Following his death earlier this month, the obituaries for John Feinstein paid fitting tribute to his enduring contribution to the sporting wing of the great American library. Each trawl through his career touched upon 40-plus non-fiction books written across four decades, classics such as A Good Walk Spoiled, A Season on the Brink, Hard Courts, and The Majors showcasing his unique knack for lifting the veil on everything from professional golf to college basketball, tennis to the NFL. Soccer never featured in his sprawling bibliography, yet one of his most prized personal possessions was a jersey belonging to Johan Cruyff.
Not some supposedly game-worn piece of memorabilia purchased at one of those online auctions where authenticity can be a fluid concept either. Here was the genuine article delivered right from the player himself. Shortly before the Dutchman departed the Washington Diplomats following his late-stage, not entirely successful flirtation with the North American Soccer League in 1981, he invited Feinstein for a farewell lunch and interview at the Four Seasons in DC. After the food had been cleared away, Cruyff said, “I have something for you.” Suddenly, he was fumbling under the table where he had earlier placed a box that he now handed over.
“Inside it was one of his jerseys,” Feinstein told Pablo Maurer in The Athletic in 2016. “So obviously, the tradition in soccer is that you give your jersey to your opponent at the end of the game, out of respect. And he said, ‘You deserve this. You were a worthy adversary.’ I never thought of myself as an adversary. I still have the jersey, which I cherish.”
Fresh out of Duke University, Feinstein started at The Washington Post, where the rookie cut his teeth on the police and court beats before fetching up at the sports desk. There, he was eventually tasked with covering the Washington Diplomats of the troubled North American Soccer League. A rather humdrum assignment typically given to those down the food chain, it morphed into something much more glamorous and exciting after the club signed Cruyff, newly bankrupt because of a dodgy financial adviser, in 1980. The cub reporter and the most cerebral footballer of this and perhaps any generation forged a strange, mutually beneficial relationship.
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“It became almost a ritual, if they lost,” said Feinstein in that interview with Maurer. “I’d say, ‘So Johan, what happened out there?’ He’d say, ‘What happened? The coach is an idiot. The players don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t f**king listen to me. This is impossible.’ That was what he’d always say: ‘This is impossible.’”
Still billed as the best-selling sportsbook of all time, Bobby Knight went berserk at the completely accurate portrayal of him as a foul-mouthed bully. Cruyff was a little more stoic
The savvy Cruyff knew enough about America to appreciate that venting about questionable tactics and unco-operative teammates carried more heft in the sports pages of the Post than anywhere else. It was then a great newspaper, still basking in the afterglow of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate exposé, rather than the emasculated private Jeff Bezos plaything of today. Smart and ambitious, Feinstein recognised too that he’d been afforded privileged access to an outspoken character whose name guaranteed column inches, the prized currency any young writer on the up craves.
“Johan would come up to me and say, ‘Why did you put this in the paper?’,” said Feinstein, about the routine that played out every time one of Cruyff’s printed harangues subsequently caused controversy at the club. “And I’d say, ‘For crying out loud, I had my notebook out!’ And then when practice was over, especially on the road, he’d just come up and say, ‘So where are we going to dinner?’ All was forgotten.”
After exiting the playoffs in the opening round in his first season, Cruyff was back playing with Levante in Spain in 1981 when Feinstein mentioned to Washington’s coach Ken Furphy that the struggling team needed its superstar. Five weeks later, he returned to the capital.
The greatness of so many of Feinstein’s later publications was that, just like in his dealings with Cruyff, he inveigled his way into inner sanctums, gaining the trust of normally private, reticent subjects, producing works that genuinely took readers behind the curtain.
His prolific stretch in that regard began when he persuaded the legendary coach Bobby Knight to allow him to spend six months with the Indiana University Hoosiers’ basketball team in 1985. His sports editor signed off on the leave of absence because he wanted the peace that came when the rather demanding Feinstein was out of the office, and that sojourn spawned the timeless A Season on the Brink.
Still billed as the best-selling sportsbook of all time, Knight went berserk at the completely accurate portrayal of him as a foul-mouthed bully. Cruyff was a little more stoic. Despite the fact somebody else at the Post once wrote that the European import “has been the biggest disappointment since Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society”, his relationship with Feinstein appeared unaffected. Something which is all the more impressive since clippings from the era show the young journalist never pulled his punches. In one article alone, he reveals the star player was earning $9,000 a game, criticises the hypocrisy of his complicated relationship with the coach, and baldly states he had come to America simply because it was less pressure than remaining in Europe.
“He insists that he does not think of himself as the Saviour,” wrote Feinstein. “But he did not object when somebody stitched “JC” on the front of his uniform.”
Clever intro. Odd couple.
