One on One

by John Feinstein

  Not for one second did I think he was joking. Nor did I even consider a smart-ass answer. “Got it,” I said meekly, returning to speculating on the Diplomats’ chances that weekend against the Seattle Sounders.

  Several years later, after I had returned to sports despite Woodward’s advice, George called me into his office. The day turned out to be so important in my life that I remember the date: January 6, 1982. I had been back in sports for two-and-a-half years, and even though George and I battled over space and play and which stories I was going to cover, I was doing well. I had been promoted to cover national colleges in football and basketball, a beat George had created essentially for me because I had outgrown covering Maryland only.

  Now, late on a Friday afternoon, George called me into his office and shut the door, which was unusual.

  “I’ve got some good news for you,” he said.

  The last time he had said that to me had been a couple of years earlier, when he called me in to tell me he had gotten me a raise. I had been thrilled, so thrilled that when I walked back out to the newsroom I told Paul Attner, one of the paper’s respected veteran reporters, that George had gotten me a raise.

  Attner looked at me skeptically. “I’m not saying you don’t deserve a raise, but when did you start working here?”

  “It’ll be two years next week,” I said.

  Attner shook his head. “That’s a union raise,” he said. “George had as much to do with that raise as I did.”

  Years later, when I would retell the story at Red lunches, George would deny it at first, and then say, “Okay, so maybe it did happen that way.”

  This time the news was different. I wasn’t getting a raise. I was getting something better. “I’m putting you on the Redskins,” George said. “You’re the best reporter I’ve got. You deserve it.”

  I was stunned. George knew how I felt about the Redskins. He knew how much I disliked going to Redskins Park, which I had done on occasion filling in for Attner or David DuPree, who had been the beat writers. One of our first skirmishes had come shortly after my return to sports when he walked over to my desk on a Friday afternoon and said, “You are doing great work on the Maryland beat right now, and I want to reward you.”

  Another union raise perhaps?

  No. He put a media credential for that Sunday’s Redskins game on my desk. “Go to the game. Sit in the [press] box. You’ve earned it. I even got you a parking pass.”

  “George, thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it. But I haven’t had a day off in a while and, believe it or not, I’ve got a date.”

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. “Have a good time. It’ll be a good game.”

  “I know it will be, George. Maybe another time. I kind of like this girl.”

  “Come on, you don’t have a date. Who would date you?”

  Legitimate question, but I really did have a date. I repeated what I had said earlier.

  Finally, he looked me in the eye. “I need a sidebar. I’ll see you Sunday.”

  With that he walked away. I postponed the date and wrote the sidebar in about twenty minutes (I was always fast if nothing else), but I wasn’t happy. Unfortunately, in spite of my lack of effort, George decided I was the perfect Redskins sidebar writer. So most Sundays, after covering Maryland on Saturday, I would find myself at a Redskins game, calling Jerry Claiborne from the press box during the game (Claiborne would never talk in the morning because he had to go to church and then look at film before he’d take any calls) so I could write my Maryland follow-up story at halftime and then my sidebar after the game.

  No wonder I couldn’t get a date.

  And now George was telling me he wanted me to give up the national college beat, which I loved, to cover a team I didn’t like, spending half my life chasing down stories on the status of the backup left tackle for the following Sunday.

  I tried to play nice, which with George was usually a waste of time. I told him I was flattered but I loved covering the colleges—especially hoops—and I was just starting to feel as if I knew enough people to really break some stories. Maybe down the road if he wanted me to cover the Redskins that would be the thing to do, but not right now. (What I wanted to do was yell, “I’m too young to die!”)

  “Colleges don’t matter at this paper,” he said, one of the more honest things he ever said to me. “The Redskins matter. You’re getting the job every scribe [George loved to call reporters scribes] on the paper wants. Congratulations. You’ve earned it.”

  “George, seriously, I don’t want it.”

  “This isn’t a request, John.”

  I walked back to my desk dazed. My friend David Maraniss had just succeeded Woodward as metro editor. He had said to me in the past that if I ever wanted to come back to metro and cover Maryland politics—the plum beat in metro, one that had produced many Post stars through the years—all I had to do was ask. Ten minutes after leaving George’s office, I was in David’s office.

  “You serious about the offer to cover Maryland politics?” I asked.

  “Of course I am.”

  “When can I start?”

  One week later, I was in Annapolis. I never covered the Redskins. And even though a lot happened over the next two years, not all of it good, I never really regretted the decision. I thoroughly enjoyed the political beat. It was a great place to be young and single, and I met a lot of smart, interesting people—on both sides of the political aisle.

  But I missed sports. I still hadn’t been to Wimbledon or an Olympics, so when George offered me the chance to come back to cover the national colleges again and add the tennis beat, I said yes. I had doubts because I would have gotten to cover the national conventions in 1984 if I stayed in metro, but I had one of those epiphany moments that made the decision clear to me.

