“The transistor radio was turned up full blast, even though the news was on. The voice came in loud and clear. ‘It’s 94 degrees in Washington and if you’re driving home from the beach you can expect to hit heavy traffic.’ The sounds of summer. The elderly man holding the radio shook his head, switched the sound off and put his cigarette out on the sidewalk. Then he walked into the stifling atmosphere of the Spingarn High School gym to watch his third basketball game of the afternoon. He hardly seemed to notice the heat.”
So began one of the first feature stories John Feinstein wrote For The Washington Post. It appeared on July 10, 1977, a day when Feinstein had two other Post bylines — one about a telethon to attempt to save the ABA’s Indianapolis Pacers, another about three Washington-area college track stars. Over the next 48 years, The Post would publish hundreds more pieces by Feinstein, including a column on Michigan State men’s basketball coach Tom Izzo that Feinstein filed Wednesday morning, the day before he died at 69.
Here is a tiny sampling of some of his most noteworthy pieces.
INDIANAPOLIS — Billy Packer sat on press row in the RCA Dome on Friday afternoon watching George Mason go through its open practice on the eve of the Final Four. Packer — who has been a television analyst at the Final Four for 32 consecutive years, the last 25 at CBS — found himself in the middle of a firestorm after he and partner Jim Nantz were openly critical of the NCAA tournament selection committee’s decision to invite George Mason and several other mid-majors instead of taking more teams from the power conferences.
“I’ll be honest with you: I still don’t know how they did it,” Packer said as Jim Larranaga gathered his Patriots around the center jump circle.
There has never been a national championship game quite like the one that took place in Houston on Monday night. There have been other remarkable endings — Lorenzo Charles’s buzzer-beating dunk in 1983 instantly comes to mind — but nothing that compares to the climax of Villanova’s 77-74 victory over North Carolina.
Because both teams made shots that will be remembered forever — in the final five seconds. If Carolina had gone on to win the game in overtime, Marcus Paige’s off-balance, double-pump three-pointer with 4.7 seconds left would have been remembered much the same way as Mario Chalmers’s game-tying three-pointer in 2008 to send the Kansas-Memphis title game into overtime. It would have fallen into a play-it-again-and-again category along with game-winners from Michael Jordan for Carolina in 1982 and Keith Smart for Indiana in 1987. It would have been historic. Except that Kris Jenkins topped it.
LOS ANGELES, July 28, 1984 — It was still more than five hours before Ed Burke would carry the American Flag into the Los Angeles Coliseum, leading the United States team into the Opening Ceremonies at the 23rd Summer Olympic Games today, but he was already fighting back tears.
“I’ll probably cry all the way around the track,” he said. “I wish I could control myself but I don’t think I can. I’m almost crying right now just thinking about it. I never imagined myself leading the Olympic team into the stadium.”
Burke is a former schoolteacher whose quiet tones do not seem to match his 6-foot-1 inch, 248-pound body. He was chosen Thursday by the 21 team captains to lead the 614 U.S. athletes into the stadium. He was selected because, more than any of the glamour athletes on the team, Burke embodies what the Olympics once were all about.
There was almost no one neutral on the subject of Robert Montgomery Knight, who died Wednesday at 83 after being ravaged by dementia for several years. Many swore by him; many swore at him. He was an emotional and intense person who inspired great emotions and intensity.
Let’s begin with the easy part: He was a great basketball coach. He won 902 games at Army, Indiana and Texas Tech, retiring as the all-time winningest Division I men’s basketball — surpassed later by his pupil Mike Krzyzewski and a handful of others. He won three national titles, went to five Final Fours and won an Olympic gold medal. His first national championship team in 1976 is the last Division I men’s team to go undefeated. Knight almost never drank, but each winter when the last undefeated team went down, he would treat himself to a sangria and ginger ale.
Tom Brennan knew he should be thinking strategically. The clock had just rolled under a minute and his Vermont basketball team was trailing Boston University, 55-54, Saturday afternoon with the America East championship — and a bid to the NCAA tournament — hanging in the balance.
“There were so many decisions to be made,” he said, his voice still filled with emotion 48 hours later. “I’m standing there and I know I’ve got to figure what we’re going to run when we get the ball back. I don’t know if we’re going to be down one or down three or what the time is going to be. I need to be cool, calm and collected.
“And all I can think is, ‘Oh please, God, don’t let me come this close and not get there.’ I had waited 30 years to get to this moment and now it was right there, and I just kept thinking about how I was going to feel when it was over — thrilled beyond belief or devastated. There’s no in-between. Then we got the ball back and I sort of snapped back to reality.”
I first met Mike Krzyzewski in 1976 when he was the coach at Army and I was a Duke undergraduate. He and Jim Valvano — then the coach at Iona — thought I did a pretty good Dean Smith imitation. Little did either of them know how important Smith would become in their lives. Little did I know how important they would become in mine.
With Krzyzewski set to retire next season after 42 years as Duke’s basketball coach, my most vivid memory is from March 1983, when very few people thought he was going to end up becoming one of college basketball’s iconic figures, with five national championships and a record 1,170 victories. It was a miserable, rainy night in Atlanta, and Duke had lost to Virginia, 109-66, in the ACC tournament to finish 11-17 and bring Krzyzewski’s three-season mark with the Blue Devils to 38-47.
