In the “emperor has no clothes” category, boxing division, we have Manny Pacquaio, elite pugilist, apparently being told by so many fawning people that he can play professional basketball … that he is attempting to do so. This, when anyone paying attention knows that the 5-foot-6, 36-year-old fighter is, at best, a decent pickup-game player. […]

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The two times I have seen Zach LaVine on a basketball court he looked like a world-beater. I was at Staples Center, back in November, when he scored 28 points on 11-of-14 shooting, including 4-of-4 from three-point range, in a one-point victory over the Lakers. And then I saw LaVine’s impressive victory in the Slam […]

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Jerry Tarkanian died today at the age of 84, and the volume of pieces written about him by sports journalists has been impressive. Nearly all of it, however, focuses on his time at UNLV, which certainly was interesting, and lasted 19 seasons. For me, however, he will always be the coach who put Long Beach […]

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Knee surgeries. A snapped Achilles tendon. A broken leg. Kobe Bryant fought back from those to return to the Lakers. But now a torn rotator cuff? In his right shoulder? In his shooting arm? At age 36? We may have just seen the last NBA game Kobe Bryant will play, which is sad … but […]

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Running the sports section of The National is a bit of an out-of-body experience for an American. The Big Three of American sports are baseball, basketball and football. The Big Three of sports in this part of the world are cricket, rugby and football — football, as in soccer. We run cricket off-day stories here. […]

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I’ve been away. I may have mentioned that. The last time I was at Staples Center probably was 2009.  Games 1 and 2 of the NBA Finals. The Nokia Theater was complete, before the jump to Abu Dhabi later that year. But I don’t remember much of anything around it. Most of the rest of […]

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This is an odd case, in professional sports. Nearly every professional athlete plays through pain. . When an injury is too severe to play on … he or she returns at the first moment. Often before they were expected to play — or perhaps should be playing. Then there is Derrick Rose.

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The Big Fella, the Captain, the master of the skyhook, is in the UAE capital. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, leading scorer in NBA history, UCLA and Los Angeles Lakers star, arrived in Abu Dhabi tonight, flying in on that new Etihad nonstop from LAX to AUH. He got off the plane and Tweeted, from @KAJ33: “Best service […]

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As the pace of Baby Boomers leaving this dimension — a process that takes them, as newspapers a century ago might put it, “into the shadows” — I predict a sharp upswing in a very annoying post-mortem task. Getting rid of the dearly departed’s T-shirts. Boomers, or male Boomers, anyway, have been wearing T-shirts their […]

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It was just one exhibition game, but Kobe Bryant scored 27 points Thursday night. After the ruptured Achilles and then the broken leg … I wasn’t sure he would score 27 again in a backyard game, let alone against an NBA team.

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