I’ve known Andy Baggarly since he was a kid from Upland who was going to school at Northwestern. He was good right out of the box, like so many Northwestern J School people are. Maybe we gave him some room to grow, back in the L.A. market, but it wasn’t like we had to mold […]

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I wasn’t sure we would get the Champions League final in Abu Dhabi. Seems like we don’t get all that much on TV, sports-wise, without paying lots of dirhams, and we didn’t do that with our TV package. But we did get it, on three Al Jazeera sports stations, and it was fascinating to watch […]

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I talked to Carlo Nohra today about the upcoming Fifa presidential election. Nohra is the chief executive of the UAE domestic soccer league and a very bright guy, and he also worked several years with Mohamed bin Hammam, who is Sepp Blatter’s opponent in the election. I will be doing a piece on bin Hammam […]

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I love relegation. I knew about it, of course, long before I got off the plane in Abu Dhabi in the heavily Euro-influenced UAE. But seeing it in action … brings home what fun it is and how the NBA, the NFL, MLB could all be improved. Not that I expect this ever could happen. […]

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For my weekly commentary that runs with the two-page “Pro League package” in The National … I had decided to do a roundup of “what others said about Diego Maradona coming to the UAE.” I expected that the most famous footballer of the past two generations would get all sorts of special attention. I was […]

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I hate driving traffic to commercial sites, but this is an amusing slide show, and a bit of silliness seems like a good idea on a 115-degree Abu Dhabi day. I’m also not a cat person. The world is divided into two halves, right? Dog people and cat people. The whole of the UAE are […]

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This was the big story today, and The National was all over it. Diego Maradona, “El Jefe Loco,” as I preferred to refer to him while I was writing the countdown to South Africa blog, has signed a two-year deal to coach the UAE Pro League club Al Wasl, starting with the 2011/12 season. First, […]

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This may be the most specific “gag reflex” story I have involved with in … oh, a very, very long time. So consider that before going forward. You will say “oh, no … ewww!”

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In about a three-hour span today, Manchester United clinched its record 19th English top-flight league championship … and Manchester City secured its first significant trophy in 35 years by winning the FA Cup final. And how does any of this make it a big day in Abu Dhabi? Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, brother of the […]

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We at The National did a story on this today … acknowledging that Friday the 13th is often considered to be an unlucky day in the Western world … noting that it doesn’t have the same meaning among Arabs and Muslims … but also noting that this culture, like apparently every culture on the planet, […]

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