John Feinstein, a 35-year sports journalist (The Washington Post), argues federal involvement in sports is inconsistent—critical for crises like the NFL/NBA stoppages or Penn State scandals but often unnecessary. He proposed a "sports czar" to streamline decisions and criticized MLB’s 1922 antitrust exemption, exploited by owners like Bud Selig during the 1994 strike, which Judge Sonia Sotomayor ended after unilateral changes. Feinstein’s book Season on the Brink (2M+ copies) reshaped NCAA rules, including banning media in locker rooms and recruiting visits, while his stance in baseball disputes favored players’ union leadership under Marvin Miller and Don Phir. His career shifted from a $17,500 advance debut to bestselling works like A Good Walk Spoiled, illustrating sports journalism’s evolving influence amid economic and legal battles. [Automatically generated summary]
How much impact does the federal government have on the world of sports in this country?
unidentified
You know, I go back and forth on how I feel about that because sometimes I think it would be best for government just to stay completely out of sports.
A lot of the times when Congress gets involved, the hearings are basically television shows designed to give the Congressmen and women involved exposure to a different audience when they're running for re-election, which they always are, certainly on the House of Representatives side.
But the flip side is sports is a multi-multi-billion dollar business in this country.
It has a huge effect on the lives of people, people as fans, people in terms of raising money for cities, for higher education.
There are so many different ways that sports affects our lives.
Many of the stadiums that exist are built with government funds.
So there are also times when I think the federal government should be more involved.
And in fact, there have been times when I have suggested, and sometimes people think in jest, but that the president appoint, for lack of a better term, a czar of sports, somebody who can sort of come in when there's a crisis, whether it's a work stoppage, which we just saw in both the NFL, football, and in the NBA basketball in the last six months, and say, okay, you're going to come to me and we're going to fix this.
We're going to work it out.
Or when we have the kind of crises we're seeing in college athletics nowadays, which are topped off, for lack of a better term, by the horrors at Penn State in the last few months.
So more and more as I get older, I think the federal government should be more involved than it has been.
We've got a clip of you testifying in a second, but how many years is this for you as a sports writer?
unidentified
Well, I started when I was in college, so 35.
I was a college sophomore at Duke when I first started working for the student newspaper there.
I didn't just write sports.
I was always involved in the political side too and covered, when I got to the Washington Post, I was a night police reporter, covered cops, courts, politics, too.
But I've been involved as a sports writer for 35 years now, started at the Post when I graduated in 1977, and have worked there in some form for most of the last 34 years.
I am officially listed as a contributor, which means I write columns on a regular basis, but I'm not a full-time employee because really my first focus is the books.
And I work for the Post whenever I can, and I still enjoy it.
I love daily journalism.
I still believe in it, even with all the changes that have occurred.
This testimony in 1994, you start off by saying, I didn't write testimony, I'm just going to wing it right here.
You get five minutes.
Jack Brooks, who's no longer in Congress, was a Congressman from Texas subcommittee.
Let's watch this and you can explain why you said what you said.
unidentified
Mr. Selig made the point that government should not intervene in baseball.
Congress should not intervene in baseball.
Congress did intervene, or excuse me, government did intervene through the Supreme Court ruling in 1922 when it granted baseball this exemption.
To me, I'm not a lawyer, but to me, an exemption from a law means there is a special circumstance.
If a police officer tells me I can drive my car 80 miles an hour to a hospital because my wife is about to give birth in the back seat of my car, that doesn't mean he's going to grant me the same exemption from the speed limit when I drive my wife and child home two days later, because presumably I don't need that exemption anymore.
What were you doing then?
You mean professionally?
Or in my testimony?
I had just written a book on Major League Baseball.
That's why they asked me to come in and testify.
I can't believe how young I looked back then.
And the subtitle of the book was The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball.
And the book came out a year and a half before this testimony.
And the reason I subtitled it that was because it was clear that the owners and players were heading for a collision.
The owners had hired a union-busting lawyer to take over their negotiations.
And he had basically promised them, I will break this union, because the baseball union has been the strongest in all of sports dating back to the 1960s when Marvin Miller first started it.
And sure enough, the players ended up walking out and struck in August of 1994.
There was no World Series that year.
That's why the congressional hearings were held to try to get the owners and players back to the bargaining table.
Bud Selig, the commissioner, was actually sitting right next to me during that testimony.
And at one point, I can't remember exactly what it was I said, and I like Bud Selig very much, and I talk about him in this book at some length, and that testimony, Bud put his hand on the microphone and leaned back and said, you can't possibly believe that.
