The world of professional football (international variety) seems enormous.
Countries you couldn’t find on a map have professional leagues. Countries you’ve never heard of have leagues. Countries like England and Germany have about 28 tiers of leagues.
I’ve been writing from the UAE for more than two years and, admit it, most of you have no clear […]

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After another day of Fifa madness, including the Jerome Valcke e-mail (Qatar “bought” the 2022 World Cup), a Sepp Blatter press conference at which he barely kept control over surly and mocking journalists … and Sepp’s assertion that “Fifa is not in a crisis” …
Well, any reasonable observer would have to say that he/she has […]

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I believe many of us like to think we’re glass-half-empty people. Doesn’t a sort of world-weariness make us seem, oh, more sophisticated? More realistic? Cock-eyed optimism … doesn’t the “cock-eyed” tell us all we need to know about optimists?
Certainly, in the news biz, where we document famine and pestilence and death and destruction, optimists are […]

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Almost 11 months ago I did a blog post that generated as much hate mail as anything I’ve written at this address. Vile stuff. Unprintable. I posted eight comments, but another 20-plus I did not. Not because I didn’t like the criticism (I read them all), but because I didn’t feel like redacting the vulgarities.
“Matt […]

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I celebrated, two weeks ago, while traveling in Italy, the fact that I would not be able to see the Lakers and Celtics on live television in the NBA Finals. Because 1) it would agitate me and 2) these things usually end so badly for the Lakers.
That does not mean I haven’t kept close track […]

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Where did we leave off? We mentioned Vietri, yes? Let’s back up a minute.
We left Sicily two days ahead of schedule. Mostly because we were running out of interesting things to do within a reasonable drive … and because our hotel — Feudogrande agriturismo — was supposed to be about sublime, home-cooked […]

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Wow. Was that fun! Show up with a vastly inferior team, smaller, slower, less-creative and less-skilled, withstand all but one of about 50 scoring chances, get a fluke goal that slips through the keeper’s Mickey Mouse mitts and trickles across the line at about 1 mph … and escape with a point in the World […]

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I am writing this from the terraced bar area of the quirky Bristol Hotel in the little Amalfi Coast town of Vietri. We left Sicily two days early and powered halfway up the Italian boot yesterday. Now, we’re back to overlooking the sea … near the end of our Italian vacation.
In a few minutes, I […]

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We again interrupt this travelogue to muse about sports events back home, this time the Day of Reckoning at the University of Southern California.
Anyone who has been around the American college sports scene for any length of time could see this coming. To spend any time around Heritage Hall at USC was to pick up […]

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Truth be told, as great as our first week was, in Massa Lubrense … our second week was not, the first three days in Sicily.
The beyond-tepid “welcome” to the Feudogrande agriturismo hotel, the dreariness of Catania (broken up slightly by a nice lunch I wasn’t there for), the tourist-driven nightmare of Taormina, and then a […]

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