This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

If you’ve ever wondered what an hour-long conversation looks like on paper. Well, today’s your lucky day. 9 pages of typing, hours of play, pause, rewind, play, and repeat. It sucks, but there is no substitute for doing your own transcription. Sure, I could pay someone to do it – countless firms will churn it out verbatim for a fee – but there is something in the process that becomes priceless to me. There’s the obvious rehashing of the conversation which pricks the brain and its rational creativity, helping to bring complicated subjects to light, but there is something more.

Take my recent conversation with Sport Illustrated’s Grant Wahl. We weren’t trying to deduce cold fusion from the hot variety, and we weren’t solving world hunger. We were, however, strangers getting to know each other through our shared experience, and it is somewhere within those shared words that a nascent muse embeds within, creating something much more important to me than that of the definition of the transcription. It’s hard to explain it - as if that last sentence doesn’t make that abundantly clear - but I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

Before we talked, Grant was my personal most-read soccer scribe. Anything breaks, I pretty much go looking for Grant’s reporting, and I don’t use the word reporting lightly. He is a writer, and writes well, but it’s his reportage that I rely on and expect, and that he always delivers. I mean, who else gets calls from Bruce Arena past the polite cut-off deadline of 10pm, delivering juicy bits of apology spawned by previous words spoken during a more conversable hour? I’d say here that Grant must have caught himself for a minute and laughed at where he found himself that night, but that would be suggest this kind of thing doesn’t happen to him, or more specifically, never happened to him before. But when you’re getting letters of recommendation written by arguably this generation’s greatest journalist, David Remnick (Editor of The New Yorker) upon graduation from Princeton, late-night phone calls from Mr. Sunshine don’t seem such a big deal.

I’ve wanted to interview Grant for TIAS, but besides a headshot next his stories and a profile absent of any information on Big Soccer’s message board, I didn’t know anything about him. An email to Sports Illustrated PR solved that problem, and in little less than an hour I was trading emails with Grant and caught him on the phone (at a respectable hour) one Saturday before he began his college hoops pre-season tour (his other – and really main - job for SI). We talked soccer and shop, and just as he still picks up his college notebook from his favorite writing class, I’ll be able to read through our conversation and always have something to refer to when I need that inspirational boost we all thirst for occasionally. I hope it can do the same for some of you. Our conversation, slightly edited from its 9-page beginnings, continues below.

I wanted to basically just get some of your own opinions out there, that can’t always be placed front and center when you’re the writer and not the subject. Having read your work for so long – and knowing there are more like me out there – I think it will fun for readers to get inside your brain, of course as long as you don’t mind defaming your sources and friendships.

Sure, the one thing I can say is that I do have opinions and try at times to express them in print, though maybe not as much as some other soccer pundits or reporters. In the coverage of American Soccer there is a lot of opinion, but not a lot of good reporting.

Yeah, I’d agree with that. Present company excluded of course. Why do you think that is?

I certainly don’t want to make my colleagues look bad, because there are some great soccer reporters out there, on both coasts and the Midwest, and you saw it at the World Cup especially. I think also too that there’s not very big numbers – there’s not demand for full-time soccer reporting and writing in the US.

You’ve mentioned that in the past. Obviously you don’t think that has changed?

That’s what I think, and that includes my place. I mean, if I could be a 100 percent full-time soccer reporter, I’d do that, but Sports Illustrated doesn’t have that demand. So, my main gig there is as a college basketball writer. I’m a lead writer for them, and been doing that for several years, and I enjoy that. But if they ever had the demand for a guy to do soccer completely 100 percent of the time, I’d do that.

Have you had discussions with your editors about that possibility?

No, not really, because I know myself that demand isn’t there. Things work out pretty well for me. The seasons as they are in the US, there’s not a lot of overlap with college basketball and soccer. I cover college basketball from November through the end of march and the rest of the year I’m doing a lot of soccer stuff.

What’s your soccer background?

