Diane McGraw helped bring the World Cup to Philadelphia. She just had to wait more than three decades to see it happen.
Her path to the city’s soccer moment began far from any pitch, as Alex Coffey reports for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
A Ridley Park native who once dreamed of becoming an actress, McGraw had little interest in sports as a young woman.
When an injury cut short her brief field hockey career at Notre Dame High School in Moylan, she pivoted to organizing intramurals as her class athletic representative, an early hint of the career to come.
She moved to New York, worked in modeling and entertainment, and eventually found herself organizing celebrity tennis tournaments.
That unlikely gig cracked open the door to something much bigger: national and international events, leadership roles across multiple sports commissions, and, eventually, marriage to longtime Phillies reliever Tug McGraw.
Back in Philadelphia, she became an early champion of international soccer.
The matches she helped organize at Franklin Field in 1989 and 1990 drew crowds north of 40,000, proof that the city’s appetite for the sport was real.
That momentum pushed her to spearhead Philadelphia’s bid for the 1994 World Cup.
The city had sponsors. It had fans. It had energy. What it didn’t have was a stadium.
FIFA wanted control of Veterans Stadium for roughly two months, and Major League Baseball had no intention of sending the Phillies packing for that long. The bid collapsed.
“I was thrilled [to hear] that it was coming here,” McGraw said of Philadelphia’s current World Cup moment. “Finally. We deserve to have it here. And I’m just sorry we missed out on it back then.”
The full account of how McGraw helped lay the groundwork for the moment Philadelphia is finally living out awaits in the full Philadelphia Inquirer report.
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