EVERYBODY hated Will McDonough sometimes. It couldn’t be helped, really. If you read his Boston Globe column, which you did if you’re any kind of serious sports fan, there were times when you wanted to punch him square in the face.

Maybe it was the reverential treatment he accorded his pal Bill Parcells even after the Tuna pulled the rug out from under the Patriots on the eve of Super Bowl XXXI. Maybe it was the recent columns on pitcher Jose Contreras in which McDonough was perceived to be siding with hated Yankees owner George Steinbrenner over Red Sox president Larry Lucchino. Maybe it was the way he would periodically lay into Roger Clemens when the Rocket was pitching for the Sox.

Whatever it was, he found a way to set you off. He made it worse by writing as if his opinions were unassailable. And most of the time, he made it worse still by presenting the facts in such a way that you couldn’t argue with him.

Some, like former Patriots owner Billy Sullivan, had what appeared to be a seething, consuming hatred for the man, expressed time and again over the course of years. McDonough had no respect for Sullivan, and he made his disdain clear in print. Sullivan countered with pokes at McDonough’s credibility, at one point calling him a "stooge for [Oakland Raiders owner] Al Davis." The legendary feud between the two men reportedly reached its most volatile point in a Philadelphia locker room in the early ’80s, when, according to what Billy’s son, Pat, later told Mark Jurkowitz (as published in a 1994 Phoenix profile of McDonough), the two men nearly came to blows, with McDonough telling the senior Sullivan, "You’ve always been an asshole, and you’ll be an asshole forever."

Others, including many of the sports figures who found themselves the topic of one of his more-vitriolic columns, also must have felt some degree of hatred for McDonough, the kind of hatred that might soften as years went by but would never fade completely. Lucchino may not have meant "I hate Will McDonough" when he recently suggested Will should stick to covering football, but given that McDonough had just attacked him in print, it’s safe to say Lucchino didn’t mean "I sure do love that Will McDonough."

For those of us who are just sports fans, just readers — who have never encountered the man, never read our names in his column — the hatred was largely situational, and mostly temporary, but very real. You might hate McDonough for a couple of minutes, or it might last a year, but the emotion would always come on strong and burn hot.

You’d be reading one of McDonough’s columns or watching him on TV, just trying hard to absorb as much of the information he’d be throwing at you as your mind could handle, and suddenly he’d shove you into an all-out rage. It could be something as simple as his taking a potshot at a Houston Oilers player who made the unforgivable mistake of missing a game to be present at the birth of his child. Or it could be something as significant as his reporting an unsubstantiated allegation that the late Celtics star Reggie Lewis’s death was drug-related.

Most of the time, though, he’d do it without intending to do anything but his job. He’d do it just by stating simply and straightforwardly — and with his deep knowledge of sports and his always-impressive reportorial skills backing him up — something that would utterly contradict what your fan’s mind knew to be incontrovertible, carved-in-stone fact. And the worst, most enraging part of it all would be that even when you were absolutely certain he was wrong, there’d be part of your brain telling you that maybe, just maybe, he was right. It would be that traitorous part of your brain that remembered all the times other people hated McDonough for something that offended their fan sensibilities while you just sat back and thought, "Yeah, but he’s right." It would be that defeatist part of your brain, which knew that even if McDonough were completely wrong, most readers would end up seeing the issue at hand his way.

It happened to a friend of mine recently when McDonough laid into Lucchino over the Sox exec’s war of words with Steinbrenner. "Lucchino has a face for all occasions, but, unfortunately, very little knowledge of baseball," McDonough wrote. "He was slotted into the Red Sox job by his good friend, Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, who wanted to ensure that he would have Boston’s vote in his pocket whenever he needed it."

I understood completely when my buddy opined that McDonough should have just gone ahead and moved to New York. But the fact of the matter was that McDonough was right about Lucchino, even if he was a bit overharsh in expressing himself.

