Hanging Up Her Notebook
hen Jackie MacMullan was 15, she was a high school athlete, frustrated by the lack of coverage given to girls’ sports in the local newspaper. She complained to her father, who urged her to call up the paper. The sports editor tossed her a challenge: “Why don’t you write something and I’ll put it in the paper?”
“I’m a kid,” she recalled protesting at the time. But before she knew it, the kid had her own column. Her subject: girls who were exceptional athletes.
By the time she got to UNH, MacMullan knew she wanted to be a sportswriter, and faculty mentors like the late Don Murray ’48, director of the journalism program, and Andrew Merton encouraged her.
Now, after more than four decades as a successful journalist covering everything in pro sports from the Red Sox and the Patriots to most notably the NBA, and scoring in-depth interviews with the likes of Patrick Ewing, Tedy Bruschi, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley and more for the Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated, ESPN or one of her three books, MacMullan is taking a step back. She announced her retirement from ESPN in August after almost 10 years there, having appeared on every ESPN platform, as a senior writer for ESPN.com as well as on SportsCenter, The Jump, Around the Horn and Outside the Lines.
MacMullan visited campus in 2009 for a meet-and-greet and book signing event for “When The Game Was Ours” the New York Times bestseller she wrote with Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.
Stars like Tedy Bruschi, Patrick Ewing, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley don’t just talk games and stats with her, however. They have all given her compelling stories they wouldn’t share with any other writer. “I write about sports,” she told UNH Magazine in a feature article in 2007. “But I write about people in sports.”
MacMullan credits UNH for much of her professional success (and for the opportunity to meet the man who would become her husband), and says that Murray and Merton were a kind of “good cop, bad cop” teaching team for her.
“She was the student you wish all your students could be. She’s very good at talking to people and gets people to open up,” Merton said during a visit by Jackie to UNH for a book signing for her New York Times bestseller, “When the Game Was Ours,” which she co-wrote with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.
MacMullan is not only known for her interviews, reporting and writing, but also as a mentor to young women in the world of journalism. When she started at the Globe, there were so few women in the business, most of her mentors were men.
“But then, as I went along in my career, there were all these incredibly talented young women that were just looking for a little guidance. And it was my pleasure to provide that guidance,” she told NPR in September. “It was a joy for me to provide that guidance. It was something I did at The Globe. I was an associate editor there by the time I left, and I think I enjoyed it almost as much as writing my own stories in time.”
Looking at retirement, she shared in the same interview: “When I first started in this business, I was young enough to be the athletes. And then I got to be a point where I could be their mom. And now I’m up to their grandmother, and that just feels like it’s time to go out on my own terms.”