The weight of work

Renowned soccer writer Grant Wahl dropped dead in a pressbox in Qatar yesterday, and there but for the grace of God. It might be an excess of drama to say his job killed him, but that it was at least an accomplice seems obvious.

From Wahl's website:

 My body finally broke down on me. Three weeks of little sleep, high stress and lots of work can do that to you. What had been a cold over the last 10 days turned into something more severe on the night of the USA-Netherlands game. I could feel my upper chest take on a new level of pressure and discomfort ...

And there I'll stop, because a memory has come back to me.

Forty-two years distant, it's of another man with another cold. And how it, too, turned catastrophic.

What happened to Grant Wahl in a pressbox in 2022, see, happened to a man named Bob Fuller in a high school gym in Lapel, In., one night in 1980. And his job was at least an accomplice, too.

Fuller was the basketball coach at Highland High School in Anderson, an intensely driven man who used to paper over the windows of the gym to keep nosy nellies from observing his practices. You could say he was a bit paranoid.

He also was a genius at implementing the zone defense, the wellspring of his teams' success. No one played zone like Highland played zone. The discipline of his players, and the intricate choreography with which they shifted in concert on the defensive end, were unmatched. They were the hallmarks of Fuller's teams, and he even wrote a book about the zone.

That particular week in 1980, Fuller, too, was suffering from a cold that had settled in his chest. He was, to put it plainly, sick as a dog. But he kept his foot on the gas, as was his nature. And he was on the bench that Friday night at Lapel.

By halftime, his distress was obvious. Lapel's coach, Dallas Hunter, even went to the locker room with an offer to end the game right there. Fuller, being Fuller, declined.

No sooner had the words come out of his mouth than his eyes rolled up and he collapsed. Later that night, he died. 

Bob Fuller was just 40 years old.

Grant Wahl, on the other hand, was only 48.

And if it's too much to say, again, that the job killed them, they shared the same drive to do that job right, no matter what. For Fuller, there was a game to coach, and so he coached it. And for Wahl ...

Well. He spent two decades at Sports Illustrated, where he became known not just for his soccer and college basketball coverage but for SI's cover story on a high school phenom named LeBron James. In Qatar, he was one of 82 journalists honored for covering eight consecutive World Cups. By then, he had left SI to start his own website; he'd also been a contributor for Fox Sports from 2012 to 2019.

As part of his coverage, Wahl had been present for every game in Qatar. He wrote stories. He did a podcast. In the last one, he said he had bronchitis and had been treated at the medical center, but "you can probably tell from my voice I'm not at it at 100 percent here. Hopefully I will not cough during this podcast. I'm coughing a lot."

The next day he was dead.

One of the smartest observations ever made is that everyone's job is harder than people think it is. I can't speak to the coaching profession, but I can, as a print sports journalist for 40 years, speak to the stresses of that job. The weight of the work has always been heavy, but never more so than now, with staffs cut to the bone and podcasts, video and blogs now part of the coverage mix. And of course the stress goes hand-in-hand with that.

Particularly if, like Grant Wahl, you were driven to do the job the way it should be done, because that's what your audience deserved.

I am not now nor ever was in the same galaxy as Wahl, nor remotely had the same sort of pressures. But part of the reason I stepped away from the profession when I did, a few months before my 60th birthday, is because I could feel myself beginning to wear down. I was working six days every week and often seven, because that's what the job entailed. I loved what I was doing, always did, but it was turning me into someone I didn't like: Snappish, easily annoyed, angry at nothing.

So I walked away.  Didn't want to keel over in a pressbox somewhere, I liked to joke.

Yesterday, in a completely different universe than some small town Indiana sportswriter, Grant Wahl did keel over.

And so, once more: There but for the grace of God.