Life & Wisdom Quote by Will McDonough

There is a quiet flex in McDonough's roll call of marquee events, but the real move is how quickly the flex dissolves into craft. He isn't bragging about proximity to greatness so much as establishing a kind of professional credential: I was there, over and over, across sports, across eras. For a sportswriter of his generation, being present mattered the way bylines and shoe-leather reporting once did in politics. You earned authority through repetition, not hot takes.

The cadence is telling: Super Bowls, World Series, heavyweight fights, Olympics, then the sweeping "every sporting event there is". It reads like a passport stamp montage, but it also hints at something else: the job's strange bargain. You get access to the biggest stages, yet your role is never to be the star. You're adjacent to spectacle, paid to translate it, and expected to remain both enamored and skeptical. The list is a love letter to sports' pageantry and an admission of how the beat can become an identity.

Context matters: McDonough came up in a pre-internet media ecosystem where a few gatekeepers narrated the national sports story, especially in Boston. His voice was influential because scarcity made it so. The subtext is almost elegiac now: a career built on being in the room, watching history with your own eyes, before the audience could watch it from ten angles in real time. The line carries pride, yes, but also the implicit question of what happens to the sportswriter's mystique when everyone "was there", at least on their screens.