Grant Wahl was in the right place at the right time during his too-short professional career.

Wahl came out of Princeton University in the 1990s, and landed a job with Sports Illustrated magazine. You might recall that the Nineties were the time when soccer had just started to make an imprint on the American sports scene, thanks in part to the placement of the World Cup tournament here in 1994. There weren't a great many sportswriters who knew too much about the game and how it was played, especially on an international basis. It was a perfect spot for Wahl, who had "studied" under future U.S. National Coach Bob Bradley at Princeton

Almost before he knew it, Wahl was writing SI's soccer stories. No, they were never too plentiful, and they were rarely on the cover, but if you went searching for them they'd turn up. He'd found his niche. Grant also worked on college basketball during his time at the magazine. Those assignments lasted for almost 25 years.

Then Sports Illustrated started to shrink in staff size, and Wahl was one of the casualties. Eventually he wound up freelancing on Substack, writing for an audience of about three thousand instead of many multiple times that number. But the readers were rabid soccer fans, and Wahl even paid his own way to major events to add his informed commentary to the conversation.

Wahl's career was unique in that he was the single unquestioned authority in his area of expertise, soccer. So when he died in December 2022, it was a particularly painful moment for those fans. The outpouring of sympathy was quite impressive and well deserved

"World Class," then, is something of a good-bye present to those supporters. It was put together by Alexander Wolfe and Mark Mravic, both SI alumni. It's Wahl's greatest hits, presented in anthology form and broken into a variety of themes. Realistically, though, the groupings of articles don't really matter much. We bounce from one subject to another rather easily. We're in good hands here.

One way to judge anthologies is to count the number of stories that hold the reader's interest all the way through. In my case, I'm not going to say I'm a major follower of the sport of soccer. I've only written about it a few times, and know most of the rules and few of the strategies. Still, there were only a few stories here that didn't compel me to keep reading to the conclusion - mostly on international soccer subjects.

Then again, some of the non-sports articles were definite keepers. Wahl's profile of then-new North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams was written at just the right time. Williams had just arrived from Kansas, and he had almost Shakespearean doubts about whether he was doing the right thing. Speaking of basketball coaches, Wolfe and Mravic reach back to Wahl's Princeton days for a column on why legendary coach Pete Carill wasn't quite the saint he was often portrayed to be by the national media.

Perhaps my favorite piece in the book has never been published before. It was a paper written for a course taught by New Yorker David Remnick about Gloria Emerson, one of the only women who covered the Vietnam War for a major media outlet. The experience left some serious baggage on her psyche, and Wahl's profile of one of his mentors can stand up with any story of its kind done by more experienced reporters.

The proceeds of "World Class" are going to establish a journalism award at Princeton in Wahl's name, which is nice. Those who enjoy good writing and reporting certainly will find this book rewarding. Those who are big soccer fans will take that level of enjoyment up a notch.

When Grant Wahl died suddenly from an aneurysm while covering the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the entire sports world was in shock and in mourning. He was well known for his passion for writing about soccer and being the voice for those who were not heard. This book is a collection of Wahl’s writing on those topics from many different sources. His best known work was writing for Sports Illustrated, and many of the pieces are from the magazine, but there are also articles from Substack, his college classes and other sources.

What struck me the most about this collection was not the quality, as that was expected to be superior in a collection of Grant Wahl writing. It was not that the topics were varied and not just about soccer and college basketball, the two sports that Wahl covered during his time at Sports Illustrated. It even wasn’t that his articles would often champion causes like social justice for marginalized groups like LGBTQ+ or migrant workers. No, what I really liked about this book and each of the articles was the passion that Wahl put into each article. That was mentioned throughout the book – that a reader could see that Wahl was writing with a purpose. Often, the forward of a book written by a relative or colleague of the author will state this – but in this case, it was absolutely the truth.

There are several powerful pieces scattered throughout the book. One of the best had nothing to do with sports and was a submission of Wahl’s when he was in college. He wrote an account of a person for whom he held great regard – Vietnam War correspondent Gloria Emerson. It was an assignment for a non-fiction writing class, but it was so good and received so much positive feedback that it was kept amongst his other writings. Two others that I believe should be noted are his Substack writings on the conditions faced by workers in Qatar preparing for the 2022 World Cup and his portrait of American teenage soccer player Freddie Adu, who did not live up to the hype given to him during his career in Major League Soccer and is now playing for any European team who will sign him.

One doesn’t have to be a soccer fan to enjoy Wahl’s work on the sport. The same goes for his other pieces in this book – if a reader simply enjoys excellent non-fiction writing in which the passion of the author is clear, then that reader needs to read this book.

I wish to thank the publisher for providing a review copy of the book. The opinions expressed are strictly my own.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC to this book.

I want to thank Grant Wahl's family and friends who put this book together. Of course I love sports, but Wahl's writing oozes sincerity and passion for his subject and shows unique perspective inside the human condition which doesn't often come out in sportswriting. For Wahl, sports is the venue but he is mostly a writer and observer of the under-appreciated and under-served. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would highly recommend to all readers. 4-stars