I was young and angry and stupid on March 12, 2011, when I came home boiling from covering the ACC basketball tournament as a grad student and laid waste in my personal blog to the entire institution of sports media. These were the first games I had ever covered, but that total lack of experience didn’t slow the firehose of opinions—the writers were complacent and lazy, the players and coaches despised us, access was a joke, and the entire system had been irretrievably broken. You can imagine how veteran journalists might feel about me, the 20-something who only needed two days in a media center to condemn their entire livelihood. (Also, a man on press row yelled at me for reacting to an impressive dunk, so I gave him the finger. I wrote about that, too.)
This was a time preceding our current Internet dystopia when even an obscure blogger could go viral, and as often happens when I write under the influence of high emotion, this post generated a reaction. Some readers loved it, and many hated it. On a sports journalism forum, the veterans gleefully predicted I’d never land a job. The Esquire writer Chris Jones took me to task, albeit kindly, on his blog. Tim Layden, then of SI, advised me by email that these kinds of attacks “distinguish nobody.”
It was more attention than I was used to, by far, and the stress and regret ate at me until I folded and wrote an apology. Pretty soon, I regretted the apology as much as the original post. The present felt littered with missteps, the future unspeakably dire. In a few years I’d be 30, and I was at sea.
The subject line of the first email John Feinstein ever sent me was “John Feinstein.” It’s the same subject line he’d use again and again in the hundreds of emails we exchanged between 2011 and 2021, and it wasn’t narcissism, but a vast incompetence with anything technological. (This was a man who would regularly tweet out his columns with a link to the general Washington Post sports page because he couldn’t link the specific column).
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Tribute John Feinstein, legendary sports journalist and Golf Digest contributor, dies at 68
To see his name on my screen was a thrill—Season on the Brink, the book he wrote while embedded with Bobby Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers, was one of the best sports books I’d ever read. His innate storytelling ability, combined with exhaustive research and the incredible access he’d been granted, led to a masterpiece, and to me that book alone made him heir to the greatest sports author ever, David Halberstam. He’d found my blog, and the first paragraph of the email he sent made my year:
Shane–A friend of mine sent me your blog post today from March 12th. Let me say two things: I’m not sure why you felt any need to apologize (I’m old so I couldn’t figure out how to get to the apology, so I’m flying a bit blind) for anything you wrote and I truly hope you won’t walk away from journalism because it would be a waste of great talent.
It will seem self-serving to print a compliment like that, but brother, I needed it. What followed was an artful and well-deserved rebuke of how I’d behaved, couched in agreement with my rejection of objectivity—”I don’t think I’ve ever watched a game in my life without being biased”—and a memory of the time he’d sat on press row during a Duke-Virginia game and called one of the referees a “goddam cheat.” The email was 1500 words long; he ended by telling me to keep my passion at all costs, and to contact him if I never needed help.
Reading it again today, I see it as an act of unbelievably generous mentorship to a young writer of far lower status who could offer him nothing in return. He died on Thursday at age 68, and I haven’t come close to paying my debt.
I tried. Later that year, I ran a long interview with him ahead of the publication of his memoir One on One. In the meantime, the blog post that was supposed to end my career before it began led to a job with the ESPN site Grantland. I tried everything I could to get the Feinstein interview on that site, but failed, so I ran it on my personal blog where I estimate that it helped him sell roughly zero books.
Fourteen years later, that’s all I’ve got on my side of the ledger. On his side, he appeared on two of my podcasts, gave a long interview for a story I wrote on Duke basketball, sent complimentary emails on stories of mine that he enjoyed, listened to my occasional gripes about life as a working journalist. In every case, he responded quickly and enthusiastically and usually at length with advice and stories and complaints of his own.
When I groused about an editor at a previous job, he wrote back, “I once told [an editor] I was going to kill him, and when my boss asked me if it was true, I said it was. He shrugged and said, ‘just checking.'”
When I complained about a media official who gave me a hard time about credentials, he had his own story about the man: “A few years back he told me he was REALLY strapped for inside the ropes access armbands and why did I REALLY need one. I just looked at him and said, ‘are you f—– kidding me?'”
(Yes, he got the credential.)
For those who worked with Feinstein, none of this will be surprising. There was a funny contrast between his personality on and off the page. To me, he always treated the characters in his books with relentless sympathy and dignity, from athletes to coaches to executives. Even Bobby Knight, who once told Feinstein that perhaps Hitler had been right about the Jews, gets a more empathetic treatment in Season on the Brink than he probably deserved. (Of course, Knight hated him for that book anyway.) Especially later in his career, Feinstein preferred covering more obscure subjects like Patriot League football and Triple-A baseball, and while part of it was about access, it was also about depicting ordinary people in states of grace.
