I find this John and Jim Harbaugh thing fascinating. The odds of brothers meeting as coaches of opposing teams in a Super Bowl … have to be extreme. (But then, it’s happened in the 47th Super Bowl, so perhaps we would have to concede that the odds look like 1-in-47.) I like this on several […]

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Subtitled: “Misadventures in building your tour event’s field.” The Abu Dhabi Golf Championship got a fair bit of attention before it began, for two reasons, as I noted a few days ago: It included the world’s two highest-ranked players, Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods. And then it went horribly wrong.

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Biggest sports story since I arrived in Abu Dhabi. The UAE national team won the Gulf Cup tonight! How big is that?

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This must be how the other half lives. Or whatever fraction of humanity lives where winter is a serious business. The scene: A day off, in the apartment, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, talking inside my head.

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If we stipulate that the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which goes off in November, is a very big deal, with international appeal, and the Mubadala World Tennis Championship gets some notice, too, we perhaps are looking at one other event in the city which has a global audience, or the potential for one. And that […]

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I spent far too much of the night watching the NFL playoffs. Like, I have a day job, and the games began at 10 p.m. here in Abu Dhabi and ended at about 5 a.m. But I came to a couple of conclusions — or arrived at old conclusions anew — on two prominent NFL […]

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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It is rare to see a woman at a soccer match, here in the UAE. Rarer still, by far, is to see an Emirati woman. A citizen, that is. So the notion that as many as 25 Emirati women took advantage of a chance to fly over to Bahrain (at Football Association expense) for the […]

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So, woke in the middle of the night here — Sunday afternoon in California — and decided to watch some NFL. I didn’t know which game would be on (only insomniacs plan their NFL viewing, in the UAE), but found it on the local Fox Sports network … and there were the Seahawks and Redskins […]

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In my time in the UAE, the senior national soccer team has been, mostly, wretched. The Emirati footballers completed a hapless campaign in the final round of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup just after I arrived in Abu Dhabi, in late 2009, but I heard about it, and the reverberations could still be felt. […]

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