One story she told me on more than one occasion was about the day she first met ‘Little Johnny Feinstein.”
She knew I knew him and had worked alongside him in press boxes over the years
As the story went, she was sitting in Madison Square Garden in mid-March of 1968, fervently cheering for the Dayton Flyers — coached by her husband, Don “Mick” Donoher — as they played Fordham in the quarterfinals of the National Invitational Tournament.
Sitting nearby and cheering even more passionately for Fordham was a little boy who seemed to live and die with every Rams’ play.
Fordham missed a shot at the buzzer and UD won, 61-60.
When Sonia saw how dejected the little boy was, she told me she went over to talk him:
“I told him, I’d couldn’t lie, that I was happy the Flyers won because my husband was the coach, and I knew all the boys on the team. But I felt bad for him, and I told him, ‘You really know your basketball!’”
She asked his name, and he said “John Feinstein” and said he was 11.
She wanted to know if he’d be back in two days to catch the semifinals and he said he would. He said his dad had gotten tickets for the whole tournament.
“I asked him if I could count on him to root for the Flyers in that next game and he said he would,” Sonia told me.
Dayton edged Notre Dame that game, 76-74, in overtime, and two days later the Flyers met the Kansas team led by JoJo White.
“Johnny was there again and he cheered his heart out for us again,” Sonia said.
The Flyers won the tournament with a 61-48 victory over the Jayhawks and as Sonia readied to go join the celebration, she asked “Little Johnny” if he’d like to meet her husband and some of the boys.
He jumped sat the offer.
Years later — with Feinstein now a legendary sportswriter with the Washington Post and the author of dozens of books — we sat next to each on press row at an NCAA Tournament game and he finished Sonia’s story for me:
“When she brought me down to meet Mick, he said ‘Little Johnny Feinstein! I’ve heard a lot about you. Sonia tells me you really like basketball.’
“I told him I did and with that, he brought me into the dressing room and introduced me to the team.
“A couple of weeks later, a package came to our house from Dayton. Inside was a sheet with the autograph from every Flyers player.
“And best of all, there was a photo of Donnie May. He’d been the MVP of the Tournament an he’d written a message on it:
" ‘To John –
" ‘Thanks for helping us win the NIT
" ‘Don May.’ "
‘Little Johnny Feinstein’
Over the years I could tell Feinstein — who I would not call soft and cuddly by any stretch of the imagination — had a sweet spot for the Flyers and Don May and especially the Donohers.
In the final Associated Press college poll of the 2019-20 season — when the postseason was cancelled by the COVID pandemic — he was the only voter to rank the 29-2 Flyers as the No. 1 team in the nation.
“Mick Donoher was the first college coach I ever met,” he wrote in glowing tribute to the UD legend after his death last year.
Now, Feinstein is gone too,
He died suddenly on Thursday. He was 69.
That day he was said to be coming to the Atlantic 10 Tournament at the Capital One Arena to cover a game. And if he could have wrangled it — just like he once promised Sonia — he would have been back for the next game Friday to see the Flyers play.
Over the years when we’d cross paths on the March Madness trail, he often would ask me about the Donohers and sometimes the Flyers.
We knew each other, not really well, but now that we often were two of the oldest guys on press row, there was some added kinship.
He had been closer to my late colleague, Gary Nuhn, who I worked alongside until he retired in 2000. He died last March at 77.
He had a good Feinstein story from 1981.
I was a sportswriter in Miami then, but Nuhn — like Feinstein — was at UD Arena when DePaul, the No. 1 team in the nation, was upset by Saint Joseph’s in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
The Blue Devils star, Mark Aguirre, was so agitated by the loss that after the game, he walked straight out of UD Arena, all the way to the team hotel in downtown Dayton.
Several sportswriters, including Feinstein, scampered after him to record the meltdown.
When he got back to the Arena, Feinstein came to the back ramp that led down to the court, but a security guard wouldn’t allow him to pass.
Feinstein was covering Maryland, which was meeting Indiana in the second game that day, and he was frantic to get to courtside by the opening tip.
As voices raised and tempers flared, UD athletics director Tom Frericks heard the commotion and came over and defused it. He walked Feinstein down the ramp to his seat.
When he penned his tribute after Donoher’s death, Feinstein wrote about another time the UD coach embraced him.
Two weeks after the Aguirre incident at UD Arena, Feinstein was at the Final Four in Philadelphia.
As he was waiting for the first game to start, he spotted Donoher sitting with some other coaches in the stands. He went over and as he started to introduce himself, he prefaced it with a reminder of that 1968 NIT meeting.
As Feinstein wrote, a suddenly beaming Donoher stopped him in mid-sentence:
“Little Johnny Feinstein! Sonia and I have been wondering if the stories we read in The Post were by the same little boy we met back in ‘68. We’re so proud of you!”
He said it turned out that one of the Donoher’s sons lived in Annapolis and sent his parents the paper.
A book with Bobby
While Feinstein wrote on all sports, college basketball seemed to be his favorite and many of the 44 books he penned were on the sport.
He wrote about the Patriot League, the Final Four, Duke basketball, and the time Kermit Washington punched Rudy Tomjanovich.
Another book was about Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith and Jim Valvano. And several adolescent fiction books had basketball settings.
But his most famous work was “A Season on the Brink,” the story of the 1985-86 Indiana basketball season and Coach Bob Knight, who had given Feinstein unprecedented access and then seemed to hate he’d ever met him.
Feinstein had moved to Indiana to write the book, but one night, after yet another headbutting encounter with Knight, he drove to Dayton in dejection and hoped by having dinner with the Donohers, he’d get some advice.
Mick couldn’t offer much solace. “He’s going to hate the book,” he told Feinstein.
And Knight did. He banished Feinstein from his program for a few years.
Although I liked Knight, as did Feinstein he said, I had my own trials with the mercurial coach.
One that stands out happened at a January game in 1992, my first trip to Assembly Hall since I’d moved back to Dayton from Florida.
Mark Katz and I had ridden together to Bloomington to cover Ohio State’s game with the Hoosiers. When we picked up our passes, Marc got his for press row. Mine had no seat number, just “Southeast Corner” written on it.
The usher pointed me to the top of the arena, where — behind a four-foot wall — there was a lone metal chair with my name on it. I had to stand to see the court and fans needled me about having really ticked somebody off.
Then it dawned on me. Just before I’d left Miami, I’d written a column taking Knight to task for mocking Puerto Ricans after his team had played there.
“The only thing they know how to do is grow bananas,” he told Sports Illustrated.
I’d forgotten all about it.
He had not. On the way to his postgame session that night, a grinning Knight walked past, smacked me on the back, and asked how I’d liked the seat.
When I offered some half-baked answer, he dismissed me with a laugh:
“You sportswriters are all alike.”
But I know that’s not so.
John Feinstein stood out among us.
After all, what other sportswriter ever had Mick and Sonia Donoher say:
“We’re so proud of you.”
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