What a shame. We all know how bad the industry is, but if Bob McGinn can be forced out of covering the Packers beat for the biggest paper in Wisconsin...wow. That's like Alabama football here.
I live in Wisconsin and grew up a Packers fan, there's simply nobody like him. We all have our biases based on where we live and who we grew up reading, but Bob McGinn has been appointment reading for Packers and NFL fans for so long. This is a shame. I tell Packers fans, "Be thankful for the last quarter-century of watching Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers and reading Bob McGinn."
This is going to sound romantic and probably corny, but it's so frustrating to see the last vestiges of "old-school" guys being shown the door. Not that other very good Packers reporters haven't come and gone and aren't still around, but McGinn was THE definitive source on the team. If McGinn wrote something, then you forking damn well cared about it.
Especially with the NFL where games are dissected 500 million ways within 3 hours of the game ending, it's rare to keep that appointment reading status. But for me and so many Packers fans, the story of the game wasn't really written until you read McGinn the next morning (or, in more recent years, at least when it was posted online at night).
He was definitely a nuts and bolts, no-frills reporter. I honestly don't ever remember him writing a single player feature, in the sense of writing about a player's life, interviewing a player's family, etc. There's a place for that. That wasn't McGinn's place. His place was in the guts of the game. On a day-to-day basis during the season, he had an incredible way of bringing the thoughts of scouts and personnel guys into the laps of fans. His reporting was as dogged as it gets. He was a true "source guy." I'll be no NFL beat guy had more sources than McGinn.
He'd often said that the way he approached reporting on the Packers changed when Ron Wolf arrived as GM. When he started the beat in the mid-80s, the Packers were horrible. Basically a laughingstock. Then Wolf turned them into a Super Bowl champion, and McGinn always said it was the most unfathomable turnaround he'd ever seen. From then on, he said it was his goal not just to write about games and players, but about what it REALLY took to win in the NFL, how the guts of the game truly worked. And boy did he ever succeed. His Ultimate Super Bowl Book is like porn for diehard football fans and reporters, all at the same time.
He did it all with straightforward writing, too. He'd never spin a phrase like, say, vintage Rick Reilly. Sometimes his writing could best be described as "basic," but the amount of information he packed into a few paragraphs was more than some beat guys could get in a month. He could and would often be brutally critical, too, but you knew it was never a bullshirt hot-take, because he wouldn't write anything if he didn't both believe it and have loads of sources to formulate his beliefs.
From time to time, he'd pick up some spare work for the JS in a pinch. I remember a couple years ago he covered like a boys HS sectional basketball game. The forking story must've been 42 inches long. Nobody would ever get away with that, but he could. Even in a HS hoops gamer, the amount of information he had was absurd. And that was presumably on something he didn't have much knowledge of going into. The guy is a forking wizard.
I sure hope he continues to write. As for Gannett, continue to run off your hardest-working, most-talented, most-read staffers. Great business model. forkers.
