Investigative journalist Andrew Jennings on October 30, 2013, giving the presentation ‘Who wants to go to Qatar in 2022? Hands up!’ Photo by Thomas Søndergaard/Play the Game via Play the Game on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Trinidadian sports journalist Lasana Liburd pays tribute to his mentor, British investigative reporter Andrew Jennings, who died in England on January 8 following a brief illness, at the age of 78. This article was first published at Wired868. An edited version appears below with permission. One of my most vivid memories of Andrew Jennings came on our second meeting, after a media conference at the Trinidad Hilton in the build-up to the 2001 FIFA Under-17 World Cup in Trinidad and Tobago. It was an elegant event, attended by then FIFA president Sepp Blatter, with every local sports reporter of note present. Jennings had not yet distinguished himself in football, but he caught the attention of the room with some spicy questions to the head table during the Q&A session. Refreshments in hand, curious local reporters surrounded the short, plump, grey-haired Brit to learn more about his mission on the island. Jennings put up with barely a few minutes of chit-chat before he leaned purposefully towards the group, as if to share a secret. Instinctively, his local “hosts” reciprocated by leaning towards him. “Let’s get those crooked fuckers,” hissed Jennings, in a fierce whisper. Eyebrows shot up and, to a man, everyone seemed to remember somewhere else in the room they needed to be. In less than a minute, I was the only one left in his company. Jennings, smiling, leaned forward again. “I find it better not to waste time separating the wheat from the chaff,” he told me, with a wink and a wry smile. It epitomised Jennings: funny, mischievous, clever and confrontational. He was a man who understood his purpose. I’d met him a few days earlier, when he sought me out—on the recommendation of an undisclosed third party. He was investigating corruption in FIFA and, naturally, he found that there was ample evidence of it in the Caribbean. So he was searching for someone in the region he could trust. I was 24 years old and had already been a journalist for five years. Within my first year on the job, I wrote a critical piece on the administration of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (TTFF)—steered by then FIFA vice-president Jack Warner—for the Trinidad Guardian newspaper, and I never changed course. But Jennings was something else entirely. He was an investigative journalist; and he became my mentor in that field. (His wife, Clare Sambrook, a former UK Guardian editor and author, certainly gave me some valuable writing tips, too.) I know personally of Jennings’ interactions with Brazil striker Romário, Trinidad and Tobago goalkeeper Shaka Hislop, and West Indies batsman Sir Viv Richards. There are no doubt hundreds of others—some more illustrious, most less so—who reached out to the veteran journalist and found someone keen to empathise and make their challenges his. A lot will be said of Jennings’ excellent work over the years. That is as it should be. His first sport book The Lords of the Rings: Power, Money and Drugs in the Modern Olympics, which he co-authored with Vyv Simson in 1992, shook up the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and was listed by the New York Times as one of the best sport reads of the century. He wrote two more books on the IOC and three on FIFA, in addition to producing dozens of documentaries and giving maybe hundreds of lectures. Jennings zeroed in on how money meant to further the sport was funnelled away by corrupt officials; he shone a light on the way conscientious administrators, managers and coaches were bullied and purged, and athletes, fans and governments were abused and cheated. It is hard to overstate the real value of journalism of that sort. For the fan-in-the-street, the abiding image may well be of a feisty, grey-haired man picking fights with powerful sport officials. But Jennings could never have amassed the multitude of well-placed contacts he did without whistleblowers feeling absolutely certain that his concern about the sport was genuine and his discretion regarding their identities was unimpeachable. For me, though, Jennings’ most important qualities were his empathy, honesty, tenaciousness and generosity. As we collaborated for years, eventually sharing sources, I can say with complete certainty that some of the persons who trusted Jennings with inside information held very high positions within FIFA and its confederations. And they often remained his confidants for years. There were administrators and athletes on every continent who believed in Jennings.