Remembering Grant Wahl

The FIFA World Cup is currently being held in Qatar and provides the best competition that soccer has to offer. The event is a spectacle that the whole world tunes into.

A story that falls outside of the confines of the pitch has been nationally covered by the sports media. It revolves around the death of astute U.S. soccer journalist Grant Wahl. Grant was in Qatar covering the U.S. and other nations in their quest to win the FIFA World Cup. He was a champion for the soccer community and a champion for women’s soccer and was instrumental in growing the game of soccer in America.

All of that is great, but that’s not why I knew about Grant. As a kid, my affinity for anything involving sports started evolving after I had seen a Sports Illustrated cover featuring Lebron James. “The Chosen One” donned the cover as James was a phenom coming out of high school and was about to hit the NBA scene. The story was written by Grant and admittedly, I was too young to read at length about Lebron at that time. However, that cover did fuel my love for sports.

Soon after, my grandpa got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated for Kids. I enjoyed reading about athletes that would appear on the professional sports scene before long. After outgrowing the Sports Illustrated for Kids era of my sports fandom, my grandpa got me a subscription to the real Sports Illustrated.

I was an avid consumer of Sports Illustrated content and I remember reading many articles, not only by Grant, about football, basketball, baseball and other sports. Grant was a reporter who wrote about NCAA men’s basketball and soccer. Looking back at some of Grant’s articles, I reminisced on a story where Mario Chalmers hit a game-tying shot for Kansas in the 2008 NCAA national championship game. The play stands out in my head but the magazine cover where Chalmers is rising above a young Derrick Rose is ingrained in my mind.

The impact of journalists like Grant telling those stories are why I wanted to be a journalist. Sports give us wonderful moments but those moments aren’t moments without broadcasters producing them, photographers taking pictures of them, journalists recapping and analyzing them and spectators watching them. Grant was one of the good writers who gave people the opportunity to feel like they were experiencing the game without actually being there or seeing it.

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