I think everyone who is connected to American soccer has some sort of unique background about how they got into it. For me, I only played until I was like 13-years-old like a lot of kids in the US, and then got away from it into other sports. But, I got back into it in college. I started covering the team at Princeton in ‘93, when Bob Bradley was the coach and they went to the final four. I learned a lot of the game from Bob. It was great; he was pretty patient with stupid questions early on. I remember doing a story on him for the Princeton Alumni Magazine, and he took the time to talk about the game with me, without making me feel stupid. And from that point on I learned it’s better to listen than to pontificate. Everybody has opinions, but from my perspective, I’ve learned a lot of the game from those experiences with Bob and a lot of other people too. Ok, I’m trying to make this story make sense a little bit. In the summer of ‘94 – which was obviously a World Cup year – I won a scholarship in college, the summer of my sophomore year, to go to Argentina for three weeks to do some reporting on the culture of soccer there. I spent a lot of time around the Boca Juniors and the fans. I traveled with the fans to road games, overnight trips. And no one ever told me these people were these hardened criminals. I just had a great experience. I traveled with the ex-chief of the Boca fans, Kiki the Butcher, and the amazing thing was after the game I got separated from them, and after about two hours I just decided to go to the train station – I was just going to go back to Buenos Aries – and they were waiting for me with their bus at the train station. Kiki the Butcher gave me a big hug, “Americano!” I ended up writing all this stuff, about my experiences traveling with these guys, and I really got into the passion of the game in Argentina, which I’m still convinced there is no place in the world where there is more passion for soccer. I ended up going back to Argentina a year later and living there and doing my thesis in college on the politics in soccer in Argentina, and made a lot of contacts down there and really got into the game. And then I got to Sports Illustrated in ‘96, and nobody wanted to cover soccer, and I just wanted to write. I started there as a fact-checker and wasn’t doing any writing, and I had a little bit of background by then and they let me do some stuff.

How old were you at this point?

Let’s see, ’96, I was 22. And at that time it was interesting because MLS had just finished its first year, because I guess I came in November of ’96, and it had a better than expected first season in terms of attendance and stuff, and there was a little bit of a demand for soccer coverage there. We also covered the college soccer final four in the magazine because I remember going to that the first couple of years. They started to like my stuff and after a year I was a full-time writer, and then started doing more college basketball as time went on, but liked soccer enough that I wanted to keep doing that, and that’s basically what I’ve been doing since.

Do you think if you didn’t personally have interest in soccer and kind of, for lack of a better term, stick it in the face of editors, there would be soccer coverage there?,

I think it helps in my case and a lot of other soccer writers in the US, that we like the sport. I’m not going to pump up the sport in my reporting into something that it isn’t, because I don’t want to be a soccer cheerleader, but I’d still like to see the sport succeed here. My main feeling about coverage of the sport is that I want it to be treated it like any other sport. Take it seriously and not have every story be about ‘is the sport going to succeed in America?’ Just cover the people and the sport as it grows. You know, it’s the kind of thing that at the top levels of Sports Illustrated, they’re into the World Cup, and so, you know, we’ve had the World Cup on the cover at least the previous two World Cups, and there’s been more soccer coverage in Sports Illustrated in the last 8 years than the previous 45, ya know? So there are good things. As far as other parts of American soccer, they’re not that into it… yet, and it’s not like they’re demanding. I’m not getting calls from my top editor saying I need do more soccer stuff. So I think it helps. There are so many good stories in soccer. They’re open to those. I have a story coming out in the magazine on Jay DeMerit, over in England. They sent me out to China and Israel and a lot of far-flung places over the years to do good soccer stories and give them places in the magazine.

It’s always fun following you through those travels. The international aspect of soccer and its subsequent characters and culture is my favorite part.

Thanks. That’s another reason I’d love to do soccer full-time is because there are so many good stories simply because of the volume around the world.

Would you ever consider making a move to a BBC or somewhere with a more soccer-centric audience?

I don’t know if they’d want to hear from me. But you know, I like the situation I’m in right now. I’d like to cover soccer more, but, imagine soccer and Sports Illustrated, because when we cover soccer, I think we cover it pretty well, and you can use the desire of top international soccer stars to make it in the US market to get some really good access to some of the top international players. I got to do a sit-down interview with Ronaldinho in Barcelona in early May, that you know was like a week and a half before the Champion’s League Final and a month or so before the World Cup, and I don’t think he was giving too many one-on-one’s at that point. So you see these players get it. They understand it; they want to be bigger in the US so it is a weird thing because I’ve always thought that those players are covered differently over in Europe and elsewhere outside the US because the journalists don’t get a lot of access and I think there is more room for the more American-style coverage of top-level soccer. American Media, we demand really good access. And I know that is what makes Sports Illustrated, Sports Illustrated, but there is an English language market out there for that that hasn’t been filled yet.

