Wow, that was an incredible World Cup final.
TigerBlog, as you know, hates to see any game decided by penalty kicks, let alone the World Cup final. Then again, the game yesterday that had to have been the best World Cup final ever, and maybe the best game period, even with the PKs.
Argentina seemed to have it salted away twice first up 2-0 in regulation and then up 3-2 in OT. Of course, it only go to OT because Kylian Mbappe scored twice in less than two minutes to tie it up. Then, after Lionel Messi got his second of the day, Mbappe got his third, on a PK, to tie it and force PKs.
Mbappe and Messi both converted. Argentina would end up winning, 4-2. Even with the loss, it's possible that there has never been a better clutch performance by anyone to compare with what Mbappe did.
How could they keep playing without Grant? It hardly seemed real to consider that someone so young and vibrant, and someone so ubiquitous, could be gone, just like that.
Now that this World Cup has faded into the past, it will be four more years until the next one, which will be held with an expanded field in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
The three host nations will all automatically qualify. The field will go from 32 teams to 48, with 16 groups of three countries each. The top two advance to the 32-team, five-round knockout stage.
TB just assumed that Grant would be his source for any international and professional soccer information he needed between now and then.
Among the many, many tributes to Grant since his death was THIS PIECE on the Princeton Alumni Weekly website, written by Peter Barzilai ’97, whose wife Malena Salberg Barzelai, also Class of 1997, who was a member of the Daily Princetonian sports staff when Grant was co-sports editor, along with Nate Ewell.
Justin Pope, another Prince staffer, had this quote in the story:
“For a very small group of us who were in that room with [Grant] every
afternoon and a lot of evenings in ’94, ’95, and ’96, it was a golden
era,” said Justin Pope ’97, co-sports editor in 1996-97. “There was this
energy and kind of cockiness, and it came from the top, and he was the
person who sat on that tower. Grant created an environment that people
wanted to be a part of and wanted to do ambitious work.”
For TigerBlog, that story, and the pictures that accompanied it, brought back a flood of memories, and familiar names, from his time working in athletic communications while all of those students wrote for the Prince. Just is right. That was a golden era.
It was good to see their names and their very young faces — until TB remembered why he was seeing them.
As near as TB can tell, Grant's first story as a Prince writer was on Sept. 16, 1992, when he wrote about the Princeton women's volleyball win over Rutgers. He then went on to cover cross country that fall, and then basically everything else along the way.
His first soccer coverage was of Princeton's run to the 1993 NCAA Final Four, with wins over Columbia, Penn State and Hartwick. Grant wrote this as his lede for the Hartwick story:
November Madness? It may not have the same ring as its March
counterpart, but does it really matter? Then again, does anything really
matter about yesterday's NCAA men's soccer quarterfinal except for one
simple thing? Princeton 3, Hartwick 0.
TigerBlog was at all three of those games too. He wishes he could remember his interactions with Grant from those days, or from when they first met, which was likely before that at a football game.
He'd love to know if Grant talked about loving soccer, or if those games played a huge role in his eventual love of the sport.
Back then, Grant covered way more basketball and football than soccer. Basketball was his first love, really, or it least it seemed that way at the time. Soccer, though, is where he has left a legacy that will never be forgotten.
There will be other World Cups. Grant's total of World Cups covered will, tragically, be frozen forever at eight. TB will think of Grant any time he watches a game on that level, a game Grant would have probably covered, and he'll think about the college student he knew and the international figure he became, and all the times the two spoke during all those years.
As TB went through the Prince archives to follow Grant's progression, he came across this column that Grant wrote on Nov. 23, 1994. It was entitled "Remembering Basketball On The East Side Of Kansas City."
He leaves you with this for today:
Remembering Basketball On The East Side Of Kansas City • by Grant Wahl (Nov. 23, 1994)
Last summer I stopped by Dr. Naismith's grave to pay my respects. The headstone wasn't ostentatious or anything — just a small, rough slab of granite resting in a quiet cemetery on the East Side of Lawrence, Kansas. East Side, quiet, resting — words that, at least for me, called to mind the best and worst of basketball, the game Dr. James Naismith invented late last century.
I sat down next to the stone. It had not changed, I assumed, for 60 years. Yet in the past decade I had changed, and so had Sugarman. I knew it was all related to Dr. Naismith's game, so we talked for awhile.
