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CNN
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It was 5am and I couldn’t sleep; my mind replayed the extraordinary drama of Argentina’s penalty shootout victory over Holland over and over.
And then I checked my phone. I thought I was going to throw up.
American soccer journalist Grant Wall, who also covered the game in Lusail, had died.
Initially, social media was full of concerned rumours, but then came the horrifying confirmation. It all seemed so sudden and too strange to be true.
Grant had been tweeting about the game, had posted about the incredible Dutch stoppage time equalizer that sent the game into extra time. But then, while more than 80,000 fans were engrossed in the drama on the pitch, Grant was fighting for his life. As we now know, frantic attempts to revive him were tragically unsuccessful.
If my personal experience is anything to go by, for many of the journalists covering the World Cup in Qatar, the hours since have been a surreal and sickening blur.
I can’t remember the first time I met Grant. It might have been in New York for Jurgen Klinsmann’s appointment as head coach of the US soccer team in 2011, or maybe we never met in person until this World Cup in Qatar.
But such is the nature of our business that we orbit each other and communicate so often on social media and through our TV interviews that we have become friends.
In many cases, our conversations took place on Skype or Zoom, and I can clearly remember one occasion when his wife, Celine, accidentally walked into the room and almost went out in front of a global audience. He deftly waved her away without breaking his stride.
In the years to come, epidemiologist Dr. Celine Grounder will become one of the public faces of the scientific fight against Covid 19, and he rarely manages to hide his pride in her achievements. He was gushing about her to me just two weeks ago.
As a writer for Sports Illustrated, Wahl quickly made a name for himself, introducing then-high school athlete LeBron James to the world with one of his many cover stories and the headline “The Chosen One.” Just hours after he died, NBA great James led a tribute to Wall, lamenting: “This is a tragic loss. It’s a shame to lose someone as great as he was.”
But it was as a football writer that Wahl really made a name for himself. He was a cheerleader for the beautiful game in North America long before it was fashionable—a decade before the English Premier League became a Saturday morning fixture in many American households, and some Major League Soccer stadiums drew crowds of more than 70,000.
Famed British soccer commentator John Champion told me that when he crossed the Atlantic to join ESPN in 2019, Wall was the first to hit the red carpet. “He was selling the idea of soccer in the United States,” he said. “He was almost a missionary in that sense, he traveled the world telling people to take American football seriously. If you ask any of Europe’s top soccer journalists who their first port of call was if they wanted a story in America, it would be Grant Wall.
It is for this reason that both the US Soccer Federation and Major League Soccer paid their respects in such glowing terms. Wahl was as important as any player in the development of the game in America.
Saturday’s tributes were so raucous that no one could doubt his impact. “I’m not sure people outside the United States understand Grant’s impact on soccer there,” British soccer broadcaster Max Rushdon tweeted, “Certainly didn’t until I read the tribute.”
But there was so much depth to Grant because he wasn’t just a reporter writing about wins and losses. He was fearless in his pursuit of the truth and regularly shined an uncomfortably bright light on the darker side of professional sports, highlighting human rights abuses and standing up for those voices that have been silenced.
In 2011, just months after FIFA’s controversial decision to award the current World Cup to Qatar, he campaigned to be elected as the new president, promising to rid soccer’s world governing body of corruption, “Let’s cure FIFA of its [Sepp] The Blatter infection,” he famously promised.
He was a constant thorn in FIFA’s side and once in Qatar he seemed like a magnet for controversy. When he picked up his media credentials at the start of the tournament, he took a picture of the tournament logo on the wall. He reported that he was approached by security officials and inexplicably asked to delete the image from his phone. A few days later I found myself in the same spot, remarking to my colleagues about the now infamous “Wahl Wall.”
Before the USA’s first match against Wales, he was asked to remove a rainbow T-shirt he was wearing as a discreet show of support for the LGBTQ community. It wasn’t until he was detained by stadium security and ordered to remove it (he refused) that he went public with the story.
A few days later, we both attended the same Thanksgiving lunch at the Iconic Torch Hotel, and later that night, at 1:30 in the morning, he joined us live in our studio in Doha. He wanted to appear on the show, but he was so busy that it was the only slot available.
Before the interview, he described his new freelance business venture, GrantWahl.Com, and shared that he was concerned that he might run out of money during the trip. He also told us that he has set aggressive goals for delivering content to his paying subscribers.
The condensed ground mass of the Qatar World Cup gave both journalists and fans the unique opportunity to attend several matches each day, but the tight schedule, offering three or four matches every 24 hours for 17 consecutive days, was exhausting. However, many found the smorgasbord of action irresistible.
We subsequently learned that Wall fell ill during the tournament, something he said he expected after covering so many World Cups in the past. He was in the medical clinic in the World Cup media center feeling tightness in his chest and feared it was bronchitis, he said on an episode of the Futbol podcast with Grant Wall.
But that night we joked about the fact that I had lost my voice on just the fifth day of the tournament. Qatar wasn’t his first rodeo, but it was my first World Cup in person and my body had quickly given in to the flight across eight time zones and the punishing schedule.
But when I think about this interview, it embodies so many of the things that many of us loved about Grant. He was charming, kind and so happy to be covering his eighth Men’s World Cup and the game he loved. We discussed the t-shirt escapades, Cristiano Ronaldo’s latest antics and the upcoming clash between Team USA and England.
“There’s a demand for respect from the US side,” he explained, a demand for validation from a country that has historically looked down its nose at the development of the same game with a different name across the pond. But he knew the tide was now turning and attitudes were changing.
As in life, there is always a time limit for an interview, and we were running out. Needing a quick line to wrap up and head back to the main studio, I thanked Grant and told him it would be “interesting to see what happens next.”
None of us could have imagined that the next chapter of his extraordinary life and career would be so suddenly and terribly final.
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