It’s hard to envision what Eric Wahl went through when his brother, Grant, unexpectedly passed away during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
As he recalled the day of Grant’s death during a conversation with host Jessica Kleinschmidt on Awful Announcing’s Short and to the Point podcast, Eric described doing some mundane activities during a rainy day in Seattle.
With the World Cup gripping everyone’s attention, Grant’s silence on Twitter stood out. While Eric usually kept tabs on his brother’s tweets, especially during such events, Grant himself had gone quiet. This wasn’t entirely surprising, considering he was likely engrossed in writing a story.
That was before Eric received some texts from Grant’s wife, Céline. She informed her brother-in-law that Grant had collapsed at Lusail Iconic Stadium, which Eric said didn’t register as strange because Grant overworking himself was not an unusual occurrence.
“Grant not taking great care of himself while working a job was not unusual, even though he was a very physically fit person,” Eric explained. “He was getting over what we thought was Bronchiectasis. And then, her follow-up message was, ‘They’re giving him CPR.’ And right after that, just a very short text message that said, ‘He’s dead,’ and I just stared at that, and I remember I started screaming. I had to grab a couch pillow because I didn’t want my neighbors to freak out.
“And then stuff just kind of moved really fast. I did something wildly out of character for me. I made a video of myself, that I so — like people say ‘Live without regrets.’ Regrets are a powerful feature sometimes. I made a video to put online, and I did — which is not something I ever do — saying I thought Grant had been killed. And at that time, I had maybe 1,000 people following me on Twitter. Almost all of them were people I knew, had worked with, or knew of. And I didn’t even use my own name, so someone had to know who I was to figure things out.
“But it was an immediate emotional reaction because I literally had just been talking to my brother. He just had a birthday. It’s not unusual for anybody with a public face to get crazy emails and even death threats and things. But he was telling me about some of the death threats he had been getting that were especially concerning. By this point, he already had his whole experience wearing the rainbow soccer shirt, and he was writing a series of things very critical of the Qatari World Cup Committee and things that were happening to migrant workers there. And he had just told me about how, while he was doing a podcast interview, some strange man had walked into the house he was sharing with some other journalists and was very casually walking around and just walked out, and how strange he thought that was.”
So Eric reacted the way he reacted.
Meanwhile, his phone was blowing up, as it would in a moment like that. When Eric finally had a moment to breathe, he told his now ex-husband that he felt kind of ambivalent about it. He looked up from his phone, telling Eric that it didn’t matter; the video was now everywhere.
“That was maybe 10 minutes,” Eric said. “It was a definite media education for me. And I’m glad that I didn’t blame anyone directly. I’m so glad I didn’t do that. But I got a lot of my own death threats; that’s not a comfortable place to be in. I also had some very nice people reach out with higher profiles than I have to give me some suggestions and some pointers, one of which was like to put your social media in your name, but for certain things, make them private.
“I made my Instagram private because a couple of outlets had used the video without my permission. I didn’t really pay attention to media much after that…but I stayed on Twitter. In a very weird way, a positive byproduct of that day was the amount of support I got from people that I didn’t know, didn’t know me on Twitter, that actually really helped get me through stuff…I think because I was just in sort of this weird kind of fugue state in my head, it just felt like I was reporting.”
And now, Eric has the opportunity to delve directly into Grant’s thoughts through his book, World Class: Purpose, Passion, and the Pursuit of Greatness On and Off the Field. This compilation of Grant’s work throughout his career will be narrated by Eric himself. However, for the foreword, he’ll be listening to his sister-in-law, Céline. Additionally, Alexander Wolf and Mark Mravic contribute their voices, each providing introductions to specific pieces by Grant, placing them within a social and historical context.
Eric confided in Kleinschmidt that narrating the audiobook was a deeply personal experience. He described feeling a strong connection to his brother while reading Grant’s work. Despite initial nervousness, Eric found the process fascinating and emerged with a newfound understanding.
“Some of these essays, I remember talking to Grant while he was working on them,” said Eric. “And he and I used to joke because my background is very like English teacher-y, and my graduate degrees are in creative nonfiction and fiction writing. So, my approach to writing and what a paragraph should look like is totally different than what you’d write for a magazine. And I could hear myself, like I read some things out loud that I remember cracking on Grant for — not because they weren’t well done — but because they were so opposite of what I would tell a student to do in a paper, for instance.”
Eric recalled how Grant would sometimes get so enamored with his own writing that he would even get up and develop a verbal tic while reading it aloud. Eric would then become the audience for Grant’s performance, either directly, through an email to Grant or by telling his sister-in-law, Céline, about it. Invariably, they’d both question whether Grant planned to keep that specific part because of his obvious fondness for a particular phrase.
“It was not uncommon for him to go toe-to-toe with editors to fight for a phrase or something like that,” said Eric. “But the process of reading these stories made me really proud. But it was definitely by the end, a cathartic feeling. I’m contributing to my brother’s legacy in a way that I think would make him very happy. And just being proud of the entire process of being allowed to make suggestions for things I thought should be in the book.
“There are some amazing pieces in the book, and it closes out on some of his dispatches from Qatar, which were harder for me to read. That was a hard day. We wanted to get those out as quickly as we could because we knew they’d be emotional..”
“I think in whatever format people access this amazing book, I think there’s a lot of just Grant in it being himself and showing us what was important to him,” Eric Wahl added. “And I’m really proud of it.”
Short and to the Point with Jessica Kleinschmidt is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