You’ve touched on marketing players, in regards to grabbing the US market, but our own players seem to have their own issues with that. This World Cup especially, everyone went in as possible saviors, but they leave as goats. Why does it seem that every soccer star, every American built up as the next soccer star, seems to fail in some way in the public or fan’s eyes. Will we have that, ever?

I guess I would frame it in slightly different terms, though I agree that there is no breakout American soccer star. There hasn’t been yet, and people are looking for it, but I don’t think it is this idea of extremes that Landon or whoever should be considered failures. These guys are still young, in their early 20’s. But as far as the next or the first American soccer star, I’m not sure when that will come. Some people think it will still be Freddy Adu, and that’s still a possibility for a kid who is still a teenager. I guess the one thing I would counsel is that people have some patience in waiting for this stuff. There is a lot of hair-trigger reaction from soccer fans who are too quick to label something or someone one extreme or another before you get a full chance to see that person’s career.

But that doesn’t sound like Americans now does it?

NO, it doesn’t. it’s not. I’ve had people tell me Freddy Adu is a bust, and I’m standing there thinking, ‘he’s 17.’ So granted the media – a lot of people in the media – built up Freddy to be the player who was going to come in at 14 and 15 to MLS and lead the league in scoring, but what I try to do in my coverage at least is to balance out the excitement – the genuine excitement - that people in soccer have about a player like that in the US and the realities of how difficult it is going to be to be that first superstar.

You mentioned your forthcoming piece on Jay DeMerit, Who do you have on your hot-list of potentials, be it youth players, MLS, or otherwise?

I’m keeping my eye on a lot of different things, and at this point I don’t think – it depends on how you view potential – it’s pretty likely that a player like Oguchi Onyewu is about to make a move in January, or as soon as January, to a top level club, and there is a reason why Bruce Arena was so excited about Onyewu going into the World Cup, and while he was sort of up and down at the World Cup, this is a guy that has really become a world class defender. As far as younger guys go, yeah, I’m really excited to see how Lee Nguyen does at PSV. It’s a really nice opportunity at a club that cares about younger players.

What drew you to Jay as far as his upcoming feature is concerned?

Well, his story is awesome. It’s the kind of story that transcends soccer, and that our editor at the magazine understood when I explained it to him that this is amazing that he is where he is right now playing in the Premier League. For a guy who was an MLS reject who was playing in parks in London on the weekends just three years ago and now he is playing against the best strikers in the world and defending them. And he looks like he plays in the Premier League. So just telling someone’s story about that – just the struggles that DeMerit went through for a year and a half with next to no money, sharing a bedroom with another guy in a rough part of London. You know they were trying out for teams in third and fourth second divisions. And he made it! So it’s stuff like that – I think there is something American about it too – about a guy who has so much confidence that he doesn’t realize he shouldn’t be out there. When I was over there I saw him play Manchester United, and he had a good game.

It’s almost the opposite of American stories from our childhoods’ history books. You had all the people coming to the New World for all of these new challenges and opportunities – no money, nothing but the clothes on their backs – and now here’s this kid going back to the homeland, if you will. Soccer is one of the rare places that that ‘dream’ can be reversed.

Yeah, and doing it in a way that is completely outside the US Soccer development system. This guy never played OPD; still never been part of a US national team at any level. To know that those kind of possibilities – those stories – are actually out there has to be pretty inspiring to a lot of readers I would think. So I’m excited to get that story out there in the next couple of weeks and getting readers on a real widespread level to read about him.

When you see guys like Jay move outside the system, do you find it says something inherently about that system? Obviously, you’ll always have the guys who slip through the cracks or have to do it there way, maybe, but is there a problem, nonetheless, with the system?

Problem and opportunity at the same time. We’re going to see the development of US players improve over the next 20 years – in MLS teams especially, where under new rules they will be able to develop and keep players, and go out there and beat the bushes and pick some very rough talented kids and get them to a level where they can be professional players. It’s interesting, I don’t think Jay DeMerit is bitter necessarily about not being drafted in MLS, but I think the way he puts it is ‘I understand the system. I wasn’t a part of the system growing up because I didn’t want to travel three hours to play in Milwaukee every week against the top level club teams (he’s from Green Bay).’ He understands there’s not enough invested, there’s not enough numbers in the development programs in the US right now or over the past several years to really do it the right way as they do all around the world; or he wouldn’t have fallen through the cracks.

