Washington Post sportswriter John Feinstein wrote the book on college basketball—quite literally, in the case of A Season on the Brink, his 1986 magnum opus on a year spent with Indiana's men’s team.
Feinstein has been to 39 Final Fours during his career. This year’s men’s event, being contested Saturday in Houston by Connecticut, Miami, San Diego State and Florida Atlantic, would have been his 40th. However, Feinstein is staying home for this one, a decision he discussed at length in a Post column Thursday morning.
The veteran scribe cited a column from June 22 in which he wrote that the NCAA should move both the men’s and women’s Final Fours out of Texas following the shooting deaths of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde last May. The men’s NCAA tournament is being held in Houston, while Dallas plays host to the women’s event.
Specifically, Feinstein expressed a belief that the tournaments should be relocated “until and unless that state passed something resembling meaningful gun legislation.”
That did not happen, as Feinstein pointed out, and gun violence continues to plague American life. On Monday, three children and three adults were shot and killed at Covenant School in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood.
“I knew two things for certain when I wrote the column: Texas wasn’t going to change its gun laws, and the NCAA was going to hide under a rock and do nothing,” Feinstein said. “Sometimes you have to tilt at windmills.”
