I cannot recall if I always loathed all things Boston. Perhaps I did. Being a Lakers fan in the 1960s would have been enough to sour a right-thinking person on Boston. The Celtics: Good, but also really lucky. If I were ambivalent about the Boston Red Sox, the Boston (now New England) Patriots and the […]

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… out of mind? Presumably scores, even hundreds of print and electronic journalists turned up for the Lakers’ media day, today, many of them interested in Kobe Bryant, above all else. But it would appear as if no one asked him about his long trip to the UAE and back. I would just like to […]

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I hope Kobe Bryant got paid for this. And I am certain he did. He arrived in Dubai on Wednesday and was three hours late for a press conference (plane delayed, apparently, and most every press conference in the UAE starts at least an hour late) at which he talked about healthy living, and staying […]

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A few years ago, we splurged on the slightly slicker version of the cable TV package. The one with all the Al Jazeera sports stations and, more important, the one with three ESPN stations. Yes, here in Abu Dhabi. ESPN, ESPN America and ESPN Classic. Those three were the primary lifeline, in the UAE, back […]

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I never really believed Dwight Howard would leave the Lakers. Right up till it leaked today that he would do just that. Who leaves the Lakers? Especially when leaving them means walking away from the extra $31 million in guaranteed money the Lakers could pay? But I also never thought committing $118 million to the […]

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Watching American sports live, from the UAE, takes some extra effort. Not that things are not available. They are, if you pay a little bit extra — maybe $50 a year — to augment your basic cable package (most of which is not in English) with a set of stations that includes ESPN, Fox and, […]

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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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I suddenly am impressed with this Lakers team, after having despaired of them, most of the season. (Pretty much from the 1-4 start forward.) Kobe Bryant out till sometime next season with the ruptured Achilles, Steve Nash hurt again, a playoffs berth clinched when Utah lost earlier in the evening … Not needing to win […]

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I always thought the Walt Whitman poem eulogizing Abraham Lincoln was over the top. “Fallen cold and dead …” But my reaction to what appears to be Kobe Bryant’s torn Achilles tendon led me to think of the Whitman poem: O Captain! My Captain! (The one that, of a time, was required reading in American […]

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The Miami Heat’s winning streak ended at 27 tonight, in a loss at Chicago, and I like to think the surviving members of the 1971-72 Lakers are celebrating somewhere with a bottle of champagne. Just as the players of the NFL’s unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins allegedly do when the latest team to get close to […]

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