Grant Wahl is a senior soccer writer at Sports Illustrated and author of The Beckham Experiment. He joins me on this edition of the World Cup Buzz podcast to talk about the three teams representing CONCACAF: Honduras, who most will view as longshots; Mexico, who experienced a drastic turnaround after firing Sven Göran Eriksson; and the United States, whose expectations are elevated after success in their last trip to South Africa.
Have to say that I’m getting a bit sick of Grant Wahl as like this gatekeeper of soccer knowledge and news. He’s a privileged Ivy Leaguer who went straight from Princeton to SI–never started his own blog or worked as a stringer at a high school game–and in the Beckham Experiment he even refers to himself as a member of the “media elite,” but everyone treats him with such respect because it’s Sports Illustrated, like whoop-dee-do. But I don’t really see him as adding much to American soccer. SI and the big media are pretty late to the party as far as I’m concerned. Blogs and the Internet lead the way for soccer in the US.
Moreover, are we really supposed to admire The Beckham Experiment so much? It’s not that big of an achievement. David Beckham’s crew sold SI/Walh the access in exchange for the ’07 cover. Anyone could have written a bestseller had David Beckham been taking your calls regularly during his first season in the US. Big deal. I’m much more impressed by upstart bloggers who came up reporting the American game without SI or elite media contacts behind them.
Also, Walh’s being robbed in Honduras was a really embarrassing incident, not something he should have gotten a medal for. Sorry, but you don’t jump into a rental car in SPS dressed like a Wall Streeter on safari and steam up la cartera principal to Tegus twittering cell phone pics of how brave you are during a period of civil unrest, and then act surprised that you got ganked. He was lucky he wasn’t killed. Friggin’ stupid. (I was in Honduras during that period and I never once got close to getting robbed, because I used my head and didn’t go around looking like I had $10,000 to spare. Duh.)
Man, I have a lot to say about Wahl. You wanna know another thing that really bothers me about Wahl? That thing on Drogba in SI this week is Exhibit A. It’s like, Wahl actually buys into this bogus concept of soccer as inherently good. Like all it takes to solve the sectarian political problems of West Africa is for Didier Drogba to say, “Can’t we all get along?,” and Christians and Muslims will be like, “Hey, he’s right!,” and everyone will drop their guns and poverty and disease will be fixed, because of soccer. I think it’s exactly the opposite–that corrupt regimes and political rackets use international soccer to distract people and divert attention from social ills. Like, does anyone think that Mexico’s obsession with the Tri is really that good (or bad) for Mexico? If they win the World Cup, there’s still going to be a drug war and a dysfunctional economy and a horrible, corrupt government.
That reminds me, once Walh got to Tegus after he was robbed last fall, he met with Micheletti and reported word for word whatever rah rah BS Micheletti said about Los Catrachos, and didn’t ask him a single adversarial question (which is why he was invited, I guess), basically allowing a thuggish military coup d’etat leader to wrap himself in the popularity of the national soccer team in SI. How does that save the planet? Why didn’t Walh contact Zelaya too and ask him if he was proud of the Honduran national team?
I’m just saying, if Walh wants to talk about the political dimensions of the game, about how great it is, then lets talk about it–but that doesn’t mean that the Grant Walh cheerleader types win that debate every time.
One more thing. Walh is also 100% schizoid on Honduras. He recently told Only A Game’s Bill Littlefield on NPR that he thought Honduras could be the Cinderella Story of the 2010 World Cup, which is quite different from what he said on this podcast. Which is it?
Who the hell pissed in your cheerios?
Good one. Did you come up with that all by yourself? Because I’ve never really heard that saying before. Hey, maybe Grant will invite you on his yacht some day.