Two hours later, I was sitting in Atlanta’s Omni watching Maryland play Georgia Tech in the final game of the night when Bobby Dwyer, then a Krzyzewski assistant, approached me and my good friend Keith Drum, who was then the sports editor of the Durham Morning Herald.
“You guys have to come out to the hotel when this game’s over,” he said to Drum and me. “Why?” we both asked. “Because [Mike’s wife] Mickie is in the room crying, convinced Mike’s getting fired,” Dwyer said.
I have had the privilege of knowing many great athletes through the years. But the best athlete I ever got to compete alongside was Margot Pettijohn.
Margot was the star of the Masters swim team I have been part of for the past 22 years. She holds more world and national records than Michael Phelps could fathom. On a team filled with truly excellent swimmers, Margot, who was about 5-foot-2, was the competitor and the person we all looked up to.
She died this past weekend after a short battle with a virulent form of lung cancer at age 72. The news was stunning. Margot was an absolute stud athlete, in the kind of shape most of us can only dream about. Her death is beyond my comprehension.
There’s nothing quite like a farewell in golf. For the truly great players, they come much later in life than for other athletes, meaning that their impact is spread across multiple generations. Jack Nicklaus was 20 years old when he first contended in a major championship, the 1960 U.S. Open. Forty-five years later, in what he says will be his last major championship, he still played the game well enough to birdie the final hole and give anyone who has ever cared about golf one last great thrill.
The scene on Friday afternoon at golf’s birthplace, the Old Course at St. Andrews, was one of those moments when sports gets it exactly right. There was no script, as is so often the case during retirement ceremonies; no presentations and no speeches. Nicklaus departed exactly the way he wanted to: as a golfer, competing in the British Open on a course where he twice won the game’s oldest major championship. He went out — literally — swinging, missing by two shots the 36-hole cut that would have allowed him to play on the weekend. Not bad for a man with 17 grandchildren.
LONDON — Someday, they will be gone. Someday, a new champion will emerge in women’s tennis. But right now, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert Lloyd still burn with the desire to be No. 1. As long as they continue to feel that way, the rest of the world will be playing for No. 3.
Saturday, they will play the final at Wimbledon for the fifth time. Navratilova has won all four finals they have played here and eight of the 11 grand slam finals they have played. But Evert won the most recent one, the classic French Open final four weeks ago.
So, Navratilova wants revenge. Evert wants to prove the French victory wasn’t just a last gasp. Evert is 30 and as intense as she ever has been. Navratilova is 28 and just as eager. They are two of the greatest champions in history (Evert 17 major titles, Navratilova 11) and they will play this match as if it is their first big final.
So many memories came flooding back to me early this morning when I heard that John Thompson Jr. had passed away: memories of our fights, most of them about access to his players, but others — often late at night in Final Four hotel lobbies — about the good, the bad and the ugly in college basketball. There were later memories, too: John being funny; John lecturing (and me even listening at times); John telling me what I should be writing.
But one memory stands above the others because it says so much about who he was and the extraordinary life he lived.
In 1982, led by freshman center Patrick Ewing and seniors Eric Floyd and Eric Smith, Georgetown had reached the Final Four in New Orleans. During his Friday news conference, Thompson was asked how it felt to be the first Black coach to make it to the Final Four. A look passed over Thompson’s face, one I had seen often.
“I resent the hell out of that question,” he said, his bass-baritone voice raised to an angry pitch. “It implies that I’m the first Black coach capable of making the Final Four. That’s not close to true. I’m just the first one who was given the opportunity to get here.”
There is an ancient tradition, practiced in the South Seas, which held that anytime a chief’s feet touched the land of another man, the land automatically became his.
Today, in the North American Soccer League, there is a similar tradition: Any soccer field which Johan Cruyff’s feet touch, becomes his.
“Pelé was magic at 35,” said Washington Diplomat defender Robert Iarusci. “But Cruyff, he is something else, something different. He’s beyond belief. It’s tempting when you’re playing against him just to stand back and watch.”
At about 6:30 on Saturday evening, I will be standing on the field at Lincoln Financial Field while the Army and Navy alma maters are being played.
I have no idea who will sing second, as the winners always do, but I know one thing for certain.
As the last notes die out, my wife — who watches exactly one football game a year — will send me a text.
It will say, “Are you crying yet?”
And I know exactly what my answer will be: “Absolutely.”
As the statements poured out in the wake of Arnold Palmer’s death on Sunday night — ranging from 23-year-old Jordan Spieth to 76-year-old Jack Nicklaus to the President of the United States, I was struck by one thing: Almost no one said anything about Palmer’s golf.
It was all about the man.
Palmer, who was 87 when he died in a Pittsburgh hospital, was a great player: a seven-time major champion who won 62 times on the PGA Tour, fifth on the career list. But Palmer wasn’t one of the most iconic athletes of the past 100 years because of what he did on the golf course, but because of what he did off the golf course.
No one understood and embraced the responsibilities of stardom the way Arnold Palmer did. No one ever signed more autographs — never a scrawl, but a very clear signature. No one was more accessible or open with the media — all media, ranging from TV networks to high school kids who wanted to ask a few questions. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods are the greatest players in golf history. Palmer was the most important.
