One on One

by John Feinstein

  So I went to find Dell. At that point we had never met. Charlie Brotman, who has been the tournament’s PR director forever, found Dell and introduced us. I tried to ask the question diplomatically. I said something like, “It seems to me, Donald, you’re in a difficult situation because you’re wearing so many hats here. You’re trying to do what’s best for the tournament and what’s best for your clients and what’s best for TV, and you had to make a decision about which match to play this afternoon…”

  He figured out where I was going before I could get to the punch line.

  “What is this?” he roared. “Some kind of f—ing Watergate investigation?”

  That was really all I needed. Dell knew he had been caught with his hand in too many places, and he didn’t like where I was going at all.

  “Thanks for your time, Donald,” I said.

  I turned and walked away.

  Brotman knew exactly what was going to happen next, and sure enough, as I sat in the press trailer—which was a trailer—writing, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Dell.

  “Can I talk to you outside for a moment?” he said, giving me a big smile and a friendly tone of voice.

  “Sure, Donald.”

  I then had to listen for at least fifteen minutes while he explained there was absolutely no conflict of interest, that he would never want to see a player hurt, that he loved Gene Mayer like a son, that Gene wasn’t upset that he had played in the afternoon, and on and on.

  Then came the best line of all. “You know, I’ve always respected your work,” he said. “You’re not like that guy Tony Kornheiser, who is just trying to nail people.”

  “Really?” I said. “You’ve read my coverage of Prince George’s cops and courts?”

  I used some of his quotes on loving Gene Mayer in the story, but, of course, the “Watergate” quote made it too.

  The next morning, when I walked into the backstage area—there were no real locker rooms and no press room—I heard Dell’s voice before I’d taken two steps. “You had to do it, didn’t you?” he yelled. “You couldn’t resist.” He was walking straight toward me, pointing his finger in the general direction of my chest. “You guys from the Post are all the same.”

  “Nice to see you too, Donald,” I said.

  The next day I drove to West Virginia and wrote a story on Frank Cignetti, then the football coach at WVU, who was fighting his way back from cancer. The desk was considering holding it a day, but Cignetti was so open and honest they decided to “strip it” (six column headline) in Tuesday’s paper.

  That clinched the Woodward bet. I had been prepared to beg the desk to get the story in the paper, but Cignetti made it easy for me. A few days later, without complaint, Woodward walked to the McDonald’s on 14th and K Streets that was frequented by most of the hookers in the neighborhood. He had to wait because I like my hamburgers plain or with onions only. He marched with the food back into the newsroom, where I, of course, had the in-house photographer waiting for him.

  Woodward signed the photo for me later on. I still have it, framed on the wall of my office. It says, “John, you deserve a break today… Bob Woodward.”

  THE TWO AGENTS I had met the second day of Wimbledon not named Dell were Peter Lawler and Tom Ross. I had sneaked into the players “tea room”—which was actually the lounge and dining area—with Dewey Blanton, who worked at the time for the Men’s Tennis Council. We had walked upstairs and encountered Lawler and Ross, who had been on the balcony that overlooks the outside courts. It was raining again, and even agents know when to come in out of the rain.

  “Well, if it isn’t the Advantage boys,” Blanton said as we got to the top of the stairs.

  Both men were young. Lawler was older, taller, about 6 foot 3, with glasses. I would learn later he had been a swimmer at Yale. Ross was closer to my age—mid-20s. I would describe him a few years later in Hard Courts as looking like “a slightly overweight Ken doll.” In those days he just looked like a Ken doll: sandy hair and a quick smile. He had played tennis at California-Berkeley.

  Blanton introduced us. “You looking for a story?” Ross asked.

  Oh God, here came a pitch, no doubt, for one of their clients.

  “I’m actually just looking to stay dry,” I said.

  Ross shrugged. “Well the guy from Pony just tipped me that Ann White has a new outfit she’s going to wear in her match against [Pam] Shriver that needs to be seen.”

