Soccer writer Grant Wahl was a fixture on the world sports stage. He got his start in Miami

The sudden death of U.S. sports journalist Grant Wahl who reported passionately on soccer and who died Saturday while covering a World Cup match between Argentina and the Netherlands in Qatar at only 48, according to the Associated Press, has mourners the world over sharing messages of grief.

Wahl’s penultimate tweet was a commentary on the match: “What just happened?” he simply wrote. Three minutes later he sent his final tweet with praise for an “incredible designed set-piece goal by the Netherlands.”

Many of those mourning and awaiting answers are from South Florida. Some of the saddened and shocked are his former colleagues at the Miami Herald.

Though Wahl found a national voice and following with Sports Illustrated after joining the publication in November 1996, the Kansas-born author started his career as a 21-year-old intern in the Miami Herald’s sports department in July 1996.

His first story found in Miami Herald’s archives? Wahl reported on the arrival of Australia’s men’s soccer team to an Olympics Village facility set up on the Nova Southeastern University campus in Davie.

“Perks include a post office, nightly live entertainment, a massage room, and — since this is the Olympics — security measures that have turned Nova Southeastern University’s Leo Goodwin Residence Hall into a fortress,” Wahl wrote.

Hal Habib was the Herald’s assistant sports editor and Olympics editor when a young Wahl, fresh from Princeton, approached his desk at the Herald’s fifth floor newsroom inside the old One Herald Plaza building on Biscayne Bay.

Wahl told his editor he’d like to do a preview of the Olympic soccer tournament in Davie, Habib recalled in a Twitter thread.

“Sure, kid. Knock yourself out,” Habib remembers thinking.

“I was stunned at what came next. Grant had mapped out the entire tournament, breaking down every team, no matter how obscure. I knew we had somebody special in our midst and Grant was every bit of that and more. I thought I knew something about soccer until I met Grant. Nobody knew the game like him, but more than that, nobody could WRITE the game like him. Nobody. He was a master dissecting the sport as well as with words,” Habib wrote.

At the time, as today, interns often need a place to stay for their temporary newsroom assignments. Wahl may not have had the Olympics Village at his daily disposal but for his tenure at the Miami Herald he lived in a garage studio at the home of then-Herald sports columnist Linda Robertson and her husband, reporter Andres Viglucci — both of whom still report for the Herald.

“So wrong and so unbelievable,” Robertson tweeted after learning of Wahl’s death. “We loved him from day one.” She called Wahl a “stellar journalist and even better man.”

Fellow Herald sports columnist Michelle Kaufman also tweeted her shock at the news coming out of Qatar. “Absolutely gutted,” she wrote. “I covered six World Cups with Grant. This was his passion.”

Before he was a Miami Heat star in 2010, basketball great LeBron James was a 17-year-old up-and-comer whom Wahl anointed “The Chosen One” in a much-discussed 2002 Sports Illustrated cover feature.

James offered condolences Saturday, calling Wahl’s death a “tragic loss,” Your E! Daily News reported.

“I’m very fond of Grant and having that cover shoot — me being a teenager and him covering that, it was a pretty cool thing,” James said in the E! report. “And he was always pretty cool to be around. He spent a lot of time in my hometown of Akron covering me over the course of time before that cover story came out. And I’ve always kind of watched from a distance.”

Chris Wittyngham, producer and commentator on “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz,” podcast recalled a sports journalist who stood out from so many. “He treated me with a level of respect I didn’t deserve. He gave me an opportunity when I needed one. And most importantly he was kind. Needlessly kind.”

Here are some of Wahl’s stories from Miami Herald archives, including that first one.

G’day! Aussies arrive in South Florida. Davie hosts Olympic Soccer Team

Published July 6, 1996

Australia was the last team to qualify for the Olympic men’s soccer tournament, but Friday it was the first to arrive in South Florida. At the Olympic Village in Davie, the Aussies will enjoy nearly all the amenities of the flagship Village in Atlanta.

Perks include a post office, nightly live entertainment, a massage room, and — since this is the Olympics — security measures that have turned Nova Southeastern University’s Leo Goodwin Residence Hall into a fortress.

Since the 1972 Munich Games — when Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered 11 Israelis — Olympic organizers have been hypersensitive to security concerns, and the Village in Davie is no different.

The effort is headed by Dean DeJong, a retired major from the Miami police department who organized security for the papal visit to Miami in 1987 and the Summit of the Americas here two years ago.

Those events and the Olympic Village “are similar in the types of security required, but for the Olympics you’re protecting greater numbers of people,” DeJong said.

A majority of Davie’s 127-officer police force will be on call July 6-31, said Lt. Steve Seefchak, who is coordinating Village security for the Davie police.

