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It's an offer that widely admired sports journalist Lynn Henning couldn't refuse: Accept his paper's latest buyout deal or swallow a pay cut and possible beat change.
"I'll be retiring Feb. 1 from the Detroit News," the 66-year-old columnist confirms in a Sunday morning tweet to nearly 15,000 followers. "It has been a marvelous 40 years there, 45 years overall."
In a follow-up, he posts:
"This job is a gift and a privilege. The blessings flow from readers as much as from colleagues and from journalism itself, which has been, forever, a passion and commitment. Am grateful."
Lynn Henning on the beat last March at Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland, Fla.
(Photo: Susan R. Pollack)
The former farmboy is a 1974 Michigan State journalism graduate and a veteran of Big Ten and Detroit Tigers coverage mostly. Henning's decade of baseball writing started each spring with colorful, insightful dispatches from Lakeland, Fla.
The stylish craftsman also is admired for lyrical, vivid accounts of wilderness fishing adventures with relatives and friends -- essays that cast lines deep into reflections on nature, geology, relationships and mindfulness. "With sun and blue sky and cold, crystal-blue water combining for a heavenly ambience, dig into the freshest of all feasts," he wrote of a lakeside trout lunch in 2017. (See photo below.)
Well-wishers react with dozens of effusive comments under his tweet -- more than 170 in just over two hours. "You’re a hell of a newspaperman, Lynn," posts collegaue Nolan Finley. "A class act," tweets News reporter Louis Aguilar.
Tributes also come from Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley, who's also taking a buyout from her paper, and Chad Livengood of Crain's Detroit Business. "Big loss for The News and its readers," he posts.
Another comment comes from a former federal prosecutor in Detroit who's now a University of Michigan law professor and MSNBC commentator:
You have been a constant source of outstanding analysis and a role model for decency, @Lynn_Henning. Thank you for your contributions to our world and our understanding of it. Sports was merely the prism through which we viewed it.
— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) January 20, 2019
"Only frustration at the moment: Can't personally respond to the all the gracious notes," the nearly retired writer responds. "Geez, 66-year-old boys aren't supposed to cry."
Henning grew up on a farm in St. Johns, north of Lansing, where he attended high school. After graduating, he moved to the capital, enrolled at Lansing Community College and became sports editor of The Lookout campus paper at age 18.
'What I wanted to do'
"The first time I got exposed to real Tigers' baseball coverage was when the Tigers' winter press caravan came," he recalls in a 2015 interview with the student editor of the paper where his career began. "That’s when I really knew that becoming a sportswriter . . . was absolutely going to be what I wanted to do."
The writer and outdoorsman with a 19-pound trout he caught and released in 2017 at Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories.
(Photo: Scott Gardner)
He went to MSU as a junior and became sports editor at The State News. During senior year, the young striver became a part-time sports contributor for the Lansing State Journal.
Post-college career stops were at the Battle Creek Enquirer for a year and then back at the State Journal for nearly four years (1975-79). He moved to the majors in fall 1979, joining The News.
He's co-wrote Kirk Gibson’s autobiography, "Bottom of the Ninth" (1997), and the author of two MSU sports books, "Spartan Seasons" (2003) and "Spartan Seasons II" (2006).
When he spoke four years ago with student editor Jeremy Kohn at Lansing Community College, Henning said being an effective journalist is like "being a good baseball player."
"You have to hit, field and throw. You have to know how to report, interview and write if you want to be a sportswriter."
Those fundamentals can be enriched by knowledge, grace and humility, as this pro showed repeatedly.
The writer and Henning were newsroom colleagues from 1979-2003.
Earlier coverage:
Detroit News Asks Columnists Wojo, Henning And Rubin To Take Pay Cuts, Jan. 8
