Grant Wahl ... Substacker supreme
The sportswriting and American soccer communities have sustained an immeasurable loss
Important clarification that bears repeating once in a while in these (still) early days on a new media planet:
Substack is a publishing platform. Not a news organization.
I am thus unable, technically speaking, to assert that I had the privilege to call Grant Wahl my teammate.
Yet I feel safe saying that we were kindred spirits who, after lengthy runs working for traditional media outlets, launched our respective Substacks roughly a month apart in the summer of 2021.
I studied everything Grant published as part of the ongoing quest for Substackers everywhere to try to learn about what works and what doesn't in this nascent domain. The community he was building was hugely inspiring and I'm glad I had the chance, when we touched base briefly before he left for Qatar, to tell him that.
Our eventual landing spots and overlapping backgrounds — Grant as the basketball-turned-soccer writer; me as the soccer-loving NBA scribe who has dabbled some in his sport, too — have left me thinking of little else since we so jarringly learned Friday of Grant’s death while he was covering his eighth men’s World Cup. It’s one of the saddest stories I’ve heard in nearly 40 years in this profession.
Two days later, I'm still not sure what to say or write — such is the level of shock inflicted by this devastating news. You read tribute after moving tribute, pose questions with no answers and ache for his wife, Dr. Céline Gounder, who has been dealt such an unspeakably cruel blow.
It is so endlessly sorrowful that no one can truly know, but instinct tells me that Grant was prouder to cover the 2022 World Cup than any other in his storied career ... even as he openly wished that the tournament was being staged almost anywhere else.
That hunch stems from knowing how much pride beamed from Grant that he was dispatching himself across the world to make this trek as the independent publisher of his very own news outlet, having built a website that enabled him to cover every single U.S. men's national team qualifying match on the road to Qatar ... and print numerous articles to spotlight all the reasons that Qatar never should have been awarded this World Cup in the first place ... and to provide all of his wonderful men's and women's coverage of The Beautiful Game in one place and totally his way.
It remains utterly incomprehensible that we could lose such a giant in our industry at the way-too-young age of 49 when he was in the midst of doing exactly what he wanted to do. It will never compute.
Yet I couldn't imagine writing anything this weekend without dedicating it to him and reiterating what an absolute honor it was to call Grant a peer and a friend. He used to pop onto the old Soccer Today radio show I co-hosted alongside Steve Davis and Tyler Kern — as well as the late, great Bobby Rhine — in Dallas on 103.3 FM and was always prepared to brainstorm about the leap into the world of self-publishing.
Please read Jon Wertheim or Molly Knight or Joe Posnanski or Dan Wetzel to learn more about Grant’s life and career from those who were closer and knew him better. Or watch the coverage from my colleagues below at CNN World Sport as they honor his memory and you’ll reach the same takeaway.
Neither our business nor the sport he covered with such passion will ever quite be the same without Grant Wahl.
From Grant’s Archives …
In his first decade at Sports Illustrated, before he became a full-time soccer correspondent, Wahl was a highly regarded college basketball writer who was dispatched to Akron, Ohio, during the 2001-02 season to write about a high school junior named LeBron James.
The resulting piece landed James on a Sports Illustrated cover for the first time as THE CHOSEN ONE. You can read Grant's feature from the SI vault here.
More very sad news
Legendary Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan announced Sunday morning that former NBA coach and two-time All-Star Paul Silas, who won two championships with the Celtics as a player and another with Seattle, has died.
I covered Silas only as a coach — he was LeBron James’ first coach in Cleveland — but learned quickly when I started following the game in the 1970s that he was one of the fiercest rebounders in the NBA at just 6-foot-7. I also know nothing made him prouder than seeing his son Stephen finally get a shot to be an NBA head coach in Houston after toiling as an assistant for two decades.
Sending condolences and love to the whole Silas family.
Thanks so much, Marc. It has been a weekend of heavy hearts for so many of us. Still wish it wasn’t true.
Thanks for sharing your memories Marc. Grant’s passing is such a lost for so many in so many different ways. He was an amazing basketball writer prior to his fútbol stuff, but he may have surpassed himself with his passion for fútbol. There are so many of us who have never met him, but felt like we lost a friend because of how he spoke to us with his writing and responsiveness to those whom appreciated his writing. Please feel free to sneak in a fútbol piece every once in awhile since we know what kind of a fan you are for both beautiful games. RIP Grant