  I knew the name Ann White but knew almost nothing about her. I was skeptical. “New outfit?”

  “Yeah. He said it will be the talk of the tournament.”

  Since White would be playing Pam Shriver—a semi-local for the Post since she was from Baltimore—I thought it might not hurt to take a look. I’d probably write something about Shriver anyway.

  “What court?” I asked.

  “Court two,” Ross said.

  Court two was Wimbledon’s most famous outside court. It was called “the graveyard of champions” because there had been so many upsets there. I hadn’t been there yet since no matches had been played on outside courts on Monday. So when the rain finally stopped at about six o’clock, I walked out to court two just in time to see Ann White take off her sweats.

  She was wearing a white formfitting Pony bodysuit—as in from head to toe. Let me say this: she had the form to wear the outfit. Ann White was about 6 feet tall with blond hair and what Ted Tinling would call an elegant body. As soon as I saw what White was wearing, I knew I had to find Ted.

  I raced across the concourse and told the imperious guard at the tea room door that I was not going upstairs to the tea room but to Ted’s office, which was a few yards from the entrance. He looked at me suspiciously.

  “If you want to walk in there yourself and tell him I need to see him, that’s fine with me.”

  “No media are supposed to be in this building,” he said.

  Somehow I resisted the urge to say what I was really thinking and instead said, “He’s the media liaison for the club. He’s supposed to talk to the media.”

  The guy glared at me, stared at my badge, and finally moved aside—if only because people lined up behind me to pass his inspection were getting impatient. I raced to Ted’s office.

  “I need you to come out to court two right away,” I said.

  Ted looked at me as if I were crazy for a moment, and then followed me out of his office. He still moved pretty well at that point, so it didn’t take us long to get back to court two, which was only a few yards from the entrance to the tea room.

  As soon as Ted saw White, he gasped. “Oh my God, it’s fabulous!” he said. “She looks fantastic! Thank goodness she has the body for it. Some players in that thing would look awful. A white cat suit—it will be the new thing. The next thing will be body paint—no clothes, just body paint!”

  I couldn’t write fast enough.

  Naturally, it started to rain after Shriver and White had split sets. The next day, White was informed by Wimbledon officials that her outfit, although white—which Wimbledon still required—did not conform with their dress code. Of course White—and Pony—got more publicity out of the banning of the cat suit than they would have gotten if Wimbledon had said it was okay.

  The only bad news was that my story, which ran in the International Herald Tribune, got Ted into trouble. The Wimbledon people weren’t at all happy that he approved of the outfit.

  “I’ve been reprimanded,” he told me the next day, sipping tea in his office. “They were especially unhappy with the reference to body paint.”

  “I’m really sorry, Ted,” I said.

  “Nonsense!” he screamed. “It was an absolute highlight! I’ll be forever grateful to you for coming and finding me so that I could see it!”

  THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY I finally heard back from Esther. “Jeff will go to seventeen-five,” she said. “But that’s as good as it’s going to get.”

  I had already decided to say yes even if she had called back and told
me Neuman wouldn’t move off $15,000. I wanted to do the book. I was convinced it could work. I was a little bit scared about leaving the Post for a while and heading off to Bloomington for the winter, but I knew I wanted to do it.

  “Tell him I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Before we sign anything, do you want to make sure Knight will go through with this?” she said.

  She was right. Faced with the reality of a reporter showing up on his doorstep for an entire season, Knight might have second thoughts.

  “Good idea,” I said. “I’m not coming home until after the British Open. Can it wait until then?”

  “Probably,” she said. “But don’t waste any time once you get back. I don’t want Jeff to get cold feet either.”

  I suppose I could have tried to call Knight from London, but in those days just getting an outside line to call the U.S. was a major challenge. So I decided to wait.

