Some have wondered what Landon Donovan has been up to since the Los Angeles Galaxy won the MLS Cup last month. He left the Home Depot Center with some ambivalent comments about his future in soccer, and one interpretation was that he was through with the game. Since then, had he been wandering the Earth? […]

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I find this John and Jim Harbaugh thing fascinating. The odds of brothers meeting as coaches of opposing teams in a Super Bowl … have to be extreme. (But then, it’s happened in the 47th Super Bowl, so perhaps we would have to concede that the odds look like 1-in-47.) I like this on several […]

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Subtitled: “Misadventures in building your tour event’s field.” The Abu Dhabi Golf Championship got a fair bit of attention before it began, for two reasons, as I noted a few days ago: It included the world’s two highest-ranked players, Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods. And then it went horribly wrong.

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Biggest sports story since I arrived in Abu Dhabi. The UAE national team won the Gulf Cup tonight! How big is that?

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This must be how the other half lives. Or whatever fraction of humanity lives where winter is a serious business. The scene: A day off, in the apartment, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, talking inside my head.

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If we stipulate that the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which goes off in November, is a very big deal, with international appeal, and the Mubadala World Tennis Championship gets some notice, too, we perhaps are looking at one other event in the city which has a global audience, or the potential for one. And that […]

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The Gulf Cup. Technically, I suppose, it’s the Gulf Cup of Nations. Played every two years. Probably very few people, even serious soccer fans, know about this tournament. But is huge in the UAE and environs. And tonight the UAE senior side, augmented by the rising stars who played at the 2012 London Olympics, defeated […]

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Not much more to be said about this. Aside, maybe, from “What took you so long?” Two other thoughts:

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I spent far too much of the night watching the NFL playoffs. Like, I have a day job, and the games began at 10 p.m. here in Abu Dhabi and ended at about 5 a.m. But I came to a couple of conclusions — or arrived at old conclusions anew — on two prominent NFL […]

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Speaking of hare-brained travel schemes, as we did in the entry yesterday, the two NFL games today brought back more memories of bad ideas that somehow usually worked out. More or less. After great angst. And one that turned into a fairly spectacular (and perhaps life-threatening) disaster. San Francisco home to the Packers, Denver at […]

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