DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. John Feinstein, one of the nation's leading sports journalists, a commentator for NPR, ESPN and the Golf Channel, and the author of more than 40 books, died last week at the age of 69. He was an ex-jock who understood the world of athletes. He was known for his insights and inside portraits of some of the most talented and temperamental characters in sports, though he was more often drawn to the obscure, struggling athlete. Feinstein began at The Washington Post as an intern in 1977 and covered the police and the courts before turning to sports reporting. He later became a columnist.
In 1985, he took a leave of absence from the Post to research and write his first book, "Season On The Brink," about his year shadowing the volatile Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight. It became a bestseller, as did his book "A Good Walk Spoiled," a behind-the-scenes look at the Pro Golf Tour. His book "A Civil War" was about the fierce rivalry between the Army and Navy college football teams. He also wrote books about tennis, minor league baseball and a series of sports-based mysteries for young readers. John Feinstein spoke with Dave Davies in 2011 upon the publication of his book "One On One: Behind The Scenes With The Greats In The Game."
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DAVE DAVIES: Well, John Feinstein, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I want to talk with a basic staple of sports reporting, and that's the locker room interview after the game, when guys gather around athletes. And I want to just call on my limited experience here. Back in the 1980s, NPR relied on its member stations for a lot of its sports reporting. And although I mostly covered politicians and elected officials, I did cover some big sporting events. And what I noticed in the athletes' locker rooms was how relatively timid the sports reporters seemed to be about asking a tough question. And it occurred to me that elected officials and politicians need the media. They have some obligation to talk. Athletes really don't need sports journalists, do they?
JOHN FEINSTEIN: No. It's a very good point. And they behave that way a lot of the time because they're not trying to get elected to anything. They're not trying to sell a program to anything. They just have to perform on the field, on the court, wherever they might happen to be - the golf course. And there is a great disdain for the media among many, if not most, in sports. And the locker room is their domain. Now, things have changed since the '80s in that, for the most part, we're pretty much banned from locker rooms nowadays. The creation of the interview room, I think, is one of the worst things that's ever happened to sports journalism, because if you think the answers in a locker room are rehearsed and canned and cliched - stepping up, giving 110%, wanting to win for my teammates - it's 50 times worse in an interview room.
At least in a locker room, if you have the time and/or the patience and kind of outwait the hoards and can get with a guy one on one, especially if you know him a little bit, you might be able to get a little better answer than that. But more and more now, teams on the college level certainly, and more and more on the professional level, are banning the media from the locker rooms after games and saying go to an interview room, and we'll bring you somebody and put them behind a microphone.
DAVIES: Right. And a lot of your book is about the business of getting meaningful access to players and coaches, moments in which they may be candid. How did you learn that?
FEINSTEIN: Well, I think it goes back to my first days as a reporter when I was still in college. It became apparent to me that the more you could see what was real as opposed to what was served up to you, whether it was in a locker room or in a practice, or if you could get somebody to let you into a team meeting - or if you could get an athlete away from their domain and put them in a restaurant for lunch or dinner or anything. But I think I really learned about that not covering sports but covering news. When I was first at The Washington Post, I spent several years covering cops and courts and politics. And I learned from that that the less formal the situation was, the more you learned.
And I do some of my best reporting without a notebook in my hands, when I'm just talking to someone and I ask about their family or about last night's ballgame, and then eventually work my way towards a real question rather than just walking up with a notebook or a tape recorder in my hands, because when you do that, that's what you are. You're a notebook or a tape recorder. You're not another person. When you walk up and say, hey, can you believe what happened in last night's game? Then you establish common ground, and you become a person rather than just a reporter.
DAVIES: Right. But then the athlete thinks he's having a conversation when he's in fact giving you on the record comment. Is that an issue?
FEINSTEIN: You know, it's never been for me because what I have always done is if someone says something to me that I think might be controversial in some way or it's something I didn't know that would thus be news, I'll usually, at that point, I'll take out a notebook or something. And I'll say, let me make sure I get this right, or do you mind if I quote you on that? I don't want there to be any doubt. I don't want anybody I'm working with to be surprised. And I have only once in my career had an athlete claim that he thought he was off the record with me, and that was 30 years ago when I was a young reporter at the Post.
I got sent to the home of John Riggins, the star running back, who was holding out. And he was in Lawrence, Kansas, and he was refusing to talk to anybody in the media. And I was the low guy on the totem pole at the Post. And my boss said, just go knock on John Riggins' door and see if he'll talk, which I did. And John Riggins basically said, get out of here, I'm not talking to anybody. And I said to him, look, John, if I go back with nothing, I'm going to be fired.
DAVIES: (Laughter).
FEINSTEIN: And he looked at me, said, I'll call your boss and tell him that I wouldn't talk to you. And I said, that's not good enough. Can't you just tell me what it is you want? And he started talking about that it was the Redskins' move. And Bobby Beathard, the general manager, needed to do this and that. And I never took out a notebook. And I stood there, and I asked him more questions, and we talked for, I don't know, 10 or 12 minutes. And I went back to my car, wrote down everything I could remember, didn't quote him specifically but paraphrased everything that he had said to me in the story. And when another TV reporter called Riggins the next day and said - why would you talk to that guy when you're friends with us and you don't even know him? - Riggins said, well, I thought we were off the record. And when the guy called me from the TV station and said John said he thought you were off the record, I said, did he really think I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, because I was personally curious about his contract?