“We anticipate that it’s going to be very unexciting work for the security people at the village,” Seefchak said, “but that doesn’t mean we’re not ready. We’re as ready as we can be.”

A 10-foot high barbed-wire fence erected a week ago traces the perimeter of the Village’s safe zone, and temporary lighting has been added alongside the barrier to help detect potential intruders. To top it off, a security officer rides horseback around the fence’s edge.

Only athletes and authorized individuals are allowed inside the fenced-off area, and they must pass through a metal detector to enter the four-floor building. Every volunteer in the Village also was subjected to background checks, DeJong said.

However, not all the teams playing at the Orange Bowl venue have elected to stay in the village. The U.S. women, based at the Orlando soccer venue, likely will commute to their match in Miami on July 25, while the Brazilian, French and Japanese men’s teams will be quartered in area hotels at their own expense.

The Olympic Village no-shows moved because of competitive idiosyncrasies and not security fears, said Stephanie Mays, vice president of the South Florida Soccer Organizing Committee.

Brazil (which will arrive at the Biltmore Hotel on July 15), France and Japan “want the privacy and don’t want to be mixed in with the other athletes,” Mays said. “There is far more security in the Village than anything they would get in a hotel.”

South Florida’s fickle fans pledge few allegiances

Published Sept. 23, 1996

All season long, the empty seats have spread through Pro Player Stadium like a slowly advancing pox. And as the Florida Marlins approached their final homestand, the team’s attendance slide — third-worst in major league baseball this year — was cause for more immediate concern.

What if the Marlins had a night to celebrate Andre Dawson’s Hall of Fame career, and the stadium was half-full?

“We want to pack this place up,” an anxious Mark Geddis, the Marlins director of marketing communications, said a week before the event, “so that it’s not an embarrassment for the South Florida fan and Andre himself to be talking to a bunch of empty orange seats.”

And so the questions linger, questions not just about the Marlins, but about all of South Florida’s teams. Why do fans attend —or not attend — sporting events? And why have fans developed stronger emotional ties to some teams but not others?

In interviews with players, fans, and those who market the teams to the community, two common opinions emerged:

South Florida sports fans are a front-running, event-driven lot. With a variety of entertainment options — four professional sports teams, one big-time college program, and year-round tourism — a title-contending team and glamour events are crucial to attract the region’s mercurial fan.

“There’s so many teams that if one team isn’t winning, fans can go to another,” said Kevin Rochlitz, assistant athletic director for sports marketing and sales at the University of Miami. “That’s the focus in South Florida: If you’re winning, they’re going to be there. If the Panthers go to the Stanley Cup, that’s the ‘in’ thing to do.”

“Sports are like the clubs in South Beach — they come and go,” said WQAM (560 AM) radio’s Hank Goldberg, whose rants against the South Florida fan have become something of a cause celebre. “If you open a good restaurant, you can count on two years of big crowds. And then you’re gone. It’s the same with the teams here.”

South Florida’s transient population is more loosely attached to local teams than fans in other cities. Only one out of four Miami-Fort Lauderdale residents was born in the state of Florida, according to the last U.S. census.

“The New York sports fan is a lot more loyal, a lot more committed to their teams,” said Brian Chesloff, 40, a Marlins season-ticket holder who was raised in the Bronx. “The reason is a lot more people there are actually from New York. I grew up in the ‘60s with the Mets, who were worse than the Marlins, and they still drew a lot more people.”

Said Pam Malone, vice president of marketing for the Heat: “It’s harder to have them feel this is a hometown team, because they come with their own allegiance. I was angry last year when I went and there were more Knicks fans than Miami Heat fans. But I think the reason it happens is so many transient people move in and move out.”

There are exceptions, of course. The Panthers turned hockey neophytes into fanatics earlier this year on the way to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Dolphins’ dol-fans

In fact, of South Florida’s five main sports draws (the four professional teams and UM football), only the Dolphins — South Florida’s oldest professional franchise and the beneficiary of 21 consecutive home sellouts — haven’t suffered an per-game attendance decline in the past year.

“Football is obviously the measuring stick for the other teams down here,” the Marlins’ Geddis said. “Miami Dolphins football, because the Miami Hurricanes aren’t drawing flies right now. That’s a team that has brought this city four national championships and lots of great days, and those people abandoned them as soon as the word probation came up.”

After starting the 1995 season 1-3, University of Miami football saw its average attendance at the Orange Bowl drop by 22,197 fans (to 38,204), more than twice the decline of any other Division I-A college football program in the country.

