I won’t soon forget what it was like to be in front of the legendary Will McDonough in The Boston Globe newsroom on Morrissey Boulevard. I was 17 years old, and through a connection at a football camp I’d gone to, run by Patriots legend Ron Burton Sr., I’d gotten a chance to speak with him. So there I was, an idiot kid in a Lincoln-Sudbury High School letter jacket, getting an hour with this icon of my childhood.
Simply put, I wanted to see what I could do to do what Willie did so well for a living.
I’ll never forget the time he gave me. He died five years later. And his name came up again a couple weeks ago when another legend of this weird game of ours, Peter King, told me of the decision he had made. King was going through the list of writers who had died while still on the job, as McDonough did, or didn’t get to leave on their own terms. I told Peter how happy I was for him, that he wouldn’t have to go out like that.