And I said, I believe every word of it, Bud.
And he's the kind of guy that we went and argued in the hallway when we were both through testifying.
And the last thing he said was, okay, I completely disagree with you.
Next time you're in Milwaukee, let's have dinner.
And that's the kind of person Bud Selig was.
The law that I'm referring to, of course, is the antitrust law.
And baseball was granted an exemption from it in 1922 and has maintained that antitrust exemption.
Let me interrupt to ask you, what is an antitrust law and how does it, in Blayman's terms, how does it apply to this?
unidentified
Well, basically the way it applied to baseball was it gave the owners the right to say to franchises, you can't move from one city to another without our approval.
In any other sport, for example, when Al Davis tried to move the Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles, the NFL tried to block him.
Al Davis sued and won On the basis of antitrust.
It said, you can't tell me how to run my business.
Because baseball has an antitrust exemption.
It can say to a franchise, no, you can't move unless you have owner approval.
Now, of course, franchises do move, do get owner approval.
We've lost two franchises here in Washington through the years, and another franchise moved to come here from Montreal.
But baseball was granted the antitrust exemption for that reason to protect cities from losing teams and from being blackmailed by owners, build me a stadium or I'll move, that kind of thing.
But it also came into play in this particular strike because the owners, what the owners were trying to do was say to the union, since we can't reach an agreement, we're just going to give you this new contract, and these are going to be the, this will be the collective bargaining agreement.
The union eventually did go to federal court, and Judge Sonia Sodomeyer, who was then a federal court judge, ruled against the owners and for the players, said, no, you cannot invoke new rules, a new collective bargaining agreement, and that's when the strike finally ended, but it wasn't until the following spring.
Why does baseball get an exemption and not football and basketball and hockey and the rest of them?
unidentified
Because baseball asked and got it.
Judge Landis, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who had been a federal judge, was the commissioner of baseball in the 1920s.
And they were able to get the exemption then.
Other sports, of course, would love to have the exemption, but to me, a twist that doesn't make sense, Congress has said to other sports, nope, you can have the exemption, but it has allowed baseball to continue to have it.
It would change only if baseball did something that would anger Congress in such a way that they'd finally say, no more.
You're abusing the exemption.
I thought in the case of the strike in 94, they were abusing the exemption.
That's what I was saying in that testimony.
But the fact that it didn't happen then, it took a federal court ruling to end the strike.
And the fact that after 2005, when the steroid hearings, the now famous steroid hearings with Mark McGuire and Rafael Palmero and Sammy Sosa, that again, government chose not to intervene in any way leads me to believe that it won't happen.
Another clip we have from that same hearing where you testified with watch.
unidentified
Faye Vincent, when he was the commissioner of baseball, made the statement that if there was a work stoppage, regardless of how it came about, that most fans would view it as a bunch of whiny millionaires taking on a group of greedy billionaires.
I think clearly that's the way many baseball fans, maybe a majority of baseball fans, view this current dispute.
That's not good for baseball.
I think if the owners do impose their salary cap, and if they break this union next spring, they will win a victory, but it'll be a Pyrrhic victory.
It's been said often that it would take an act of Congress to get the Chicago Cubs back to the World Series.
I would suggest to you now that it will take an act of Congress to get the Chicago Cubs and the other 27 teams back on the field next spring.
And I would ask you on behalf of many of my colleagues in this room who are neutral observers and yet think that you need to take this action to seriously consider taking this action.
Well, I meant neutral in the sense that we're trying to be fair to both sides.
I was not neutral.
I was clearly on the side of the players during the course of that work stoppage.
I generally tend to be on the side of the players because what happens frequently, in fact, every time there are these disputes, it's always the owners who want the change in the contract.
It's always the owners saying, we're not making enough money.
It's not that they're losing money.
In the NFL dispute that we saw play out over the first six months of this year, it wasn't that the NFL owners were claiming that they were losing money.
They just said, we want to make more money.
So we want to change the rules.
And the owners always have the advantage because as wealthy as the players are, as I said, greedy millionaires versus greedy billionaires, the billionaires tend to have the leverage on the millionaires.
So they're probably going to end up, quote unquote, winning.
Although in the case of baseball, because the union was so strong and was so well run by both Marvin Miller and Don Phir, both very smart lawyers, they won virtually all the disputes for many years until the drug issue came up between the owners and the players.
I've seen it stated that you have the all-time best-selling sports book called Season on the Brink.
Is that still true?
unidentified
Actually, another book that I wrote, A Good Walk Spoiled, which was about professional golf, sold more than Season on the Brink.