  I was driving home one night, really wrestling with the decision. As always, I found myself fiddling with the dial, trying to find a game to listen to on the radio. I finally found WOR in New York, which in those days broadcast the New York Islanders games. I’ve been an Islanders fan since they came into the league as an expansion team in 1972. The Islanders, at that moment, were the four-time defending Stanley Cup champions, and they were playing the Montreal Canadiens that night. They were up 2–1 with the game winding down when I pulled up to my house.

  I kept the engine running so I could listen to the last few minutes. The reception wasn’t great, so I leaned down to get my ear close to the radio. The Islanders hung on to win. I shook my fist and got out of the car. I had taken about three steps when I suddenly stopped. What had I just done?

  I had stayed in my car, huddled over a radio, so I could barely hear the final minutes of a November hockey game. Not a playoff game, a November game. What was the message there? At that moment it was clear to me: anyone who cared about sports that much and had the chance to get paid to write about sports was crazy if he didn’t do it.

  POLITICS HAD ALWAYS BEEN a passion of mine, but not like sports. I had stuffed envelopes for Bobby Kennedy at his New York headquarters at 81st and Broadway prior to his assassination. I followed elections and election reporting closely as a kid and in college. But I hadn’t kept records of every political election the way I kept records on sports. I had my own scoring system for every sport and would often watch one game on TV while listening to another on radio. (I turned down the TV sound.)

  That moment in the car crystallized all that for me. I went into the office the next morning and went to see Larry Kramer, the metro editor. Kramer and I had gotten off to a very bad start. He had taken over for my pal Maraniss, and I hadn’t been happy about that or the mandate he had brought with him when he took over: no more lengthy takeout feature stories, or, as some in the newsroom called them, “Maraniss thumb-suckers.”

  Maraniss was—is—a superb writer, as he would go on to prove emphatically by winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Bill Clinton and by writing one of the sports books of this (or any) generation, When Pride Sti
ll Mattered. He valued good writing and liked to give people on his staff the chance to show off their talent. The list of very good writers who worked for David—and for Bob Woodward before him and for Tom Wilkinson and Len Downie before that—is a lengthy one.

  Don Graham, the Post’s publisher, someone I admire as much as anyone I’ve ever known, had decided the thumb-suckers had gone too far. He wanted more “daily” coverage—the fifteen-inch story on the local school board meeting, the eight-inch story on the fatal accident, maybe twenty-four inches on a political debate. That was Kramer’s edict when he took over metro, and one of the first things he did was call me in to make it clear that there would be no exceptions to the rule.

  “Your boy [Maraniss] is gone,” he said then. “You won’t be writing any more hundred-inch stories on the Speaker of the House or the majority leader.” (I had probably written about a hundred inches total on Ben Cardin and Don Robertson, but I got the point he was making.)

  Kramer and I—and just about every other editor on the metro staff—battled right through election night in 1982. That night might have been one of the low points of my career. Instead of being assigned to the office to write the lead story on either the Maryland senate or gubernatorial races, I was sent to cover Bob Pascal, the losing candidate in the gubernatorial race. The editors were sending me a message.

  I sent them one back. My job that night was to call the desk with quotes and color from Pascal’s headquarters. Margaret Shapiro and Alison Muscatine would be writing the lead from the office, and the desk would put us in touch if either writer needed it.

  Shapiro, whom everyone called “Pooh,” was a good friend; Muscatine was not. She had been insulted by the thought of working with a “sportswriter” and had gone out of her way to make my life difficult.

  I didn’t shirk my duties that night as a reporter. In fact, very high up in the story was a scene I described in which Pascal walked into his hotel suite at 8:00 p.m., the moment the polls closed, and told those of us in the room, “Prepare yourselves for a surprise tonight. We’re going to prove a lot of people wrong.” At that exact moment, on the TV in the room, NBC was reporting that Governor Harry Hughes would be reelected with 63 percent of the vote. I reported that scene and that moment, but I reported it to Pooh, calling her directly rather than going through the desk.

  “John, don’t do this,” she said. “You’ve done a great job tonight even though they screwed you. Don’t give them an excuse to be mad at you.”

  “Screw them,” I said, even though I knew she was right. I didn’t care at that point.

  The next morning, after I had taken Pascal to a McDonald’s in his bathrobe and slippers for a day-after postmortem story, I went into the office and was immediately called in by Kramer and his deputy, Bob Signer.

  “You never checked with the desk last night,” Kramer said.

  I was tempted to play dumb—“Was I supposed to do that?”—but I knew that wouldn’t fly. “That’s right, I didn’t,” I said. “Was there any kind of hole in my reporting?”

  “That’s not the point and you know it,” Kramer said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I know it. I also know I should have been cowriting that lead last night with Pooh, and you guys know it too. I write and report rings around Alison Muscatine. I’m just not as good at sucking up as she is. Apparently that’s more important in this regime than actually doing your job.”

  Now it was Signer’s turn. “Part of doing the job is doing what you’re supposed to do. We’re all out of patience with you.”

  “You better not pull this again,” Kramer said, standing up to indicate the meeting was over.

  I left the office soon after that and went on vacation, as scheduled. While I was away I got a call from Pooh.

  “Listen, you’re going to have to make some decisions before you get back here,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah, they’re going to ship me back to night police, right?” I said, unimpressed.

