No. Really. Al Jazira of Abu Dhabi and the UAE … will play Real Madrid of Spain in the semifinals of the 2017 Club World Cup on Wednesday night. In Zayed Sports City, in the capital. This is the Madrid of Cristiano Ronaldo and 12 European championships. And the Jazira of Ali Mabkhout, twice champions […]

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As the ultimate international sport, one might expect soccer would offer all sorts of odd and interesting connections. This guy played for that guy, and later became coach of this team that I covered … It really is rather amazing, in a sort of “three degrees of separation” way. And I have noticed a few […]

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A couple of posts on this blog suggest the National Football League will not exist as we know it — if it exists at all — 20-30 years from now. By then, all the horrors of football-related brain trauma will have been clearly laid out and, barring some unexpected breakthrough in protective equipment, the lawsuits […]

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If it sometimes seems as if American sports tend to cycle through the same few dozen coaches … well, it’s pretty much the case. How else to explain Larry Brown, Buck Showalter, Marty Schottenheimer, et al? But international soccer coaches take it to a whole ‘nother level. Some of these guys have coached at 10, […]

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For more than a decade, Michelle Kwan represented what we in the journalism call a “standing story”. A standing story is one that is news at any time. Work or play, good or bad, any developments warrant coverage and follow-up because we believe our audience has significant interest in the topic. Particularly so, in my […]

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I settled on Al Jazira as my favorite soccer team, in my six-plus years in Abu Dhabi. In large part because the club was about 200 yards from where I lived and about 300 yards from where I worked. A club considered one of the biggest in the nation was awfully handy to me; I […]

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Geez. You spend most of 7.5 years out of the country … and homeland cultural references just blow right past. Until two days ago, I did not know that Bill Simmons‘s new website, The Ringer, had launched. As of June 2016. Which means it is not new at all but somehow had gone unnoticed by […]

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It’s called the Five Stages of Grieving, and professional journalists by now know it by heart. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. An interesting development in the grim business of companies firing large numbers of journalists, which has been a primary characteristic of the profession for more than a decade now … is how those being […]

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I’ve never really had winter clothes. Because I always lived in places that either were temperate or Just Plain Hot. Long Beach, then the Inland Empire, then Abu Dhabi. But here in Europe, in France, we can go weeks (!) without a single minute in the 60-degree (Fahrenheit) range in December, January, February. Granted, it’s […]

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I love the Volvo Ocean Race. The idea of circling the planet in a boat that has about an inch between sailors and the world’s oceans … is compelling. I became fully aware of the eight-month, round-the-world event, often described as the “Everest of sailing”, in 2011, ahead of the 2011-12 race, which included a […]

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