Retired sports scribe Jackie MacMullan is ready to “talk smack” with fans this week, but all in the name of raising money for the Huntington’s Disease Society of America Northeast Region, a charity close to her family’s heart.
MacMullan will host “Talking Smack with Jackie Mac,‘’ a virtual Q & A over Zoom on Oct. 13, at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $20 and organizers hope to raise $2,000 to help local families affected by Huntington’s Disease.
The rare disorder causes nerve cells in the brain to deteriorate. There is no known cure, but research is going on at multiple medical facilities, including at Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess and UMass Medical Center, according to the association.
MacMullan, a former Boston Globe sports columnist, has hosted similar events before, including one at Fenway Park. But now that she’s retired, this year’s event will be a little different, she said.
“I’m not going to be able to tell them the day-to-day contact that I’ve had in the past, you know,” MacMullan said in a telephone interview. “But I’m still pretty up to speed on the Celtics and the NBA. People still call me, GMs and coaches and stuff. I still talk to people from time to time because you develop a relationship with them over time.”
“But anything goes,” MacMullan said of the Q & A. “They can ask me anything they want, and they do. Trust me, they do.”
The trailblazing journalist retired in August from ESPN, where she wrote and was a regular panelist on Around the Horn. One of the most accomplished writers ever to cover the NBA, she has won multiple national awards for investigative reporting and feature writing.
MacMullan said she has been involved with the society since the early 1980′s, when she was a young reporter at the Globe. She got a phone call from a woman asking if she would shoot free throws at a Hoop-A-Thon in Boston to raise funds for the New York-based nonprofit.
“I had never heard of Huntington’s Disease,” MacMullan said. But she agreed to do it, and the event changed her life.
“I just kind of showed up,” MacMullan said. “I remember when I was doing my free throws, you know, I was in shorts and a t-shirt [and] there was this very, very well-dressed woman there who was rebounding for me, because they had volunteers that rebounded.”
MacMullan said that she thought “nice, this elegant woman is here doing this.” Afterward, she spoke to the woman, who said her husband had Huntington’s and that she lost six of her eight children to the disease.
“I’ll just never forget that woman,” MacMullan said.
She soon learned that children whose parents have Huntington’s have a 50-percent chance of getting it themselves.
“It is the worst disease I’ve ever seen,” MacMullan said. “It’s ALS with cognitive decline. I remember one of the guys that got it was a brilliant physicist, who by the end of his life was in a wheelchair and couldn’t spell his own name.”
As MacMullan got more involved, her family did too.
“My entire family’s involved with this now,” MacMullan said.
They grew close the family of a Lowell police officer who died from the disease, leaving behind two daughters. His oldest teenage daughter was also diagnosed with “a very rare, early onset” case of Huntington’s, and later died, MacMullan said.
The girl became friends with MacMullan’s then-teenage daughter.
“[She] would come to our house for dinner and talk to us very frankly about what was going to happen to her,” MacMullan said. “It was heartbreaking, just heartbreaking.”
“It was really tough for us to watch [her] pass away,” MacMullan said. She added that she hopes her family was able to provide some comfort to those who have struggled with the debilitating illness.
“I don’t know that we did,” MacMullan said. “Our family tried. You feel pretty helpless.”
Unlike a lot of other diseases, Huntington’s isn’t well known, MacMullan said.
“I’ve been involved in a lot of charities in my life, and some of them just really didn’t need me,” MacMullan said. “But I felt like this one kind of did.”
Adam Sennott can be reached at adam.sennott@globe.com.