DAVIES: (Laughter).
FEINSTEIN: And that's the only time anybody has ever said to me, jeez, I thought we were off the record.
DAVIES: Now, the other issue you have is you establish friendly relationships with athletes, and then you have to sometimes be tough on them.
FEINSTEIN: Yeah.
DAVIES: How do you handle that?
FEINSTEIN: It's the hardest thing you have to do, at least for me. And I have run into it specifically, as I wrote about in the book, with Jim Valvano, who I had a very close relationship with. I would sit in his office when he was the coach at North Carolina State and had won the national championship at 3 o'clock in the morning and listen to him talk about looking for the next thing in his life, and he felt as if he'd done coaching at the age of 37. And then came this scandal, for lack of a better word, at North Carolina State where the NCAA came in and investigated, and Jim eventually was forced to resign. And I wrote at one point that he sounded Nixonian when he was making his excuses for what had gone on at NC State. And he was furious with me. And he said, how could you write that about me? And I said, because, A, I thought it was true, Jim.
But beyond that, if I just blindly defended you, then when I legitimately defend you, it'll have no meaning. And he said, it would've meant something to me. And that hurt because I liked Jim Valvano. And I understood the point he was making. I thought you were my friend, and then you turned around and called me Nixonian. And it was a very hard thing for me emotionally to deal with. And we did, before he died of cancer in 1993, we mended the fence. And in fact, Jim, the last time I ever spoke to him said, you were probably a better friend to me than the people around me who were telling me I hadn't done anything wrong. But it is a very hard line to figure out which side of it you belong on.
BIANCULLI: John Feinstein speaking to Dave Davies in 2011. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies and his 2011 interview with author, sports writer and NPR commentator John Feinstein. Feinstein died last week at age 69.
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DAVIES: You've written a lot about golf - some great stuff - and I have to ask you about Tiger Woods, who, you know, was just such an incredible talent when he arrived. I mean, he dominated his sport in a way that is rare in athletics. What was he like when you first got to know him on the tour?
FEINSTEIN: You know, I don't think anybody who does what I do has ever really known Tiger. I do vividly remember the first time I ever saw Tiger Woods because it turned out to be a little bit of a harbinger, in a way. He was still an amateur. He was just a kid. He was 18. He probably looked 12 at the time. He was playing in Arnold Palmer's tournament down at Bay Hill in 1994, and I was working on "A Good Walk Spoiled," my first golf book. And I was standing on the range with three players, Davis Love, Billy Andrade, Jeff Sluman. And Billy Andrade kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said see that kid down there, and I looked down and there was this skinny kid hitting balls, and I said, yeah. And he said, That's the next one. That's Tiger Woods. And I'd heard the name. But I wasn't that interested, to be honest, Dave, because you hear all the time about this guy's the next one in sports. This guy's the next one in sports. I always tend to be skeptical and say, OK, show me. And as luck would have it, I happened to walk off the range a little while later, about 10 yards behind Tiger Woods. He was walking alone with his caddie, and there were maybe 15 or 20 kids standing behind the ropes trying to get the autographs of any player walking on or off the range. It was a practice day, and most players will stop in that circumstance and sign a few autographs. Tiger Woods put his head down and walked right between the kids, never looked left or right, and just kept going.
And I remember thinking to myself, Who does this guy think he is? Well, as it turned out, he thought he was Tiger Woods. So I think he had it right. But my early memories of Tiger are that he was always programmed, and his golf was overwhelming. But I remember feeling disappointed because he was obviously very bright. He'd gone to Stanford for a couple of years. You could tell, just by the way he reacted to things, that he got things quicker than most athletes did. But he wasn't giving anything up. His father, Earl, had programmed him. Don't give away anything for free. So you remember those cliches I talked about that you get in the interview room? He was a cliche machine. And if you tried to talk to him one-on-one, he really had no interest. And the only time I really ever had a lengthy, one-on-one conversation with him was in 1998 after he'd won the Masters and had become a superstar at 21. And he actually reached out to me because he was, I think, surprised, I guess, that I was one of the very few members of the media who was at all critical of his behavior - none of us could criticize his golf. And other players had told him, look, John's a pretty fair guy. If you've got a problem with him, you should sit down and talk to him about it. And to his everlasting credit, he did. We went to dinner at a restaurant in San Diego and talked for about 4 hours. And it was very intense 'cause Tiger was very smart, came right at you when he disagreed with you. We argued a lot about his father.
DAVIES: And one of the things you'd written about his father was that his father was, you know, kind of a manipulative sports dad.
FEINSTEIN: Classic stage father.
DAVIES: Right.
