Back in the IE, it was not unusual for me to have three bylines in one edition. It was fairly common, actually. Column, gamer, notebook. It also wasn’t rare to add a sidebar to that. If time availed and I was alone at an event we cared about.

Here at The National, as in SoCal, we sometimes have more newshole than we can easily fill with staff copy, and not enough writers to put into the field.

So, for today’s paper, I had six bylines.

Haven’t done that since … when?

Since one of the Super Bowls, I’m thinking. Maybe the San Francisco-San Diego Super Bowl, in 1994, when I clearly remember being one of the last two guys out of the press box in Miami, and catching the last bus back to the hotel. I had at least five that day, and maybe it was six. We had a hometown guy playing in that game, Mark Seay, so that would have made for a sidebar, and I may have written a short gamer for A1 … and it could have been six. I could have done six the next year, too, at the Dallas-Pittsburgh Super Bowl, but now I have a sense that someone joined me there, in Phoenix, for the game. So maybe not.

My record for bylines in one newspaper, is 10. Yes. Not good. I admit it. Too many. But I had 10 in 1991, after perhaps the biggest high school football game ever played in the IE, the televised afternoon game between Fontana and Eisenhower. The latter was ranked No. 2 in the country, and both were unbeaten late in the season, and the year before Eisenhower had won at Fontana and their fans stormed the field and tore down one of the goalposts.

I’d have to go back and look at the paper, but I’m sure I did the column/gamer/notebook thing, but I may have done a notebook from both sides, and then a scad of sidebars. We just killed that game. Killed it. Had about 14 slugs overall. A double-truck inside. So, yeah. Ten.

Here were the six I did, here in Abu Dhabi, Monday for Tuesday a.m.:

–A story on Victoria Azarenka, the Belarusian tennis player.

–A comment piece on Andy Murray and his curious season.

(Those two were the main components of the weekly tennis page.)

–A large preview of the Al Wahda-Al Ittihad Asian Champions League match.

–A piece on Al Ain (this is soccer, too) traveling to the Far East for nine days to play two Asian Champoons League matches. One in Hangzhou, China, and the second in Nagoya, japan.

–A general preview of the other two UAE teams playing in the Asian Champions League, Al Jazira and Emirates.

–A deadline thing on two 18-under youth sides playing at the big stadium here in town, the Manchester City youth team vs. the Qatar national team.

And there we were. Six. I had to push to get the first five done ahead of the 8 p.m. match between the young guys. It was a bit frantic and at least two slugs too many (probably three) for one paper.

But, yeah, it was fun to see my name in print. I remain convinced that lots of journalists were attracted to the field, in part, by the concept of the byline. Much much else goes into it, but that’s always there.