Year-End Remembrances, And What I Learned: Grant Wahl and Lady Moyra Bannister

This is the first in a three-post series.

On September 7, November 4, December 9, December 11, and December 12, a prominent person I knew passed away. Those deaths spanned someone I barely knew, but who helped me feel more comfortable in an interview (unbeknownst to her), to a true personal role model. 

This post, and the next two posts, will comprise a year-end series of remembrances. This is the first installment, and includes the first two of five short commemorations. I’ll share how I knew these people, and something I learned from or valued in them. 

Their deaths ranged from expected (one of them was 107), to completely shocking. Let’s start with completely shocking. 

Grant Wahl (1973 - 2022) 

You probably heard about this one. Grant was arguably the most well-known soccer writer in the United States. On December 10, he collapsed in the press box during a World Cup quarter-final match between Argentina and the Netherlands. (His widow has since said that he died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.) 

Over the last two years, Grant had been writing a very popular Substack; working as a soccer analyst for CBS Sports; and both hosting and producing podcasts. But most of his career was spent at Sports Illustrated, where he was my colleague from 2006 to 2013. To be precise about the nature of the relationship, though: I started as a temp fact-checker, and was sometimes assigned to fact-check his stories — primarily about college basketball at the time. 

As a fact-checker, you pretty quickly divide writers into two categories: those who make it easy on you and those who make it hard. The former keep detailed source notes, are responsive to your calls and emails under deadline, and will help you connect to their sources when needed. Grant was an easy one, for which I was always grateful. 

While I didn’t know Grant deeply like some of my SI colleagues did, I always enjoyed interacting with him, and I learned a lot from fact-checking his stories. When I came into SI, I really didn’t understand the depth of reporting and interviewing required to write stories as detailed as Grant and other senior writers did. 

I remember fact-checking one NCAA tournament story in which Grant was narrating Joakim Noah’s thoughts about the world as he watched CNN between games during the tournament. Noah was a Florida Gators star who was in the process of leading the team to a second straight national title, and I was wondering how the heck Grant was getting that material. Well, reader, the answer was both totally sensible and quite surprising to me at the time: Grant was sitting in Noah’s hotel room with him as he watched the news.

Everybody wanted to interview Noah just for a minute, just to get one quote. Grant managed to end up hanging out in his hotel room, listening to him and talking with him as he watched TV. He then used that material to give the reader a completely different perspective from the gazillion other stories that were being written about Noah and the Gators. 

That made an impression on me. When I later started having opportunities to write at SI, I always tried to find ways to be a detail-collecting fly on the wall, rather than just aiming for formal interviews. 

One last memory of Grant: For a college homework assignment, he once wrote about a 1970s Howard University soccer team, which had been stripped of the first-ever Division I national championship won by an HBCU. Apparently, he got an A-. The story later ran in Sports Illustrated. Must’ve been a stacked class!  

Image credits: (l) Doug Zimmerman/ISI Photos/via Getty Images; (r) Xinhua News Agency/via Getty Images

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Lady Moyra Bannister (1928 - 2022) 

I don’t get nervous before interviews. 

That’s completely untrue; I get nervous before literally every interview. However, I don’t get any more nervous for interviews with famous people than with anyone else. My visit to Moyra Bannister’s house was the exception. 

It was Moyra’s husband, Sir Roger Bannister, who made me nervous. I was there to write a “Where are they now?” story for SI. I ran track in college, and Sir Roger — having been the first person ever to break four minutes in the mile — was the definition of a living legend in our sport. I also love writing, and science, and Sir Roger was an outstanding writer — “I felt like an exploded flashlight with no will to live,” he wrote of crossing the line in his famous mile — a world-renowned scientist, and never not wearing a tie. (Seriously. Save for running pics.) He was a presence. I think my hand shook a little as it hovered over the “Bannister” buzzer outside his house in Oxford. 

To my good fortune, the interior of their home helped me calm down a little. Sure, there were the rather intimidating pictures of Sir Roger with heads of state (Winston Churchill, the Queen Mother), letters from presidents (Kennedy, Clinton), and the glass obelisk for the 2005 lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Neurology. But, at least by volume, that was easily outstripped by art. It was all over the place. Not just hanging on the walls, but canvases leaning on things, and unfinished depictions of plants and landscapes. Moyra was an excellent artist. She worked in watercolor and oil, made ceramics, and decorated furniture. The Bannister home was festooned with nature paintings in various stages of completion. 

Ultimately, Sir Roger enjoyed the story I wrote, and we became friends. On occasion, he would call me kind of early in the morning (knights have no respect for time zones!), and it would always go something like this:

“Hello! It’s Sir Roger! I have three things to tell you. [Something about running; something about one of his kids; something random but interesting.] Ok goodbye goodbye!” 

It was delightful and — for a track and science nerd — a little surreal every single time. Sir Roger passed away in 2018, and Moyra, his partner of 63 years, died this year on November 4, at the age of 94. In addition to her art, she spent a decade traveling all over England with her husband, then head of the Sports Council, promoting physical activity and opening community sports facilities. 

I certainly didn’t know Moyra well at all, but I’ll never forget those canvases. The day when my hand shook over the buzzer was scheduled to be my only interview time with Sir Roger, but I had to return to their home for a second day of interviewing, because I didn’t get everything I needed on day one. (As I mentioned above, I’d learned my lesson from Grant Wahl and other great SI writers.) 

I was self-conscious about asking for more time, but I wasn’t nervous at the buzzer on day two. I think that’s partly because, while Sir Roger’s memorabilia gave me the feeling of entering a museum, Moyra’s made me feel like I was going into an artist’s studio, where things were a little less polished, and in the process of becoming. I love nature art, and I think the interviews went a little better because I felt a little more comfortable. Thus the article turned out better. Thus Sir Roger and I became friends. 

The next post will publish on Thursday, and contain two more remembrances.

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Until Thursday…

David