FEINSTEIN: Yes. Exactly. And in fact, what I had done was I had compared him in a piece I'd written in Newsweek to Stefano Capriati, who was the father of Jennifer Capriati, who you might remember, years ago, came on the tennis tour, took it by storm. She was going to be the next Chris Evert. Her father was making deals for her left and right when she was 13 years old. And I compared Earl Woods to Stefano Capriati, which infuriated both Tiger and Earl. And I remember saying to him, if your father doesn't like the spotlight, why did he write a book about how he made you into Tiger Woods? And Tiger said, well, you know, so many people asked him about it. He thought it'd be easier just to write a book. And I said, really? Then why did he write the second book? 'Cause there was a sequel. Tiger looked at me and he smiled. He said, OK, you got me on that one. But it was one of the few concessions he made the entire evening. We argued about a lot of different things, but it was a fascinating experience. And I hoped that it would sort of be a jumping off point where Tiger and I would have a relationship where even if we disagreed, we would talk about it. And it lasted for a little while that way. And then I really believe to this day that his father said to him, you stay away from him. I don't like him. I don't want you talking to him. And that was really kind of the end of any one-on-one other than Hi, Tiger, Hi, John, between the two of us.
DAVIES: You have some great stories in here about tennis, and one of them I liked was when you followed John McEnroe into the locker room at the US Open because he wasn't talking to anybody. And this was an example of you just getting access that other people couldn't get and it paying off. Tell us what happened.
FEINSTEIN: Well, more accurately, I think it was that I knew back in those days that I could go into the locker room. And because Barry Lorge, my colleague from The Washington Post, was writing a lead, and I was doing the secondary story, the sidebar, I had a little more time. And John had come and he just won the US Open. He'd beaten Bjorn Borg in five sets. This was a few months after their historic five-set match at Wimbledon, and Borg had come back from two sets down to tie it at two sets a piece. And I'll never forget sitting there in New York City, John McEnroe grew up less than 5 miles from the stadium in Flushing, and the entire crowd was on its feet cheering for Borg. And I couldn't imagine what that felt like for McEnroe. And he somehow won the fifth set, came in, gave kind of a desultory press conference. Even McEnroe can be desultory in a press conference. And I thought, well, maybe if I go back to the locker room, I can get something - I just wanted to ask him one question. How did that feel at that moment, at the end of the fourth set, when 20,000 people were cheering for a guy from Sweden in New York City? And I walked back in, and McEnroe was the only guy in the locker room 'cause the tournament was over, Borg had left by car as soon as the award ceremony was over, and it was just McEnroe and me in the locker room. At that point, I hadn't met him. I was very young, you know, the kid reporter at The Washington Post. And I introduced myself, and John kind of looked at me and like, yeah? And I said, I just want to ask you one question. And I asked him the question about how it felt at the end of that fourth set. And, Dave, he just went off.
He said, Could you believe that? Could you - do you think if that match was in Sweden, there'd be one person pulling for me? He said, I know I misbehave, and I understand why people get up. I didn't ask another question for 30 minutes. The only challenge was I didn't have a tape recorder - was trying to write everything down because he was talking so fast. So I ended up - I was supposed to write a 16-inch sidebar, and I came back and told Barry Lorge what I'd gotten. And he called the desk and said, you got to get John some more space. And I ended up writing 40 inches, and they ran every inch of it. So a lot of times, people have asked me, well, how did you get Knight to give you the access? How did you get this guy to give you the access? The answer almost always is because I asked. It's really that simple.
DAVIES: One more thing. You know, I've noticed in my career writing mostly about things other than sports that when I occasionally have done a story at a newspaper that dealt with sports, like I did a piece once about Philadelphia Eagles' tickets and whether they were distributed fairly. And I got many, many times the email that I did when I did something about the mayor. And it's clear that sports, you know, is something that people are really, really passionate about. But I also wonder, are there times that you want to just tell people, folks, this - these are games. This is not life and death.
FEINSTEIN: Absolutely, yes, but there's an element of no. And the absolute yes is of course they're just games, and it's not life and death. And I wince every time there's a genuine tragedy connected to sports when people say, well, this puts life in perspective because - you know what? - it doesn't. The next day, fans are going to be screaming about a losing coach or a bad call or something like that. It's human nature. It's sports human nature. And yes, I want to say enough already. But there's another part of me, Dave. That believes sports does play a very important role in our society because it does give people a place to go away from the often harsh realities of life. And I - this was driven home to me in a very personal way when my mother died in 1993. And she died very suddenly, and she died young. And it was the worst thing I've ever been through in my life. And I went to bed every night, and I couldn't sleep. I just couldn't possibly sleep. And the only thing that distracted me from thinking about my mom was to think about games - to think about games I'd played in as a kid or swim meets I'd been in as a kid and games I'd covered and stories I'd been a part of and people I'd met in sports and trying - I would literally sit there and try to remember every single play in Game 5 of the 1969 World Series when my beloved and now pathetic Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles. And that got me through that period in my life.
DAVIES: Well, John Feinstein, thanks so much for spending some time with us.
FEINSTEIN: Dave, thanks for having me again. I enjoyed it.
BIANCULLI: John Feinstein speaking to Dave Davies in 2011. The author, sportswriter and NPR commentator died last week. He was 69 years old. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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