The two biggest international sports events in the UAE neatly bracket the start and finish of the “winter” sports calendar here: The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November and the Dubai World Cup in March. The former involves Formula One race cars and the latter horses. In each case, people are trying to get from […]

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When the Al Wasl club of Dubai and the UAE Pro League announced in June that they had hired Diego Maradona to be their coach … I wrote that “this will not be dull.” Got that one right. But that was shooting fish in a barrel. El Diego, FIFA’s co-player of the century (with Pele), […]

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When I arrived in the UAE, I figured I would never go to a dentist here. Bar some emergency. A doctor, sure, for an antibiotic or asthma medication or a checkup. But not a dentist. We were going to be here 18 months, maybe two years on the outside … but now we are safely […]

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I find Frank McCourt (and his ex-wife, for that matter) as repellant as just about anyone. I’m confident of that. And my initial reaction to a group “led” (“fronted” is a better word) by Magic Johnson buying the Dodgers was, “Our long baseball nightmare is over!” But the more I read about it … the […]

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A common misconception among people back in the U.S. is that we are not aware of what happens in the country’s major sports. We are not swimming in a sea of chatter about what is going on in the NBA and NFL, and we do lose track of some of what happens back home (college […]

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The UAE football team that won in Tashkent and clinched a place in the 2012 London Olympics … The president of the country, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, today awarded each player with 500,000 dirhams. Which converts to $136,000. Which is real money for winning a match you already really wanted to win.

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This is so UAE. You arrive at the office and a discussion ensues about whether it rained last night … or did not. And each side can make plausible arguments. “Rain” being a word we use here to describe any descent of water from the skies. Even the briefest and most inoffensive. And nearly unnoticeable. […]

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I now have an idea of how ridiculous I must have sounded. A couple of years ago, early in my time in the UAE and at The National, I asked a co-worker of Indian origin whether Major League Baseball ought to make a push to penetrate the India market. India is nuts about cricket, and […]

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The UAE and the Gulf are not always dead-serious places, which seems to be their global reputation. Out and about, you see people smiling and laughing. The idea of a professional comedian is, however, a fairly exotic one in these parts. Which in part explains why we went to see a Canadian-Indian comedian named Russell […]

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This is just an astonishing concept, even in the modern era. Someone has compiled a video showing every one of the Barcelona-record 234 goals scored by Lionel Messi. (Who set the club record yesterday.) And limited it to 14 minutes of video. Here is the link to that video, which I first saw on Twitter […]

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