World Class

Foreword

More than a million spectators gathered in Australia and New Zealand for the 2023 Women’s World Cup. My husband, Grant Wahl, was supposed to be one of them. He had been to every Men’s and Women’s World Cup, except one, since 1994—fourteen in all. But this one was special: Thirty-two teams played, showcasing the global expansion and competitiveness of women’s soccer. It was an opportunity to promote gender equality in sports and inspire young girls to pursue their dreams on the football pitch. It was expected to set a new bar for women’s achievement in sports on the world stage. It was that and, as is so often the case with sports, so much more.

The U.S. Women’s National Team, the favorite to win the competition, would lose to Sweden in a penalty shootout in the first knockout round. After the loss, USWNT star forward Megan Rapinoe posted on social media: “This game is so beautiful, even in its cruelest moments. . . . We lay it all out on the line every single time. Fighting with everything that we have, for everything we deserve, for every person we possibly can.” Even before the start of the tournament, the USWNT had been fighting both on and off the field: a gender discrimination lawsuit pressing for equity in pay and working conditions with the men’s team; an onslaught of “discriminatory, abusive, or menacing messages” on social media; and right-wing attacks, which turned to celebration after their defeat.

Spain, not the United States, won the tournament, defeating England 1–0. But that victory was overshadowed by the scandal that ensued. Luis Rubiales, at the time the head of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, kissed the Spanish forward Jenni Hermoso on the lips without her consent during the awards ceremony. This attack was just one of many indignities and offenses suffered by Spanish women soccer players over the years. The players were subjected to Orwellian surveillance. The team’s coach for almost three decades called the players chavalitas, slang for “young girls.” The Women’s World Cup kicked off with the Spanish team in a full-on rebellion against its own federation, which made their triumph all the more remarkable.

As riveting as the action on and off the field may have been, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the 2023 Women’s World Cup. I followed at a distance in print and on the radio. Each story left me feeling gutted, freshly conscious of Grant’s absence—not only in World Cup coverage, but at the center of my life. I know he would have been covering the tournament as he had the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar: not just the beautiful game on the pitch, but also the fight for equity, social justice, and human rights. He would have been holding FIFA, the soccer federations, politicians, and pundits to account.

Still, I had the comfort of shared grief—friends and colleagues (Grant’s and mine alike) reached out to me, wondering what Grant would make of this or that game or goal or gaffe. The sense that Grant should be there was shared, and even in the acuteness of his absence, it brought comfort. I dreaded a time when his absence might not be broadly felt—four or six or twelve years in the future, when Grant’s writing might be a distant memory, when there’d no longer be an empty seat and framed portrait in the press box in his honor. And because the events Grant covered were rooted so firmly in time, I think I feared that as we moved away from those moments, the whole constellation of his existence might recede, the light of his life growing dimmer by the day.

“Grief is not an emotion to move on from,” said writer and podcaster Nora McInerny in a 2018 TED Talk. “It’s a reality to move forward with.” Some of my work in mourning has been to understand Grant’s absence as presence—not naively, not religiously, not even as consolation, but as simple acknowledgment of our interwoven lives, a transmutation of loss into a different form of life and love.

In the weeks following Grant’s death, as those of us who loved him struggled to articulate what he’d meant to us, we longed to nail down his presence—to fix it in words, in time, in truth.

Yet if I’ve learned anything in the past twelve months, it’s that my relationship with Grant could not be pinned down—not then, not now—and that it didn’t end with his death. I carry Grant with me not as a fixed image in a locket or a butterfly pinned to a board, but as a dynamic presence—his mind and his wit still swift and agile, responding both to the world he knew and to the one shaped, in part, by his absence.

Grant covered sports like this, too—in a way that allowed his meaning, his sensibility, his understanding to extend beyond the present moment and the present game, to take up the past and move into the future. Over the course of his career, Grant was told that he should “stick to sports.” But in his mind, this was a false mantra. To “stick to sports”—to limit a story to the scoreboard, to dissection of a play, to the dribbles and drills of practice—is to strip sports of their meaning, power, and soul. Grant had a profound respect for sports, which is why he took them so seriously, in their entirety. Sports aren’t just an escape. Grant knew that sports change the world, just as the world changes sports. At the Women’s World Cup in 2019—with Rapinoe accepting awards as a crowd chanted, “EQUAL PAY! EQUAL PAY!”—Grant felt that process in motion, a ball soaring in midair. So did Rapinoe. “I feel like this team is just in the midst of changing the world around us as we live,” Rapinoe told Grant that summer, “and it’s just an incredible feeling.”

Rereading Grant’s work is hard. As I remember him reporting the stories in this collection, I recall the broader context of our lives—shared dinners, piles of laundry, our travels in different directions, quarrels that seem petty in retrospect but were pressing at the time. I feel, too, Grant’s nimble mind and invisible hand at work, weaving together voices and details in his jovial, kindhearted, voluble way. I hear his laughter, the undulating pitch and volume of his voice as he shares a story, hits upon a phrase he likes, tries out a new metaphor or idea. And as I reread his work and press on with my own, I feel myself tending our lives in a similar way—unspooling what he meant not only to me, but to soccer, and sports; tugging his sensibility forward, even as the games he covered stay pinned in the past.

I am not, as Grant well knew, a “sports person.” Before his sudden death, the idea of me writing a foreword to any compendium of sportswriting—including his—would have been not just ill-advised, but ludicrous. I am here on the force of loss and love alone. Had I asked myself, before knowing Grant, What is sports?—I might have answered with a blank expression. Sports is sports. A field, a ball, a back-and-forth, a contest of skill or might or luck. Grant taught me that sports is so much more than athletics—that it draws on histories, class tensions, economics, politics, old grudges, stubborn hopes; that through sports, we revisit the past and recast the future; that we are shaped not only by our wins, but by our losses, and that both move with us through time.