Things haven’t gotten much better. In the season opener Sept. 7 against The Citadel, UM drew 35,747 fans; one week earlier, the University of Florida had 83,075 for its debut against equally unheralded Southwestern Louisiana.

“I wish there were 150,000 every Saturday,” UM Coach Butch Davis said with a shrug. “But given the set of circumstances — the first game and who the opponent was — I look for crowds in the remainder of the games to average at least 60,000.”

That won’t be difficult for at least one game — the UM-Florida State showdown Oct. 12 is a sellout. Will the same thing happen when UM hosts Pitt or East Carolina?

“South Florida is a big-event place,” said Heat vice president for sales and promotion Neal Bendesky, who has worked in a similar capacity for the Marlins and UM. “If you deliver a premier event, fans show up. When I was at the University of Miami, they had never averaged over 6,000 fans for basketball. The first time we played Georgetown, we sold out the game. And look at the Marlins’ first season — people went to see every game.”

Three years later, however, Marlins fans are harder to find. “What fans?” asked Jamie Anderson, 17, of Cooper City, as he surveyed the announced crowd of 16,080 at a Marlins-Expos game earlier this month. “The people here only like winners. That’s why they like the Dolphins.”

Denver’s allies

Of the nine American cities that have four professional sports teams, the city with the most similar situation to Miami is Denver.

Denver has acquired two new teams in the past five years, the Rockies in baseball and the Avalanche in hockey. Like Miami, Denver is located in an area trafficked heavily by tourists. And like Miami, Denver is a transient community (its 42.2 percent Colorado-born population, like South Florida’s 25.3 percent figure, falls below the national average of 61.8).

And yet, despite a metropolitan area with 1.4 million fewer people than Miami, Denverites have turned out in greater numbers for each of their teams.

The Rockies and Broncos have posted sellout strings of 129 and 197 games, respectively, while the Avalanche sold out all but three regular-season home dates last year (the Panthers, meanwhile, averaged 90 percent capacity in a smaller arena). Even the Nuggets, who didn’t make the playoffs in 1995-96, outpaced the Heat by an average of 1,691 fans a game.

“People will always use Colorado as a measuring stick, especially for us in baseball,” Geddis said, “but there’s only a handful of teams that are selling out and consistently getting lots of fans at the ballpark. Then there’s this middle ground, and then the ground at the bottom that’s 15,000 a night.”

And although the Marlins aren’t at the bottom rung, they’re near the middle (18th of 28 teams in average attendance) and sliding.

“I’m amazed that you can get good teams to come here, and you still have the same crowds,” the Marlins’ Dawson said during the last homestand. “I thought we’d pick up some in the summer, but the crowds seem to get smaller and smaller, which is hard to understand. It’s a whole different ballgame when you’re in the thick of it, but a true baseball fan comes out for the entertainment, and not necessarily to see to it that you win every night.”

Still hoping

So why are team marketing executives optimistic they can lure more South Floridians through the turnstiles?

The Panthers hope to ride their wave of popularity into the new season.

“The goal has been [for the fans] to have a special relationship with the team, and we made strides toward that last year,” Panthers vice president of marketing Declan Bolger said. “It was an unbelievable experience. Now our goal is to build on that.”

During her recent work with fan focus groups, Malone of the Heat noticed more people were using the first-person we to describe the team than the third-person the Heat .

“You’ve got to have people emotionally embrace you,” Malone explained. “They have to feel like they’re inside. That when you lose, they lose; when you win, they win ... I don’t think we’re there yet, but we’re headed in the right direction.”

To nudge the fans along, the teams have tried to woo them with special offers and promotions, “so many it would make your head spin,” the Marlins’ Geddis said. Pogs, pins, and autographs at the Marlins, sub sandwiches hurled via slingshot into the stands at UM football games, a mini 11-game season ticket package for the Heat. Then there are the community outreach efforts, such as the Panthers Street Cats program to fund ball hockey for South Florida youths.

Meanwhile, the region’s demographics are changing along with its sports fans, said Dr. Kathleen Davis, executive director of the Sports Management Research Institute.

“I’m convinced that five years from now, you’ll see a lot more commitment,” said Davis, who has conducted demographic research for all the South Florida sports franchises except the Heat. “Ten years ago, people came here to vacation. Now they come here to live, and they’ll develop ties to these teams.”

The Marlins hope that happens soon, but they are convinced there is a quicker, sure-fire way to gain support.

“The greatest marketing tool that exists is winning, and we have never provided that to our fans,” Geddis said. “If we ever do win consistently and find that we’re still not drawing better-than-average crowds, I don’t know what the scenario is at that point. That’s when Wayne [Huizenga] and some other people have to get together and say, ‘Wow, what more can we do for this market?’”