  Boris Becker ended up becoming the youngest man in history to win Wimbledon when he beat Kevin Curren in the final that year. Curren had beaten both McEnroe and Connors to get to the final but couldn’t handle the seventeen-year-old Becker, who was spectacular on the court and just as impressive off it. When one of the British tabloid writers asked him after the final if he saw any irony in winning on a court his countrymen had once bombed, Becker didn’t even blink.

  “I’m not a soldier, I’m a sportsman,” he said. “The world is a very different place in 1985, I hope, than it was in 1945.”

  I went to the British Open after Wimbledon along with Tony Kornheiser, his wife, Karril, and their three-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. We shared an apartment in the town of Deal (the tournament was down the road at Royal St. George’s that year) that had no telephone in it. That meant each night after we’d had dinner, Tony and I would walk across the street to a phone booth, where we would usually wait about a hundred rings before an overseas operator picked up and allowed us to call the office to check on our stories.

  After the British, I flew home, slept for a day, and then called the Indiana basketball office. Mary Ann Davis was Knight’s longtime secretary. In fact, when he went to Texas Tech, she went with him and still works for him today. She told me that Knight was on a fishing trip and that she would pass a message on to him, but that it would probably be a couple of weeks before I heard back from him—he generally didn’t return phone calls from vacation.

  I reported this news to Esther, who was not happy. “You can’t sign the contract without him confirming that he’ll do it,” she said, correctly. “Jeff is getting a little antsy. I think he’s wondering if I sold him something I can’t deliver.”

  This was all new to me, but I understood. Mary Ann had mentioned that Knight was going straight from his fishing trip to Gerald Ford’s celebrity golf tournament in Tahoe. I remembered Digger Phelps mentioning that he had played in the event in the past. I called Digger. He was, in fact, going to play in the tournament again.

  “I need a favor,” I said.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I need you to get a message to Knight when you see him out there, telling him that I need to talk to him as soon as possible.”

  If it bothered Digger to be asked to play middleman for me, he didn’t show it. “Give me a number,” he said. “I’ll do the best I can.”

  I was going to be in Stratton Mountain, Vermont, that weekend at a tennis tournament. I gave Digger the number for the hotel and asked him to please ask Knight to call me at night since I’d be out all day at the tournament. There were no cell phones, and getting in touch with someone wasn’t nearly as easy then as it is now.

  “I’ll give him the message,” Digger said. “I’ll walk him to a phone if I can. But I can’t promise you he’ll call. You know how he is.”

  Actually I didn’t. I would find out soon enough.

  I drove to Stratton Mountain, without question one of the most beautiful spots to ever stage a tennis tournament, arriving on Thursday night. I knew that the Ford tournament began on Friday. I heard nothing that day. I even cut short dinner on Friday (tough for me to do) so I could be back in the room in case Knight called. I was thinking if he called and I wasn’t there, he might not bother to leave a message.

  After watching the semifinals on Saturday—and getting in a fight with a security guard who claimed I couldn’t go into the players dining area even when invited in there by John McEnroe—I went back to the room and went to bed, feeling discouraged. I figured I had maybe seventy-two hours to find Knight somewhere, somehow, or I would have to admit defeat to Esther and crawl away from the project, probably destined never to write a book.

  The phone rang at 2:30 a.m. I know because when the phone rings at that hour and you’re asleep, the first thing you do is look at the clock. The second thing you do is you wonder if something is wrong with someone in your family. The phone in the room wasn’t next to the bed, so I had to get up and walk over to the kitchen area to pick it up.

  The first words I heard were, “John, what can I do for you?”

  I was still groggy but I figured out pretty quickly it was Knight. The voice and the tone gave him away, as did the hard Midwestern accent that turns can into cayn.

  “Bob, how are you?” I said, trying to sound cordial. I knew it was two hours earlier where he was, and I knew he knew I was on the East Coast. Neither fact was relevant at that point.

  “Did McEnroe win today?”

  “Yeah, he plays Lendl in the final tomorrow.”

  “I really like the way he competes. Do you like him?”

