World Cup athletes and colleagues remember the legacy of Grant Wahl: "He was there from the beginning"
As the U.S. women's team advances through the World Cup, some are mourning the absence of one of the soccer's most prominent voices. Grant Wahl, the leading soccer journalist in the United States, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm while covering the men's World Cup in Qatar in Dec. 2022.
Now, his family and the athletes he covered are taking a look back at his legacy.
"Before we got on the map, and on the world map ... Grant was there," said Briana Scurry, the goalkeeper of 1999 U.S. Women's National Team. "He was there from the beginning, and there's not a lot of people who can say that."
Wahl was present when the team won the World Cup in 1999, the second-ever time they'd done so. He covered the momentous occasion for Sports Illustrated. At the end of the year, Wahl wrote a cover story for the magazine lauding the team as Sports Illustrated's "Sportswomen of the Year." Scurry remembered Wahl as a writer who got to the core of the athletes he covered.
"He was really like, the guy who wanted to get that story and wanted to know that person. Not just that footballer, that person," she said.
In the decades that followed, Wahl became a fixture at major soccer tournaments. Colleagues say that he helped propel interest in women's sports, and inspired other journalists, including The Athletic's Meg Linehan.
"There was no one just covering women's soccer only," Linehan said. "And one of the things that Grant really did was treat it with the exact same respect as the men's game. He also, I think, really just encouraged a lot of us to want to compete with him."
Wahl was also an outspoken advocate for equal pay for female athletes, going as far as once directly asking the president of U.S. Soccer if the women's team deserved to be paid equally to the men's team. In 2022, shortly before his death, the female players reached an agreement with U.S. Soccer.
"Grant was a feminist, including in sports," said his widow, CBS News medical contributor Dr. Celine Gounder.
Wahl was attracted to the sport because of how it brought people together and represented things like "local culture (and) local politics," Gounder said.
His interest in equality extended to other aspects of the sport. While covering the World Cup in Qatar, just days before his death, Wahl was critical of the nation's government, and was even denied entry to a match and detained by authorities for wearing a Pride shirt.
Gounder said that she hopes people remember the barriers Wahl, who was 49 at the time of his death, helped break.
"I think the fact that people appreciate soccer, women's soccer, the way they do in the United States right now and even around the world - so much of that is because of Grant," Gounder said. "So much of that is because of how Grant advocated for covering soccer, for covering women's soccer in particular. And the fact that the sport has the respect that it now has, the following that it now has, is really a testament to Grant's work."