Changing gears a second, I want to get initial your reaction from Bruce Arena calling you as you are leaving dinner to apologize. Make me a fly on the wall of that night if you can.

(laughing) Bruce and I have a long-standing relationship, from… man, I started covering him back in ’93 when my school’s team was playing his team in the final four. I got to know him over the years. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and you build a lot of relationships. It’s a relationship built on respect I guess is the best way to put it. You cover people that are serious and… man, how should I say this. I’ve criticized Bruce Arena in print before on a fair amount of occasions, but we still have a relationship because I also covered him in a way that is straight up, and it reaches a lot of people, so that was a result, him calling me that night. I think one, him wanting to get out an apology to US Soccer of some of the things he said in my column and in others. And knowing that a lot of people in soccer would read it. I think in his case in particular – I did a long profile on him in the magazine before the World Cup this year where I was able to talk to him about some pretty painful topics - like his twin sister died of cancer and the sorts of things that have affected him as a coach and as a person – and I’m not exactly sure why he called me that night, but I know by now that Bruce tends to say what he feels and sometimes that gets him in trouble. I think that he wanted to get out there what he really felt. It was surprising to me because I’m sitting there at 10:30 at night – usually you don’t talk to people that late – I don’t usually talk to Bruce Arena that late – and yet, that’s the way it went. He wanted to get that apology out there and I think that was the same day a New York Times story came out where he had criticized some of the US officials.

From the old coach to whatever it is we have now… who is the next coach? A recent column of yours went through the likely options, and you seemed to be leaning in the direction of Klinsman?

I think more than ever that Jorgen Klinsmann will get the job. I don’t have any specific information that I have reported yet, but I really have the feeling he is interested in it based on people I have talked to. You know the US is interested in him. I know that is the case. I think what it comes down to is how much power is Klinsmann going to demand to remake the team and remake the program? That’s what he did in Germany. He laid down a lot of conditions, from living in California and commuting, to bringing in a lot of people for the national team that Germany officials may not have agreed with. He wanted to bring in the field hockey coach to be his technical director. And some things they agreed to and some things like the field hockey coach they didn’t agree to, and they ended up hiring him this week. My point being I guess that I think it is one thing for Jorgen to go into Germany which has won three World Championships and try and demand these things, and they can say, ‘We’ve won three world titles. Why do you want to change all of these things,’ but you know the US hasn’t won three World Cups, so I think that he’s going to try and make some pretty specific demands or at least have the power to make the changes he wants. For me, it’s not a matter of can the US afford him, because they can afford him. The federation has a $40 million surplus right now. I think the question is are the people at the federation… how are their egos going to handle this guy coming and trying to make big changes about how they do business, and are they willing to allow that to happen. So that’s what I see unfolding over the next couple of months as the US gets closer to naming a coach.

Do you think giving the power to Klinnsman would be a good thing?

That’s the big question and whoever makes the hire will have to take that leap. I think so. I’ve had debates with people recently about how accomplished is Jorgen Klinsmann? Those are the people who say that the real talent in that German team was Loew, his assistant. I don’t really believe that, I think Jorgen is a really good soccer mind. He’s an innovator. He’s got soooo much respect from players for his own career and his own achievement , and I think that would help in taking the US job. And he’s very attack minded, wants to see teams move forward and play good soccer. I think he’d be great for a player like Landon Donovan to be honest. Really kind of get him playing in the right direction as far as a killer mentality in international soccer at the highest level of play.

I promise I’m going to let you out of here soon, I really appreciate the time. I’d like to throw a few personal questions out there? Who’s your favorite athlete? For whatever reason – as a kid, or maybe they were your favorite subject?

My favorite experience on a story was probably the Lebron James cover that we did when he was a junior in high school. It’s not soccer related, but it was a real trip to see and spend time with a kid who you knew was going to be really big but was still living in a one-bedroom apartment in a rough part of Akron, and was still sitting in my rental car, letting me drive him and his buddies to a NBA game in Cleveland. He just got really excited like a kid about meeting Michael Jordan after the game and stuff like that.

