I always have had a fondness for professional athletes who were good at what they did despite having something less than the ideal physique. Terry Forster, a Los Angeles Dodgers reliever circa 1980, was one of them. He knew he was on the “stout” end of the size spectrum and famously said of his weight […]

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When people say “you can’t go back” … they generally mean it in a philosophical way. We can’t replay the past, what’s done is done, and so forth. For me, in ways perhaps not particularly typical, “you can’t go back” has turned out to be literal. I can’t go back to my grade school because […]

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His given name was Luiz Carlos Saroli, but he was known by the informal Caio Junior, going back to his playing days in Portugal and his native Brazil. And that is how we referred to him in the pages of The National while he coached in the UAE. He died in a plane crash tonight, […]

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I realized this weekend I have moved into a form of Premier League partisanship that revolves around a single question: What is best for Bob Bradley? Bradley is the coach of Swansea City, a club already mired in a fight to avoid the disaster of relegation. Bradley is the American coach of Swansea City, and […]

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College football is huge in the U.S.  Any American who saw any of the big games today knows that. American college basketball isn’t far behind football, especially when we consider March Madness, when John Q. Public becomes a fan of whichever Cinderella is dancing. Could make a case that college baseball and softball have their […]

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I was never in the same room as Fidel Castro, but I was in the same stadium. It was the opening ceremonies for the 1991 Pan American Games and Castro’s Cuba was the host nation. A team of reporters had been assembled by Gannett News Service and USA Today and sent down to Havana on […]

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We now have added the Languedoc to places in the world where we have had Thanksgiving dinner. That ends a period of five years out of seven when we celebrated Thanksgiving in Abu Dhabi. The exceptions were … when we spent it in Paris (inviting some people over to where we were staying) and when […]

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Same song, difference verse. Yesterday, I mentioned I had never seen a rugby match. Not so much because I don’t like rugby, but because I do not follow it and it is unfamiliar to me. Then we get to sports I know well, perhaps even quite well, which I would prefer not to see, going […]

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Rugby is the most significant global sport I had never seen in person. That void on the resume has been addressed. Tonight, our French friend, a rugby aficionado, took us to see an international match at the nearby “big” city, Beziers. The U.S. women’s national rugby team, versus France’s women, at the Stade de la […]

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Jurgen Klinsmann was fired today and it looks as if the U.S. Soccer Federation is taking our advice on another matter, too: Bruce Arena as the new/old U.S. national team coach. That would be Bruce Arena, he of five MLS Cup championships, three with the LA Galaxy, and a quarterfinals run at the 2002 World […]

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