In a way, Italy began from the first announcement of the Alitalia flight crew, while still on the ground in Abu Dhabi. It is rare to hear Italian on the Arabian Peninsula, and to most Americans it is a delightful language. Round and rhythmic, almost like poetry with its cadences and energy. Wonderful to hear […]

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This is an awful time to be a Los Angeles-area sports fan. It has been mostly dreary since I left the region to live and work in Abu Dhabi, in 2009, but it seems to be bottoming out, the past four or five months. Aside from hockey, which has no significant hold on Southern California […]

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A few days ago I wrote about Josef Hickersberger, one of my favorite soccer coaches in the UAE, and how he had been rushed back to Abu Dhabi from retirement in Austria in an attempt to salvage the season by leading a struggling team to a victory in the President’s Cup semifinals. And how did […]

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I don’t know Justin Bieber from the man in the moon. I have to keep checking to make sure his first name is Justin, not Dustin. An old-guy thing. Except that I never would have been a fan at any age. Hmm. I do know this: Dustin … Justin Bieber made some impressions in his […]

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I tend to like coaches of team sports. Of any of the team sports. They push you towards the goals you would set for yourself if you were not a lazy corner-cutter. They foment teamwork. They have a plan. They have expertise. They have their own perhaps selfish motives, of course. Power, money, ego. But […]

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This is a country where the concept of “self-service” is an ugly rumor from overseas. Generally, anyone with money here … expects someone else to pick up after them, clean their home, wash their cars, raise their children and, most certainly, pump their gas. It may make for an very interesting social experiment, then, when […]

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Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, brother of the president of the UAE, will spend about $100 million to operate a Major League Soccer franchise in Queens, according to a story in the New York Times today. “Two people with knowledge of the negotiations” told the Times that Sheikh Mansour will operate the MLS’s 20th team, an […]

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It’s been decades now that parents have been hectoring kids about video games. “Nobody is going to pay you to play video games … no careers in that!” May not be a career, but a guy who has spent enormous stretches of time with his thumbs on a controller … can make $272,000 for winning […]

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Mike Lopresti is one of my favorite sports journalists, as well as one of the best sports journalists in the United States over the past 30-some years. We go way back. I met him no later than 1980, and I tried to hire him a few years later — just before he and I and […]

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Social media. A mixed blessing, at best. Up-to-the-minute news … up-to-minute bad information. A social-media-driven rumor of a 9.99-magnitude earthquake, hitting the UAE between April 25 to April 30 apparently was taken as truth by some nervous people here. To the point that The National did a story to knock down the rumor.

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