Some of us are getting old waiting for Roger Federer to live up to our declarations of his imminent tennis demise. The man will be 33 in August, which (historically) has been too old to accomplish much, in tennis. And since the days of his absolute domination of the men’s game in the middle of […]

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A particular vanity of the young is a notion that humanity has never been more attractive than it is, among the young … right this minute. Stands to reason, right? All one needs do is look at photos of Hollywood vamps from the 1920s, from winners of the Miss America contest circa 1950, at leading […]

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Chuck Pettersen died on Tuesday. He was a successful high school football coach in the city of San Bernardino. He put in 31 years on the sidelines. I saw his teams play probably 20 times. Maybe more. In this space I originally went on at some length about what I remembered about the man. He […]

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I had CNN International running on the one and only TV in the building’s exercise room, where I was alone, feebly exercising. It was a Saturday, because CNN, the U.S.-based news network, which uses a London office for its Europe/Middle East/Africa outlets, was running its “BackStory” feature, which appears on weekends and recaps what CNN […]

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“I’m terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.” That is what I said when I was informed Harold Ramis died today. To me, it was perhaps the best of the dozens of funny lines from the 1984 move Ghostbusters. And it was spoken with perfect, deadpan clarity by the Ramis character, the stiff parapsychologist Egon […]

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So, turns out I can feel this sense of “we shall never pass this way again” even at an Olympics I did not cover. I did 13 of these from start to finish, and I guarantee that nearly every journalist at an Olympics reaches a point, usually no later than the middle Sunday, when he […]

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If you saw the movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape, you may remember the character played by Andie McDowell and her concern about “the garbage” … and where it all is going to go. How will it be handled? How will it be disposed? (The actual quote, per IMDB.com, is: “Garbage. All I’ve been thinking about […]

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Two weeks ago, the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, women’s version, looked like what the Brits would call “a damp squib”. A dud, that is. (A squib being a firecracker. Yes, they have a different word for everything.) The tournament was hanging its hat on Agnieszka Radwanska, the world No. 3, but not exactly a […]

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So, the controversy over the women’s figure skating competition in Sochi. Korea’s Kim Yu-na, jobbed by the judges. Or was she? Maybe the Russian girl, Adelina Sotnikova, deserved the gold. The decision seems to have pivoted on this: Sotnikova performed the more athletic routine, with more jumps. Kim performed the safer routine, but also the […]

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We spend a lot of time in the UAE thinking about Floyd Mayweather Jr. No. Really. We do. The strange part of that is … he is an American boxer, on the other side of the world from us in the Gulf … and he is a boxer in an age of UFC … In […]

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