A death in the family

 I was watching St. John's dispose of Butler yesterday when a friend sent me a news link. 

I was watching Rick Pitino coach -- the older he gets, the more he looks like Al Pacino playing Jimmy Hoffa in "The Irishman", ever notice that? -- and RJ Luis Jr. bottom threes. I was watching misses, and makes, and more misses and makes, and dumb passes and Einstein passes. It was everything America loves about college buckets in March, and never mind the chunky NIL deals and rampant transfer portaling that's made it all so damn mercenary these days.

I was watching the game John Feinstein, that blue-blood Dukie, loved and illuminated for us better than anyone.

A bit later, the news link popped up.

John Feinstein was dead.

Dead at 69, on the same day his column about Tom Izzo appeared in the Washington Post, with another glorious March awaiting his insight and his pen. The man had contacts in the game like few others, and his fame as a premier sports journalist was midwifed by it. And suddenly he was gone and March in an eyeblink was all different, because John Feinstein was no longer there to tell its stories.

I can't begin to tell you what a hole that leaves. And how much poorer will be our narratives from here on out.

What I can tell you is the famously prolific Feinstein wrote about golf and tennis and football and minor league baseball, but it was college basketball that was his home place. He wrote books about Da Tournament and the ACC and the Patriot League. He wrote about all your coaching geniuses. And of course he wrote the book most of America knows him by: "A Season On The Brink," in which he a deep dive inside Bob Knight's Indiana basketball program during a typically tumultuous year.

It was a seminal work in the genre, because not only was Feinstein granted virtually unprecedented access by college basketball's most notorious fire-breathing dragon, he was granted that access by a fire-breathing dragon who especially enjoyed flambe-ing the media. We were his punching bag, his foil, the butt of his jokes and the object of his disdain. 

And yet somehow John Feinstein, 29 going on 30 at the time, convinced Bob Knight to give him a pass key. The book he produced from it went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list -- a remarkably nuanced portrait, for one so young, that revealed Knight as much more than just a cartoon character who screamed and bullied and threw chairs and tantrums with equal facility,

Knight being Knight, he never saw the nuance, hating the book and feeling Feinstein betrayed him because it included more than few instances of Knight swearing. This seemed akin to Popeye getting upset because someone wrote about his spinach addiction, but Knight didn't talk to Feinstein for eight years after "Brink" came out.

Nonetheless, the book endures as a classic that propelled a young sportswriter into the stratosphere. I've read it several times over the years, and, as former sportswriter of far less repute, I never come away from it without a mixture of envy and awe. He wrote this when he was 30? Are you SERIOUS?

And now I open up a news link, as March's magic begins to spark again, and I see that he's gone. And it feels like a death in the family -- a presumptuous notion born of the fact we were the same age and saw a lot of the same history being made in real time across the years.

Only John Feinstein, however, captured it so well.