It went past Season on the Brink.
Season on the Brink was my first book.
It was about Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight.
It came out exactly 25 years ago, which again was the reason for one-on-one.
I kind of wanted to look back on my 25 years of writing books and go back to many of the people I'd written about in past books, many of whom I hadn't seen or talked to for years, because I frequently get asked, whatever happened to this person or that person, because many of the people I've written about are famous, but many of them are not.
And so that was sort of the purpose of this new book.
I'm told worldwide it's somewhere past two million because it's been sold in Japan and in Italy and in Australia and in Great Britain and obviously here in this country too and it still sells in paperback.
In fact, the publisher just put out a 25th anniversary edition to commemorate it.
You say in the book that because of that book, two NCAA National Collegiate Athletic Association rules have been changed?
unidentified
That book and the next book I did a season inside because I had complete access to Indiana.
I was in their locker room.
I sat on their bench and I had total access throughout the season.
The NCAA after that book passed a rule that said that no member of the media could be in the locker room of a team before or during a game, halftime, obviously.
And that if one member of the media was allowed, then the locker room was then open to all members of the media.
So by that rule, if I'm in the Indiana locker room before their NCAA tournament game, everybody who was in the Syracuse Carrier Dome, which is where Indiana played that year, with a media credential, would have been allowed in the locker room.
Clearly, that can't happen.
The other rule that was changed when I did my second book, A Season Inside, I went on recruiting visits with coaches.
I went into the homes of high school kids they were recruiting to hear their pitch to the families.
And after that book came out, the NCAA created a rule which said no member of the media may go on a recruiting visit with a coach because they deemed it to give that coach an unfair advantage because it implied if you come to my school, then you'll get more media coverage because here's this guy coming on this trip.
And I asked the friend of mine at the NCAA who called me and said, well, what if I went on every visit that a kid had?
You're allowed to have five coaches come into your home.
What if I went on all five visits?
Then there'd be no advantage.
He said, we'll think up a rule for that one, too.
And now, more of our day-long marathon, remembering notable figures who died this year.
Coming up next, NASA astronaut James Lovell, part of the first crewed flight to leave Earth's gravitational sphere and orbit the moon, spoke at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas as part of a reunion discussion in 2009.
Then, Clint Hill, who served as a Secret Service agent for five presidents, spoke to C-SPAN in 2012 about the Kennedy assassination and the rest of his career in the Secret Service as part of the Q ⁇ A series.
That's followed by Alvin Pousson, who studied the effects of racism on the black community and spoke as part of a panel focused on the success of young black men.
After that, Cecile Richards, who served as head of Planned Parenthood, speaking at a Texas summit for Democratic candidates, followed by her appearance at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
C-SPAN's day-long marathon, remembering notable figures who died this year, continues.
All week, through the new year, the C-SPAN Networks will present a series of marathons highlighting the most consequential moments, conversations, and coverage of 2025 across C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, and C-SPAN 3.
Revisit speeches that moved a nation, hearings that shaped debates, and the authors, leaders, and thinkers that define the year.
Our highlights include key speeches with this year's most impactful speeches from elected leaders and influential voices.
Book TV book fairs featuring author conversations and interviews from our book fairs across the country.
Memorable moments with some of this year's most watched and talked about C-SPAN programming.
President Trump and foreign leaders with key coverage of events both at home and overseas.
America's Book Club, featuring a special lineup from our new weekly series of thought-provoking conversations with host David Rubinstein and leading authors.
America 250 highlights the events, conversations, and reflections marking our nation's semi-quincentennial in Memorial.
Remembering the political figures, public servants, and other influential people who've passed away in 2025.
Key congressional hearings that sparked debate and captured public attention.
Voices of 2025 with book TV and American History TV's compelling interviews and discussions with historians, scholars, and authors who shaped the national conversation.
Watch our in-depth look at the people and events that defined 2025.
C-SPAN's year-end marathon.
All week through the new year on the C-SPAN Networks.
For our complete marathon schedule, head over to our website, c-span.org.
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
This weekend, as the nation celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, join American History TV for our series America 250 and discover the ideas and defining moments of the American story.
This week at 11 a.m. Eastern, a ceremony in Boston marking the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill held by the National Park Service and other groups.
And then at 2 p.m. Eastern, North Carolina high school teacher Valencia Abbott receives the 2025 History Teacher of the Year Award from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Historian Stacey Schiff headlines the award ceremony.
And at 5 p.m. Eastern, prepare to ring in the new year with addresses from Presidents Ronald Reagan in 1983 and Bill Clinton in 2000.