  “Worse. Arlington County cops and courts.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Pooh told me that Kramer and Signer had gone to managing editor Howard Simons to report my insubordination. Simons had told them to do what they wanted with me, and they had decided Arlington County in Virginia, which was the polar opposite of Prince George’s County when it came to stories, was a good landing place for me.

  “They want you to quit,” Pooh said. “I think they’re going to give you one last chance in Annapolis. I talked to Howard and told him they’d be sending a bad message by demoting someone who was still doing high-quality work because he didn’t get along with his editors. You come back and start arguing with them again, they’re going to nail you.”

  Quitting did cross my mind. In fact, I had been approached during that time by Sports Illustrated—a chance I would have jumped at except the job was covering hockey. I liked hockey a lot, but the thought of spending winters flying in and out of Buffalo and Calgary and Vancouver wasn’t that appealing.

  What’s more, in spite of everything, I loved my job and I loved the Post. I finally took a deep breath and decided to go back, keep my mouth shut, and just do the best work I could possibly do. Which is what I did throughout the legislative session. When it was over, Kramer and Signer called me in again. “You did a great job,” Kramer said. “And I haven’t heard one word from anyone about you being anything but cooperative.”

  That summer I was actually allowed to write long takeouts again. One was on Baltimore mayor William Donald Schaefer, who was going to be reelected with something like 80 percent of the vote. He’d done a remarkable job of revitalizing Baltimore but was, to put it mildly, an eccentric. One of the anecdotes in the story was about his penchant for locking himself in his office and watering his plants for lengthy periods whenever the Baltimore Sun criticized him at all. There were several other stories about how sensitive he was to criticism.

  On Election Day, I went to the polls early in the morning to gather a few quotes from the mayor after he voted. When he came out he announced that he had, in fact, voted for himself after studying his record. We all asked some rudimentary questions. I asked him if he thought this would be his largest margin of victory in his four elections.

  “I’m not speaking to you,” Schaefer said.

  I thought he was joking. The story I’d written on him (which had been a hundred inches long) had basically been a paean to what he’d done as mayor.

  “How dare you,” Schaefer continued, “say I’m sensitive to criticism!”

  Everyone cracked up. The mayor did not.

  I got called in after Election Day again. This time it was by Howard Simons. The tone had changed in a year. “You’ve really turned it around,” he said. “You’ve done great work, and I think you’re going to get some chances to cover the national elections next year. But I have a question for you: is this what you want to do? My sense is that sports is still your true love.”

  “I do love sports,” I said. “I miss it a lot some days. But I love doing this. Plus, even if I wanted to go back to sports, I don’t think George would take me back. He was pretty pissed when I left.”

  “George is a bigger man than that,” Howard said.

  I must have given him a look that said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ because he went on: “If I talk to him, I’m sure he’ll take you back—if you want that.”

  I asked him if I could think about it. For one thing, I didn’t think it would be fair to have Simons talk to Solomon, convince him to take me back, and then have me turn around and say no thanks. For another, I really was torn. Kramer had called me in after I had talked to Simons to say he really wanted me to stay and would be pushing me in the direction of the national staff if I did.

  It was the hockey game that made the decision for me. When I told Kramer what had happened, he looked at me and said, “You’re right. Anyone who would care that much about a hockey game on the radio belongs in sports.”

  A week
later, I was standing on the practice field at Holy Cross working on a story on their coach, Rick Carter, who was one of the hot names in the business at the time. Holy Cross’s practice field is on top of a mountain, and it was snowing and freezing in mid-November. I could have been in a warm bar in Annapolis, talking to a politician while having a drink.

  I was perfectly content to be exactly where I was.

  EVEN THOUGH WE HAD continued to fight constantly after my return to sports, I knew George Solomon wasn’t going to be thrilled with the notion of me taking a leave of absence. And so, on the day before the U.S. Open started, I flew from New York to Washington (I flew all the time in those days) to have lunch with him. I didn’t tell him what it was about, just that we needed to talk.

  We went to the Palm—then, as now, the power lunch place in Washington. I laid out for George what had happened and the fact that I would need to take a leave of absence beginning in October and extending until I finished the book—I hoped in time to go to the French Open the following spring.

  George shook his head. “No,” he said. “You can’t do it. I need you. Sorry. Maybe another time.”

  I looked closely at George to see if perhaps he was kidding. He wasn’t. I took a deep breath.

  “George, I don’t think you understand,” I said. “This isn’t a request. This is an announcement. I’ve signed a contract. I’m doing the book. If you won’t give me a leave of absence, I’ll resign. I don’t want to do that, but I’ve decided I’m going to do this book. I’d much rather be able to stay because I love the Post, but if I have to leave, I will.”

  Now it was his turn to look at me to see if perhaps I was kidding. When he realized I wasn’t, he began scrambling.

  “Look, you can make several trips to Bloomington—a couple of long ones if you want. Do it that way.”

  I shook my head. “George, you can’t write a book part-time. Knight’s not going to call me in advance and say, “Hey, I may throw a chair tomorrow, you better get out here. I have to be there.”