Grant with his Sportsman of the Year, Abbas Suan

My best soccer experience was the story I did in Israel last year. Where during World Cup Qualifying, two Arab-Israeli players had scored important goals for Israel, and it was just such a transcendent sports story in my mind. I really admire the way one of the players, Abbas Suan, handled the tremendous amount of attention that came to him from scoring this huge goal for Israel. Unfortunately they didn’t end up making it to the World Cup – they came really close – but Abbas knew the position he was in as a hero to the Arab community in Israel. And yet knew this kind of knife-edge that he had to straddle if he wanted to remain popular in both the Jewish and Arab Muslim camps in the country. And yet he was still able to talk about the problems with living in the Arab parts of Israel as far as ‘look where I live in this town where the services aren’t very nice, and we don’t get nearly as much support as say people living in Tel Aviv do.’ And at the same time have the respect of Jews in Israel because he talked about being proud to play for Israel. You know, that is such a flash point there for so many reasons and this guy to be important to both sides and to speak about what it means to be an Arab in Israel. I would have chosen him as Sportsman of the Year in SI last year, and even made a case for him because I was so impressed by how he handled it.

I appreciate how you have a lot of interest in – I don’t want to say the peripheral stories around the sports world – but I feel like you have this hard news edge to your reporting and seek out more often than others those stories.

Well sports has so much meaning and significance beyond what’s taking place on the field, and obviously soccer is going to have more of those stories worldwide than any other sport, so I just appreciate the chance to go document some of these great stories that don’t get as much attention around the world. Or do get the attention around the world, but don’t get so much here in the US.

We’re on the same page there. That is the best stuff. Continuing on the personal, lets touch on your history of how you got where you are. You were born in Kansas, went to Princeton?

I grew up in Shawnee Mission, a suburb of Kansas City.

So take me from Shawnee Mission to Princeton. I would bet there aren’t too many Ivy League alumni from Shawnee Mission?

Actually, it’s funny. One guy from my high school did and that was the only reason I even contemplated applying to go there. It’s weird now for me because I never really did much traveling outside of the Midwest as a kid, which is funny for me now that I’m going all over the world for these stories. The first time I ever left the US was to go to Argentina for that project when I was 20-years-old. And yet, I was really into writing and sports as a kid and played sports – soccer, basketball, I was a pretty serious runner in high school - but I knew I wasn’t going to be good enough to even be at a top level collegiately, so I would tell people I was going to write for Sports Illustrated. I had no idea it would happen as soon as it did, but I went to Princeton thinking I would do anything I could to try and get to that point where I could get a job with a magazine like that.

And I’m sure academics weren’t too much trouble for you?

Yeah, I did really well in school, but it wasn’t until I got to high school that I thought about what I could to do with my life that would combine my interests not just in sports, but in the wider world. Man, I’m trying to remember why I went to Princeton – mainly because the offered a good financial package. I was basically going to go to the University of Kansas, that’s where my whole family went, but I also applied to Duke, Rice, and Williams College in Massachusetts. I just wanted to try a couple different places in different parts of the country. I had a friend who was three years older than me at my high school that went to Princeton, and he really liked it. I spent some time with him there. I didn’t really know the opportunities there for people who wanted to be journalists. It’s funny, they didn’t have a journalism program, but they did have a good student paper that I wrote for. But the best things in retrospect were a couple of classes I took, seminars with working journalists.

Did you ever get to take the John McPhee class? He’s pretty much my god.

Well, I took the course he usually teaches called Literature As Fact, but ever few years he takes a year off and somebody else comes in and teaches the course. The year I did in the Spring of ’95, it was David Remnick.

A nice substitute.

Yeah, you know he was writing for The New Yorker at that point, and now he is the guy who runs it. He’s the editor. It was an awesome course where you learned from a guy who may be the greatest literary journalist of his generation, I guess is one way to put it. I learned a lot of techniques that I still use for every magazine story I write today in that class.

Can you share one? Is there one cliché you go back to as a mantra or anything.

Well that’s just the thing, he was a pretty cliché-free guy. It’s funny, I still have the spiral notebook from that class, and every once in a while I go back to it to just refresh some of the things that we’d gone over. McPhee came in for one of the classes himself, and a lot of good journalists came in, and we had a big project in the second half of the semester where we wrote a long magazine story about some interesting topic. Of course David was great to work with on that too, just as far as editing along the way and in the end, I have to thank him a ton. He wrote a recommendation for me at the time to get me my job starting out at Sports Illustrated.