Grant Wahl could throw a dinner party. He and his wife, Céline Gounder, hosted them monthly for Grant's Sports Illustrated colleagues. The idea wasn't to bring together a collection of the familiar, but to gather a group of co-workers who might know little about the others, if they knew anything at all. The invite list offered no deference to one's place on the masthead; in fact, it was deliberately anti-hierarchal, designed to confirm to the freshly-hired web producer that they were every bit the VIP that the most senior editor was, maybe more so. Grant cooked, Celine chose the wine and the two of them made everyone in the room feel like the president of France.
From the late spring day in 1996 that Wahl walked into Sports Illustrated HQ, he relentlessly championed inclusion and his colleagues, especially younger ones and those further removed from the levers of corporate governance. Wahl, who died early Friday morning after collapsing in the press center at the men's World Cup in Qatar, had turned down a staff writer position at the Miami Herald to be an SI fact checker. He was gregarious and ambitious. He had swagger, too, and a healthy skepticism about the entrenched institutional hierarchy that defined not just Sports Illustrated, but Big Media more generally, in those days. He took on any assignment, no matter how dutiful or unglamorous, but he expected to be rewarded with the green light for his most ambitious story proposals, not for them not to be redirected to a more senior staffer. By the time he turned 25, this cover story launched a portfolio that would grow to more than 75 cover stories. By his 28th birthday, he had added this all-timer, which still resonates through the decades for the story's famous subject. He was that good.
His lodestars then were Alex Wolff, the Hall of Fame writer whom Wahl succeeded on the college basketball beat, and Jon Wertheim, his closest friend at SI and frequent collaborator. All three moved effortlessly across sport and subject, had built small anthologies of "bonus pieces" — the signature, probing longform pieces at the end of every magazine issue — and had a wanderlust that regularly sent them across oceans and hemispheres. Not long after covering the 2009 NCAA men's basketball championship, and ahead of the 2010 men's World Cup in South Africa, Wahl trained his ambition on a more narrow, and risky, path: soccer and soccer only.