  “Yeah, I do. He’s actually a good guy. You having fun out there?”

  “It’s okay. I’m not playing very well.”

  The next five minutes were devoted to a discussion of Knight’s golf game. At one point I wondered if maybe I was just dreaming this whole thing. I looked at the clock again: 2:50. Nope, I wasn’t dreaming.

  Finally, there was a pause, and I decided it was time to get to the point.

  “Listen, the reason I tracked you down is I found a publisher that’s willing to do the book we talked about back in Lexington. But I didn’t want to sign the contract until I made sure you were okay with putting up with me for an entire season.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. I started to panic. Was this going to be a renegotiation? Or just a flat out no?

  “Come on out,” he said. “Just promise me you won’t be too much of a pain in the ass.”

  “I promise to try not to be a pain in the ass,” I said.

  “You won’t be,” he said. “Actually, I think you’ll enjoy it. If you have any problems getting set up, call Mary Ann, she’ll take care of you.”

  I think I got “Thanks, Bob” out of my mouth before he hung up, but I’m not sure.

  I put the phone down and stared at the clock again. It was official now. I was going to ignore Mike Krzyzewski’s advice. I was going to spend a winter with Bob Knight.

  4

  Back Home Again… Sort Of

  ACTUALLY, IT WASN’T OFFICIAL yet.

  After my conversation with Knight, I told Esther we could go ahead and sign the contract. The next step was telling my boss, George Solomon, that I was planning on taking a leave of absence to spend the basketball season in Bloomington.

  To say that George and I had a hot-and-cold relationship for twenty-six years—starting with my summer internship in 1977 and ending with his retirement as sports editor in 2003—is a vast understatement. I once joked in a book introduction that George and I worked best together when we weren’t working together. These days we see each other once a week at the Red Auerbach lunches—which do continue to this day, even though Red died five years ago—and get along wonderfully.

  That wasn’t always the case. George and I often fought like cats. He loved my work ethic and my level of productivity. He didn’t love my big mouth, my involvement in the Newspaper Guild (the writers union at the Post), or the fact that I often told him his story ideas were ridiculo
us. George had been a Redskins beat writer before he became an editor. He understood that the Redskins were the most read and the most important beat at the paper—surpassing even the White House, if you ask a lot of people.

  Being from New York, I wasn’t much of a Redskins fan. More important, I found the town’s (and George’s) obsession with the team ludicrous. But I learned very early on just how important the Redskins were at the Post. Even though I was the night police reporter at the time, I was sitting at a desk in sports on the afternoon of the 1978 NFL draft, writing a story on the Washington Diplomats. They were the local soccer team, and I still covered them when I was on the metro staff largely because no one on the sports staff had much interest in doing it.

  This was before the draft was on TV, and it began on a Tuesday. As I was writing, Ben Bradlee came striding back to sports. Every story you have ever heard about Bradlee is true: he was (and is) as charismatic, intimidating, and fascinating as any person I’ve ever met. And he loved the Redskins. Every Sunday, he and his wife, Sally Quinn, sat in the owner’s box at RFK Stadium with then Redskins president Edward Bennett Williams, who was both the Post’s lawyer and one of Bradlee’s closest friends.

  “Hey, George,” Bradlee yelled. “Who’d we get?”

  I had been at the Post for less than a year and was, quite literally, the low man on the reporting totem pole—night police and soccer were my beats. I was also very young and already pretty sick of, as the late Maryland football coach Jerry Claiborne once said so eloquently, “reading about nothing but Redskins, Redskins, Redskins every day.”

  So before George Solomon could answer the question, I turned to Bradlee, who was standing close to my desk, and said, “Gee, Ben, I didn’t know the Post had a pick in the NFL draft.”

  Bradlee spun in my direction. (He could spin very fast.) He pointed a finger at me and, eyes narrowing, said in what can only be described as a menacing tone, “Listen, Feinstein, you don’t like the Redskins, you can get the hell out of this town right now. You got it?”