John Feinstein and the Big 5, the PIAA and private-vs.-public, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

John Feinstein, who died Thursday at 69, mattered in a way that most sportswriters don’t, at least not anymore. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him. So on those one or two nights each college basketball season that he showed up at the Palestra, it was a thing, partially because John would make it a thing. He was an enthusiastic storyteller and habitual name-dropper, and he, too, knew that he mattered. Hey, when a guy writes a book that sells 2 million copies, then writes more than 40 after that, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

There were plenty of gems in those dozens of follow-up books, of course. But it was A Season on the Brink, his in-the-gym account of Bob Knight and the 1985-86 Indiana Hoosiers, that lifted Feinstein into a higher realm of sportswriting than the average scribe. To read it as a 12-year-old was a revelation: the detail, the access, Knight raging on pretty much every page. You could get this close to the coaches and players? By the midpoint of my eighth grade year, the three books that meant the most to me were Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches and Other Stories, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and A Season on the Brink. I reread my paperback edition of Season so frequently that it was a wonder the binding still held.

There was a terrible symmetry in the fact that John and Gene Hackman died within a month of each other. A Season on the Brink and Hoosiers came out in the same year, 1986, the book and the film representing the opposite aspects of Indiana basketball — the sunshine of Hoosiers’ happy ending, the darkness of Knight. But for all the success that John earned for his books, for prolific coverage of college basketball and golf for The Washington Post, he loved making the 150-mile trip up to Philadelphia for a game at the Palestra as much as anything he did.

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Another writer of his stature might have considered it beneath him to cover the city series. Not John. He got what made the Big 5 special back when it really was special, and he seized every opportunity to savor the experience, just as he had done with Ivy League football (The Ancient Eight) and Patriot League basketball (The Last Amateurs).

“If only players at Washington area schools could feel that way about playing local rivals …” he wrote for the Post in 2009. “You come early and you stay late when Temple, Saint Joseph’s, Villanova, La Salle, and Pennsylvania play one another at any place, but especially when they play — as they frequently do — in … the rickety old building on 33rd Street that was built in 1926 and is still, hands down, the best place in the country to watch a college basketball game.”

Now the Palestra is at its best and loudest not when Penn plays there or on those rare occasions that another Big 5 team does, but when it hosts the Philadelphia Catholic League’s girls’ and boys’ championship games. And John Feinstein is gone too soon. They kept a seat on press row open for him Thursday at the Atlantic 10 tournament in Washington. There should be one for him at the Palestra next season, just for one night, just for the writer everyone knew.

I’m not saying that Paul George has turned out to be a worse big-name acquisition than DeMarco Murray, Nnamdi Asomugha, Matt Geiger, Scott Williams, Kenny Thomas, Danny Tartabull, Lance Parrish, Adam Eaton, Jake Arrieta, Chris Gratton, or Ilya Bryzgalov. But I am saying that those guys ought to clear some space in the podcast studio for him.

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The PIAA boys’ and girls’ basketball tournaments are continuing through this month, which makes it an appropriate time to point out, once again, that the state’s private and parochial schools should have their own classification(s) separate from the public schools.

Roman Catholic, Father Judge, St. Joseph’s Prep, Imhotep: They and institutions like them can produce, have produced, and are producing terrific teams. But they can recruit without sanction or punishment. They can handpick their athletes. A public school can’t do the same thing without breaking the rules. It’s an unfair advantage for the privates, and it should have been corrected long ago.