Two years ago, when Bob Knight died, John Feinstein wrote: “Knight was an almost Shakespearean character: Brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed.” When the news flashed yesterday that Feinstein had died in his brother’s McLean home at age 69, it struck me that Feinstein might have written a similar description of himself.

Our relationship began about 10 years before Feinstein became a best-selling author, when he was a junior at Duke looking to freelance as many ACC basketball games as he could. I was the sports editor at The Washington Post, and he would call me daily, pleading, “How can The Post not want to cover Wake Forest-N. C. State?” Eventually, I would say fine, just to get him off the phone.

That was John: One way or another, he was going to get what he was after, and if his bosses didn’t always appreciate it, his readers usually did. To call him a managerial challenge would be an understatement. Often, Feinstein knew the right thing to do. Always, Feinstein believed he knew the right thing to do. Many editors experienced his wrath. Admittedly, I occasionally went looking for it.

Particularly in his younger days, Feinstein was a force of nature. When he asked for book leave to write “A Season on the Brink,” the prospect of having him out of the office for six months, bothering Knight instead of me, was too wonderful to resist. No one in the office thought that book would sell. And then it became the best-selling sports book in history.

He and Knight are forever linked. After the book was published in 1986 to popular and critical acclaim, Knight seethed, claiming he had been duped about whether Feinstein would include his prolific profanity. The more Knight screamed, the more books flew off the shelves.

I knew every detail of Feinstein’s 1986 book tour because he would share his every stop, always pointing out there was no way he could have written a book about Knight without all the profanities Knight heaped upon his players.

When John was assigned to cover a basketball game in Bloomington in 1986, wouldn’t you know Indiana assigned him a media seat in a nosebleed section far, far away from the court. That provided fodder for another national story, more snarls from Knight and more skyrocketing book sales. Feinstein loved it. It was pure Shakespeare.

Feinstein started at The Post as a sports intern in 1977. He then got a full-time job that fall on the Metro desk, covering police and crime before joining an all-star sports staff that included, among others, Shirley Povich, Len Shapiro, David Kindred, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Tom Boswell, Sally Jenkins, Ken Denlinger and David Remnick.

Feinstein knew how to get a story. And he did, breaking what was a major Washington NFL ownership development involving Edward Bennett Williams and Jack Kent Cooke. For that, I offered to buy him lunch at Duke Zeibert’s restaurant, then a D.C. power hangout. Feinstein, of course, ordered the “dinner” steak. But it was a big scoop so I acquiesced.

One afternoon a week later, I got a call in my office from Zeibert, saying, “The kid is in here again. He’s ordering another dinner steak. I thought you should know.”

Feinstein spent the next several years bouncing back and forth between Sports and Metro, which was run at the time by Bob Woodward and David Maraniss. He also kept writing books, as many as two a year, about pro football, college football (Army-Navy), golf, tennis, baseball and a weekly luncheon hosted by the late Boston Celtics icon Red Auerbach (“Let Me Tell you a Story.”) Feinstein wrote more than 50 sports books, plus another bunch for children. No one else comes close.

Feinstein knew how to push my buttons, such as when he lost his rental car at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics — and blamed me. He regularly sparred with the likes of Georgetown coach John Thompson and North Carolina State’s Norm Sloan, and occasionally it escalated to my office. In one heated telephone squabble, Sloan began cursing me to Feinstein.

“Why are you cussing him out,” Feinstein asked Sloan.

“Because he hired you,” Sloan replied.

Feinstein once said he would kill one of our editors if the editor deleted the last paragraph of Feinstein’s Davis Cup coverage. The editor killed the paragraph anyway.

The next day, I called Feinstein in and asked whether he had threatened to kill a colleague.

They both lived to tell about it, each convinced he was right.

In the heat of the moment, not everyone appreciated Feinstein. Over a career spanning more than four decades, millions of readers did.

Today, the business is less without him.

George Solomon was The Post’s sports editor from 1975-2003 and a member of the faculty of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism from 2003-2020. He is the founding director of the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland.