Last Thursday night, the man who just might be the Journal Sentinel’s most-read writer made a rare visit to Milwaukee. Bob McGinn stopped by the Milwaukee Press Club to talk about and sign copies of his new book, The Ultimate Super Bowl Book: A Complete Reference to the Stats, Stars, and Stories Behind Football’s Biggest Game—and Why the Best Team Won.
Most of the time, McGinn works out of his home, up in Green Bay. There he devotes up to 15 hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week, producing arguably the most detailed reports in the country on the workings of any local NFL franchise. McGinn doesn’t just cover Sunday’s game for Monday’s papers. The next day he comes back with one of his signature pieces on the football beat: a weekly, precision rating of the game that looks at each category of position, grading them on a scale of 1 to 5 footballs.
He awards those grades after hours of reviewing his own game recordings and working the phones to get feedback from the network of football insiders — scouts, assistant coaches and others — he’s built around the country after three decades on the job. When that’s finished, he goes back to game recordings and to the phones to produce weekly scouting reports on the team’s next opponents.
It is that relentless obsession with detail that Thursday evening drew about a dozen and a half fans and friends to the Newsroom Pub on Wells Street to hear him and buy his book.
In person, McGinn is about as far as could be from Oscar Madison’s stereotype of the slovenly sports writer. Lean, neatly dressed in dark slacks and a sweater, he could pass for a high school civics teacher or the small-town lawyer he might have become if life had taken a different turn. It’s a look that neatly matches the single-minded discipline of his approach to covering a beat that is a keystone of Journal Sentinel sports coverage.
“I work at a great newspaper,” McGinn said, more than once, and he praised Sports Editor Garry Howard and the other three principal Packer reporters, Tom Silverstein, Greg Bedard and Lori Nickel. “They basically let me do my thing,” McGinn said. “And because these guys relieve me of daily duties and press conferences and some of the day-to-day news, I don’t have to deal with that.”
The Ultimate Super Bowl Book — currently ranked No. 1 on Amazon’s list of Super Bowl-related books — expands exponentially McGinn’s trademark approach to covering regular season football. It’s a comprehensive encyclopedia of every Super Bowl game, from the first in 1967 through last year’s 43rd. (It came out in November; McGinn hopes for a supplemental printing to include this year’s New Orleans Saints’ upset of the Indianapolis Colts). It’s stuffed with statistics and details, drawing on McGinn’s own experience covering more than half of those games, supplemented with scores of interviews.
McGinn contrasted his book with rival volumes on football’s annual championship game. “You’ve probably seen ’em,” he said. “They’re coffee table, beautiful pictures, primarily NFL authorized, the text is maybe a little superficial.” Of his own book, he continued: “There’s hardly any photos. It’s soft cover. It is hardcore football.”
Each chapter recounts a single game in something like four to five times the space of his typical Monday morning recap. He didn’t focus on MVPs or quarterbacks while researching it. “That story’s been told. The key question in all these games is why the games were won or lost. There’s a kind of culture of modesty among star players, and I didn’t want the modesty. I wanted the truth.”
So he studied every game recording he could get, settling for highlight reels only when full games weren’t available. For the more than 150 interviews, he sought out lesser-known players, coaches, assistants, coordinators and others. One prize catch: New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. “He gave me about four hours of his time — all his games as an assistant, as a head coach — as an oral history of Bill Belichick, the book would be worth it just for that.”
McGinn’s wife, Pat, who came along for the Milwaukee visit, compiled much of the data that fills out the book. “She put in the heights and weights of every star. She got the jersey number of every player. We fought to get the name of every assistant coach whoever coached in the Super Bowl. That’s never been printed! We fought to get sack totals — individual sack totals for every game, even though it didn’t become an official NFL stat until ’82, we got that in there.”
The book was born of the frustration of covering 23 Super Bowls. “Everybody’s got too many stories to write and not enough time to write ’em.” Reporters on deadline “end up not even going downstairs” to talk to the players right after the game, he says. “You’ve gotta just write off quote sheets, which are disseminated by NFL PR people. The coverage is homogenized, it’s superficial, everybody’s trying to overwrite.” Sports Illustrated is an exception, he acknowledges. But as for most after-the-game coverage: “It’s pretty weak. It’s pretty thin. Cause nobody has enough time. If you cover these Super Bowls, you’re there for a week, you’re so sick of the hype, you just go home, and you forget about that game. … So I just thought there was a void to fill.”
From the audience, Milwaukee Ald. Nik Kovac asked McGinn whether he thinks the coverage influences players’ behavior. He offered the example of a McGinn story that criticized Brett Favre for avoiding throwing the deep ball — and Favre turned around the next week and did just that. “I felt he obviously read the article and tried to prove you wrong,” Kovac said.
McGinn wouldn’t buy it. “I don’t think I have any bearing on winning or losing or what really goes on,” he said.
Later, though, as McGinn sat and autographed books, Kovac stood off to the side and reiterated his point out of the sportswriter’s earshot. “I think knowing that you’re being reported on affects how you do your job,” he said, and lamented the absence in coverage of government and policy of the saturation reporting that the Packers especially get. “I wish the newspaper had these kinds of resources to cover City Hall.”
Someone in the audience noted that Peter King of Sports Illustrated had called McGinn the best football beat reporter in the country and asked why he was still at the Journal Sentinel. McGinn said he likes Green Bay and the JS, but he also noted that his approach may be distinctively suited to Packer fans.
“It requires a knowledgeable fan base,” he said, and Green Bay’s stands out, as evidenced by the newspaper’s subscription-only Packer Insider online supplement. “We’re the only paper in the country that can charge $44.95 a year for coverage of the team.”
At the end of the evening, with a stack of books sold and signed and the last of the fans gone for the night, McGinn sat and reflected on how he wound up with his own distinctive journalism franchise.
“My dad was a small-town lawyer in Escanaba, Mich.,” he said. “He loved the law. He died when I was 9. I know I would have become a lawyer. I would have worked summers for him. I just know it. OK?
“I ask questions all the time. Just in conversations, I meet people, I ask questions all the time. When I was about 8, my dad said, ‘Bobby,’ he said, ‘Don’t ever feel bad about asking a question. It’s the people who aren’t real smart who don’t ask the questions. And you ask a question, many people in the room want to know the same thing.’”
At the University of Michigan, McGinn started out as a political science major angling toward law school. But at the beginning of his sophomore year, he went to a Michigan Daily organizational meeting. “I was hooked, and that was it. Newspapers from that point on. I got my fix on curiosity and being inquisitive in newspapers and journalism.”
Has he ever thought about applying the sort of detailed reporting he does on football to other fields — politics, for instance? “I would have loved to have another life [covering] major league baseball or politics. I did get a major in poli sci and journalism. But there’s only so much a man can do.”
“My first job was in Green Bay, then I moved to the Milwaukee Journal.” Wisconsin small town life suits him, he says.
Earlier in the evening someone asked him how he managed to seize the initiative and cover the sport in his distinctive fashion, and he replied: “If you cover the NBA, there’s 10 guys on the court. Everybody can see it. Baseball, there’s 18 people on the field. No helmets, and they’re separated. In football, you’ve got 22 guys in helmets a long ways away, and then they really move fast.
“Everybody can see the great play. My job is to find out who screwed up.”
Now, alone, he returned to the theme of the football field where the action is obscured by crowds, distance, armor and speed.
“There’s a mystery out there that people don’t understand,” he said. “The subject matter became worthwhile to me as a life’s work — to try to explain what’s going on among all those people to the great readership of this team, this knowledgeable fan base that had as many questions as I had.”
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