A powerful voice, silenced

Grant Wahl's stature in sportswriting was without equal. Plus, the King of the United States and No Screens Saturday

Over the weekend, we had tremendously good news about the release of Britney Griner and tremendously awful news about the death of soccer writer Grant Wahl, whose passing at age 49 was particularly gutting for people in my profession. If you were a colleague of Grant, you were automatically a friend.

I didn’t know Wahl, but without fail, those who did marveled at his brilliance and his generosity.

Aside from his writing talent, what left people in awe with Wahl was his ability to be at once the greatest evangelist for #futbolislife and its sternest taskmaster. Here’s Molly Knight:

Back when the USA played Wales on Nov. 21, you wore a shirt supporting LGTBQIA+ rights to the stadium, even though being gay is a crime in Qatar. You did this not because you were a gay man yourself, but because you were decent and you knew that FIFA was wrong for granting the World Cup to a country that seeks to imprison those who love who they love. You were detained by stadium security for 25 minutes and told to change your shirt. It must have been terrifying, but you made your voice heard. If only every journalist could summon the guts you had in your pinky toe.

The day before you died you wrote a story about how Qatari World Cup organizers simply did not care about the estimated 400-500 migrants who died building the stadiums in Qatar for the games. You figured out a way to cover the World Cup with your usual enthusiasm without losing sight of the horrors that made this event possible. It would have been easier, of course, to just stick to sports. But you were way too good of a human to do that.

The World Cup should have never been in Qatar. You should never have been in Qatar. You fought so hard to be a voice for those who had been silenced in death, right up until the day you died. You gave everything you had.

It was because of those last two incidents that even the less conspiracy-minded among us wondered if Wahl died of a heart attack, as was reported, or a “heart attack.” The alternative felt like something out of a movie thriller, but the timing seemed so impossibly coincidental. Wahl’s brother Eric was among those who voiced suspicions of foul play. Imagine having a sportswriting career so powerful that the world wonders if you had a target on your back.

In the days before his death, Wahl himself described being ill with bronchitis, “tightness in my chest“ and more. That would seem more than plausibly take us to a death by natural causes, but Eric Wahl, among others, is still awaiting a U.S. autopsy for transparency.

Whatever the circumstances, Grant Wahl’s passing is a tragedy for his family, his friends and the world of sports. It’ll be a long time before that shock passes.