Grant Wahl joined SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in November 1996 as a reporter and was promoted to his current position of senior writer in October 2000. Wahl's writing for SI and SI.com includes college basketball, soccer, investigative reporting and features on a variety of topics. He began his journalism career as an intern with the Miami Herald in 1996.

Wahl has covered 12 NCAA basketball tournaments, five World Cups and three Olympics for SI. Some of his recent stories include Fast and Furious, which detailed the spread of the innovative Dribble-Drive Motion offense through every level of basketball, and cover stories on LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Tyler Hansbrough and David Beckham.

Wahl first won critical praise for his work (with Jon Wertheim) on the 1998 cover story Where's Daddy?, which documented the staggering number of out-of-wedlock children born to professional athletes. He has also won four Magazine Story of the Year awards given by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association.

In 13 years Wahl has written 31 SI cover stories and more than 200 articles, which have taken him to 40 states and 26 countries.

When he isn't traveling for SI, Wahl spends his time cooking, reading, running, watching movies and traveling with his wife, Celine. He is conversational in Spanish.

Wahl, 35, grew up in Mission, KS, and attended Princeton University, where he graduated with a B.A. in politics in 1996. Wahl's first book, The Beckham Experiment (Crown, 2009), was a New York Times Best Seller.

EXTRA POINTS

• Favorite SI Vault story: Ahead of His Class (Feb. 18, 2002) by Grant Wahl. "LeBron James's first SI cover story (as a high school junior). Props to SI senior editor Greg Kelly for coming up with the cover line (The Chosen One) that LeBron eventually got as a tattoo; LeBron and his friends piled into my crappy rental car (he even brought his binder full of CDs) and we drove from Akron to Cleveland to see Michael Jordan hit the last-second game winner for the Wizards; won't ever forget the look on LeBron's face at the McDonald's drive thru when I told him, ‘You know, this has a chance of getting on the cover.' Two weeks later it did."
• Writers who have inspired your work: "Entire staff of SI, especially Steve Rushin, S.L. Price, Alex Wolff, Jon Wertheim, Gary Smith. Also: Gloria Emerson, David Remnick, David Foster Wallace, Jon Lee Anderson, and Frank Rich."
• Most Memorable SI project: Where's Daddy? (with Jon Wertheim). "SI's editors trusted a couple of punks in their early 20s to write a major story that went beyond sports; one of my best memories in journalism will always be the 10 days Jon and I holed up in a tiny SI office and wrote this."
• Most Memorable Meal: Tie: Taillevent (Paris), Sushi Kyubey (Tokyo), Shiro's (Seattle), Tetsuya's (Sydney), Le Quartier Français (Franschhoek), Cabaña Las Lilas (Buenos Aires)
• The greatest team you have seen in person: The Florida college basketball 2006-07, with the emphasis on team.

Updated 21 October 2009

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