It last happened to me with McDonough’s defense of the NFL officials responsible for the tuck call in last season’s Patriots-Raiders game. Like every other Raiders fan in America (and, indeed, a good number of standard-issue football fans outside of New England), I’ve been walking around for the past year certain that referee Walt Coleman blew that call. I’ve watched the replays dozens of times, and I become more certain with each viewing that Tom Brady had given up all intention of throwing the ball by the time Charles Woodson streaked in and knocked it out of his hand. It was a fumble, just as Coleman originally ruled on the field, not an incomplete pass, as he decided on viewing the replay. The Raiders, who were on their way to victory, were robbed.

But McDonough, like virtually everyone else in New England, didn’t see it that way. In a pair of columns, published January 21 and March 18, he defended both the referee’s final call and the controversial "tuck rule" on which it was based. And damned if he didn’t make a convincing case.

"Many never had heard of the tuck rule, which states that a passer in the act of throwing when he is hit and loses the ball is credited with an incomplete pass if he does not bring the ball back into his body before he is hit," McDonough wrote. "Brady had stopped his throwing motion and still had his hands on the ball, but never brought it into his body."

That last part is crap. Brady brought that ball as far back into his body as he was ever going to. The play was broken. Brady was looking for something else to do and he simply never bothered to cover the ball up properly. And for that he caught a break.

Unlike many Raiders fans, I never begrudged the Patriots their good fortune. I just wanted someone to admit that the team got lucky. And I thought that if anyone were going to do that, it would have been McDonough, the eternal contrarian.

But he went the other way. And it would have been impossible to argue the point with him. The guy had spent decades covering the NFL. He’d been to every Super Bowl ever played. He had a national reputation for knowing everything worth knowing about the NFL, right down to who was going to be fired, who was going to be hired, and when it was all going down. And even though his local partisanship clearly had influenced his opinion on the tuck, his word on the topic was going to be taken as gospel, and held up as such by Pats fans, who had an authoritative voice on their side of the issue.

It was enraging. And I hated McDonough for it.

I continued hating him, even as I continued reading his column (an essential measure for anyone interested in sports, particularly for those of us whose spirits rise and fall with the fortunes of our favorite NFL team), even as I continued to sit back and chuckle as others around me traveled the same road on other issues — like that friend who was offended by McDonough’s take on Larry Lucchino.

I continued hating McDonough for his defense of the tuck rule right up until I learned of his death, at age 67, on January 9. Reportedly, he was at home watching ESPN’s SportsCenter when he passed. And now it’s impossible to hate him anymore. Now all I can do is wonder whether anyone will ever be able to fill his shoes.

McDonough may have been wrong about the tuck play even if he was technically correct about the tuck rule. He was almost certainly wrong-headed in his lonely stance on Boston Herald reporter Lisa Olson’s sexual-harassment charges against Patriots players in 1990. (McDonough was the only major Boston sports journalist to raise questions about Olson’s allegations. And even though those charges have been called into doubt since, McDonough’s position appeared then to be motivated mainly by his friendship with team and league muckamucks — and perhaps by a sexist streak.) He was almost certainly wrong in his habit of cozying up to team owners and league officials while nearly always disregarding players’ voices and positions.

But his facts were always straight. His information was always good. His reporting was always rock-solid. And his positions were always well argued.

It was good having Will around. It was good knowing that a columnist for the local paper of record was the most respected (and sometimes most feared) voice in professional sports. It was good having the chance to benefit from his connections, to be, just by virtue of reading the Globe’s sports section, among the best-informed sports fans in America.

It was also good having someone to hate. Those who knew McDonough say he didn’t care whether readers liked him. He was sure of himself. He projected self-confidence. And he accepted without question the idea that if he was doing his job well, someone was always going to have a problem with him.

So farewell, Will. There will always be a part of us that misses you — and another part of us that’s never quite forgiven you.

Sean Glennon can be reached at sean@mrcrafty.com.