few months later, he wrote that Duke football fans “in recent years have found themselves sitting around waiting for the roof to fall in.” In December 1975, after the season had ended, he wrote, “There was excitement in the ACC this season, but even though conference fans don’t like to admit it most of the football was pretty mediocre.”

When Harsha Murthy started working for The Chronicle in the fall of 1977, Feinstein had just graduated. Already legendary at 22, however, he had not really left the building.

“There was that tradition that John had established of going out and getting the story,” Murthy said.

While Murthy and his peers worked to uphold the standard set by Feinstein, he was busy arguing his way into stories in Washington. Solomon hired Feinstein as an intern for the Post when he graduated from Duke. In 1977, just a few years after breaking the Watergate scandal and publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Post was full of journalism giants of the present and future. They fazed young Feinstein for one day.

“And then he became Feinstein,” Solomon said.

When his internship ended, the Post’s Metro desk — then headed by Bob Woodward — hired him. Feinstein’s professional career began because of a dramatic love for sports and a determination to understand the people involved with them. But he conquered the shift to non-sports reporting, too. He built relationships with police officers (covering night cops) much like he had built them with coaches.

“The police liked him,” Solomon said. “He was there all the time.”

Solomon loved him and so did Woodward, but other editors could not stand Feinstein’s abrasive behavior. One editor in particular, Woodward said, repeatedly tried to fire Feinstein for “being Feinstein.” Woodward would not allow this.

“You want somebody to be aggressive and tough and maybe overbearing. Get the story,” Woodward said. “He was a star. You never … fire your star.”

So Woodward told the editor he would file a personnel report on Feinstein, which seemed to appease her. She complained again and was satisfied with another report. The Post, at the time, did not actually have a personnel department, so the “reports” went nowhere. For Woodward, Feinstein’s results demanded that the Post kept him as long as it could.

Feinstein went back to sports under Solomon when the job opened up. Sports writing was serious journalism for Feinstein; the subject of his story became the most important person in the world, whether it was Mike Krzyzewski or a minor league baseball player. 

Maybe that drove his competitive instincts. Maybe they originated from his days as an athlete. Perhaps they came from his family.

Feinstein’s father was a serious man. Martin Feinstein was born in Brooklyn to Jewish-Russian immigrant parents. He was an army man, and then a music man, working for famed impresario Sol Hurok before taking over as executive director of the Kennedy Center the year before his son started at Duke. When John was in high school at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, Martin moved from New York to Washington, D.C. Martin Feinstein married three times; John twice.

Young Feinstein “was as competitive as any competitive ball player,” according to David Remnick, who bore witness to it as a sports reporter working alongside Feinstein in the early 1980s. At the Post, they called Feinstein “Junior,” because that was what people called John McEnroe, the star tennis player famous for his terrible temper.

Remnick liked Feinstein. He found him funny, maybe because he understood the humor of a middle-class Jewish boy from New York. He did great impressions. Of Dean Smith, of Solomon.

Not everyone found him so funny. He was direct, often rude. He believed his opinion to be fact; he listened to arguments, but rarely, if ever, changed his mind. Sometimes he would argue with colleagues or editors and they wouldn’t speak for months. 

Barry Svrluga, a Duke graduate and sports writer at the Post, said Feinstein “wasn’t afraid to throw an elbow to get past the PR person.” 

But there is little that anyone can think of to accuse Feinstein other than a harsh temper and a blatant disrespect for authority. 

He “outworked everyone,” as Remnick put it, frequently writing and publishing books in the span of a year without halting his other commitments. He was fearless in his reporting, brave enough to spend the better part of a year with longtime Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight, one of the rare people in the world who might have outstripped Feinstein in attitude and ferocity. 

Readers relied on Feinstein to find answers to questions most reporters never asked. He hated flying, so he drove to ask them.

Feinstein was generous in more than one way. He once sent opera tickets to Honigberg and his girlfriend, and he taught reporting to college students. He gave most of the hours of his life to other people, listening to and recording their stories, showing up with his stubborn curiosity and wide-open ears.

“He had a certain mensch-y quality about him,” Remnick said.

In the early 1990s, Feinstein came back to Duke. He formalized his role as teacher and became a visiting professor of journalism. Feinstein was already a giant in the field; he certainly did not teach for money.

Svrluga took a class with Feinstein his senior year. Ever opinionated, Feinstein told his students how to report, and provided plenty of feedback on their work. The class was a small seminar and Feinstein, for all of his volatility, made that space “a warm environment” for Svrluga. When Svrluga wrote a men’s basketball game preview that The Chronicle published, Feinstein walked into class the next day full of praise. 

Most of Feinstein’s columns in The Chronicle — like most of his work — were unapologetic. His final was not. In his farewell column, he wrote with an unusually humble pen.

“As sports editor of this newspaper I have received a remarkable amount of help from the people around me … My only hope is that in the future I will have a chance to contribute to the lives of others as these people have contributed to my life. And I hope that those who follow me here, as writers, as students and as people will receive and return the same kind of help I have received. Maybe it’s corny. But that’s what I think life is all about.”

Feinstein was a grouch and a curmudgeon. A justified, but annoying, know-it-all. An oddball, a laugh. Certainly a great journalist.

Certainly someone who cared.

The Chronicle is accepting remembrances for Feinstein. To submit yours, email opinion@dukechronicle.com.

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