Kids tend to believe their sports coaches know everything. Even if the coach is just someone’s mom or dad. Kids particularly believe in their coaches at the high-school level. Most of them, anyway. The coaches are adults. They have perhaps played, at the college level, the sport they are coaching. High school kids are 15, […]

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Well, that wasn’t very sporting. Manchester United’s team was trying to get to the Boleyn Ground for West Ham United’s last match at Upton Park, in east London, after 112 seasons there. The throng outside the stadium was so dense, before the game, that the ManU team bus could hardly move as it got close […]

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The website FiveThirtyEight.com is best known for political predictions and analysis. But it has a sports component, and today it produced an interesting piece on the best and worst teams in Major League Baseball history, at least according to the Elo statistical tool. It goes back to 1903, the year when the first World Series […]

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Bartolo Colon was called “The Horse” by Angels manager Mike Scioscia, back in the middle part of the past decade. In part because Colon was “strong as a …” but also because he “weighed as much as a …” That was back when Colon was the Angels’ ace and winner of the 2005 Cy Young […]

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Really, I can’t blame France’s Secretary of State for Francophony. French is slipping in global status. What used to be lingua franca throughout Europe is anything but, in 2016. Most of us know it. French linguists certainly do. And most of that slippage is moving towards English, and England and France were arch-rivals for hundreds […]

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During six years following the sports scene in the United Arab Emirates, I often returned to one question: Why does Dubai not have a big stadium? Dubai has hundreds of big buildings, including the world’s tallest. Dubai loves big buildings. Much of its reputation is based on big buildings, and that skyline of skyscrapers. But […]

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The French are not a religious people, but they continue to celebrate religious holidays most of the Christian world no longer sees as days off. Which helps explain why France has 11 national holidays this year, to eight in the United States. Ascension is one of the French religious holidays (as are Assumption and the […]

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It is odd to gauge my own reaction to this media release from the Los Angeles Dodgers. The famous Dodger Dog, the meat tube in a bun sold at Dodger Stadium since 1962, is now available at “more than 500” ampm mini-marts in much of Southern California. My first reaction?

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Abu Dhabi hit 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) for the first time this year, on Friday last. April 29, that is, as reported in The National. And the seemingly eternal summer of the Persian Gulf is under way. And how do we feel about that?

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Miami Marlins shortstop Dee Gordon, the National League batting champion, last week was suspended 80 games by Major League Baseball for failing a drug test. This came only a few weeks after outfielder Chris Colabello of the Toronto Blue Jays also was hit with an 80-game ban. (And also expressed puzzlement how he failed a […]

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