Golf, with its claims to chivalry and romance, was a perfect, inevitable fit. When he first came to the sport, the tennis player Jim Courier teased him that he only liked it because the players were nice to him, to which Feinstein said, “what’s wrong with that?” He was born to write about a terrified Davis Love III winning the Ryder Cup or Paul Azinger beating cancer in A Good Walk Spoiled, or about the aspirational underdogs in Tales from Q School, or about the intelligence of his favorite current player, Rory McIlroy. Feinstein could talk to anyone—his voice had a comic, imploring, lightly froggy tone that made you like him right away—but golfers made sense to him. These were his saints, ready to be immortalized.
And yet, for all his generosity to people like me, Feinstein off the page was never afraid to bare his teeth. He bridled at any perceived disrespect, was fundamentally bad at “playing the game,” and could make enemies and burn bridges with the best of them. There was an excess of pride at play that didn’t always play well with the modern realities of journalism. He believed in the sanctity of relationships—he would sit there and take it when a subject got angry at him, and apologize when he was wrong—but if he thought you violated that sanctity or functioned as an obstacle to his work, he could become the hard-nosed New Yorker in a blink.
The more I read his work and the more I learned about him, the more I considered our contrasts. I have a compulsive need for every work relationship to be positive and full of humor, and for any sparks of resentment to be snuffed out instantly. Here and there, I revert to a place on the spectrum that runs between prudence and cowardice. He was far braver in the flesh than I’ll ever be. In my writing, though, I’m far more cynical about people and institutions, and in my less generous moments, certain aspects of Feinstein’s writing strike me as verging on a rose-colored worldview (although even in those rare cases, his native storytelling chops save him).
We are products of our time, and that’s part of it. I’ll never forget seeing him at the media center in Hazeltine for the 2016 Ryder Cup, where he was working on the book that would become The First Major. He was very upset that Davis Love III wouldn’t let him in the team room all weekend with the Americans. I had to laugh—what an outrageous expectation! I was a few years from writing my own Ryder Cup book, and I knew that just like everything I’d ever done in golf media, I’d have to kick and scream and beg and cajole for two years to get a 30-minute phone interview with every middling player, and some of them would turn me down. The concept of being allowed in the team room, with the freedom to write whatever I saw, was about as realistic for me as being allowed to play. But along with his significantly higher status, Feinstein came of age when real access could be had, and his frustration with Love was a lesson in what he’d once had, and how fragmented and distanced sports journalism had become.
There was only favor Feinstein wouldn’t grant me, and that was to provide a jacket quote for my 2015 book Slaying the Tiger. He gave me wonderful advice on the process (example: “Jesus, haven’t I taught you anything??!!! You NEVER EVER deal with agents! That’s the one way to ensure you don’t get who you need”), but when I sent the book to his home, he went curiously silent. We met again in person at Chambers Bay, and I sent him an email afterward asking again for a blurb, but it’s one of the few emails he never responded to.
There are two possible explanations for this, the less flattering of which is that he just didn’t like the book. The other possibility is that with his own Ryder Cup book in the works, he didn’t want players associating him with the more negative aspects of my book. In either case, I couldn’t blame him, but his lack of response surprised me, and out of awkwardness our notes dried up; we didn’t speak digitally for three years.
But we saw each other in person; at Congressional, where we talked about our favorite national anthems and he met my mother; at Hazeltine, where he would often come to my desk in the media center to chat, which felt flattering; at other tournaments I can’t remember.
That’s another difference between us—he had a prodigious memory, and could regale you endlessly with stories about everyone from Deion Sanders to Jim Palmer to Coach K. I believe the last time I saw him in person was at the Honda Classic in February of 2022, but I’m working from faulty memories of generic media centers and I can’t guarantee he was there at all. I have fragments of memory from that day, wherever it was—he complained about work, and he seemed tired. It was not a poignant moment in our relationship, and of course I had no idea it would be our last. I wish there had been something poetic about that ending, but I can’t even remember the outline, much less the words.
What was our relationship, ultimately? “Friends” might be too strong, “colleagues” too impersonal. When I heard he died, one of the questions I asked myself was, if his death had been slow instead of sudden, would I have gone to see him before the end? I don’t know; I didn’t speak with him for the last two years. We faded, the fog of time settled, and then he was gone.
I was only a small part of his life, but when I was in the wilderness, he made me feel like his equal when I was plainly not, and he did it effortlessly and without pretense. John Feinstein, bless him, could only be himself. His integrity and pride were so intense they came with a price, but his generosity matched his talent, and his hand was outstretched. All I could ever offer in return was my gratitude, and John, it’s all I can offer now.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