East Side, Kansas City, 1984. I've never played organized ball before, never had a black friend — never spent any time on the East Side, for that matter. My neighbor asked me to join his Salvation Army league two days ago. Now I'm dribbling, and this little guy with the deceiving smile and the hands, quick as a hummingbird's wings, hawks me until I hesitate, losing focus for that one millisecond.. . . SWlPE...gone the other way. Just like that.
Frustration incarnate, all four feet of him, skitters toward the basket for another layup. He's still smiling. The gym regulars call him Sugarman, and he is the best player on his team. I happen to be the best player on the other team, not due to any acquired skill as much as my height, tallest in the league. Despite our physical mismatch, the coaches have us guard each other anyway. I bring the ball up the court, and he runs around the lane close to the hoop, so positions really don't matter.
The game progresses, each team matching the other's points. Sugarman continues to smile and flit around like a water spryte, while I hold the ball above my head, out of his reach, and execute easy turn-around layups. Quiet. Not a sound echoes through the vacuum chamber of a gym while Sugarman shoots free throws. The only movement, it seems, is my sweat, dripping like a washerless faucet so that pools form on the warped wood floor at my feet. The sweat and the ball. He bounces it once, twice, spins it in his hands just like the pros. Silence. No clock on the wall shows the remaining time, but the volunteer referee said there wasn't much left. Sugarman brings the ball down to his waist, heaves it skyward. It glances off the rim's lip, down the cylinder, into the cords of the net. Resting. Gasping for air, hands on hips.
Game over, the parents crawl out from the cubbyhole of seats in the dimly lit crackerbox gym. A young black woman, Sugarman's mother, approaches the two of us. "We're going to hear about you boys in high school," she says. For some reason I am crying.
East Side, Kansas City, 1994. The area around the old community center where we played used to have basketball goals scattered among the broken glass and loose gravel. Today the glass remains, and so does the gravel. The backboards are there too, a bit rusty but still functional. But the rims have disappeared. Either that or they have been bent beyond recognition, the twisted iron wreckage of America's fascination with the slam dunk.
I haven't seen Sugarman since the last game of the season 10 years ago. It's a shame — at the time we both talked about playing basketball together the year after, and even in high school, like his mom said we would. But the following year I joined a suburban league closer to home, and I never did make the high school varsity team.
On Saturdays I looked at the box scores from the previous night's high school games and hoped to see his name. Eventually, though, I realized that I didn't know him by any other name than Sugarman — even his mom called him Sugar — and they wouldn't put that in the box score.
Quiet. No one is playing on the courts of the East Side, and it's mid-afternoon on a sunny summer day. I drove here, I suppose, hoping to see Sugarman, yet knowing that it wouldn't happen. If it couldn't be him, I at least wanted to witness the boy of 10 years ago, darting back and forth, stealing balls and running for uncontested layups. But today the courts are quiet, and the entrance to the community center with the crackerbox gym isn't bustling with boys and girls and basketballs, not the way it used to. Sugarman isn't here. Resting.
For folks near the community center, white and black, the post-game hands on hips has been replaced by hands in pockets. The Salvation Army, it turns out, didn't have enough money to continue the league.
For some reason I wasn't crying. I stood up and left Dr. Naismith's grave with a thank you and a request: that Sugarman is still smiling and playing his game, on the East Side of Kansas City or anywhere else.
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1 comment:
I liked the Sugarman piece. It brought me back to my early childhood days when I attended the Nassau Street Elementary School in Princeton. The school was integrated. But, I was too young for that to have any significance. Most of the friends I remember were black. I was a happy kid and loved going to school. In fourth grade my life changed. I was sent to a private school only a few blocks from Nassau Street (Princeton Country Day or PCD as we called it). PCD however, was a different world. My new classmates came from other schools, mostly private. There were no black (then we used the term negro) kids among my new classmates. I quickly became aware that many of my old friends at Nassau Street were alien to my new classmates who referred to them laughingly as “jigaboos” or “jungle bunnies”. I was secretly upset by this behavior and going to school ceased to be the carefree, enjoyable activity that it had been through third grade. Unlike at Nassau Street, I made few good friends at PCD.
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