“Did you hear about the Lindbergh baby?” For decades, that mocking question has been asked of someone who has come late — very late — to some news discovery. So it was today for me, and the NFL RedZone.

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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 short headline on ESPN.com’s homepage was something like this: “Coach fastest to 100”. My first thought? A college football coach’s team had scored 100 points. And he had done it early in his career. Or early in a game. Maybe in the third quarter? As it turned out, it was about a Division III […]

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It is abundantly clear on which days the UAE domestic soccer league should play. Thursday night and Friday night. Yet, over the first nine weeks of the current season, only once did the league actually plan for a Thursday-Friday schedule. Which is crazy, and here is why.

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Wow. I just poked around to see reaction to Bill Simmons being suspended by ESPN for three weeks for calling Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, a liar on his (Simmons’s) podcast  … and it seems like every blogger and talking head has weighed in. It’s the perfect storm for sounding off. Seems like most everyone […]

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American exceptionalism is a fairly controversial political notion, talked about for nearly 200 years, that the United States is unlike any other country in the world due to its “unique” history and form of government. People of good will can be on either side of that discussion. But the U.S. most certainly is exceptional in […]

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We hired someone from the San Francisco area to work here in the sports department of The National. Yes. Even though a certain someone in the newsroom is a Southern California guy. We haven’t come to blows yet, but it could happen. The NorCal kid turned around this morning and announced: “Who would have guessed […]

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I was in the gym of our apartment building in Abu Dhabi, doing puny exercise, and the TV up in the corner of the room was stuck on MTV. Not my first choice but my only choice — someone had stripped the batteries out of the remote. And then came a blast from the past. […]

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I pretty much hate sports movies, and football movies are a big part of the problem. (Just behind boxing movies, I’d say.) I have never seen a football film that correctly conveys game action, and that lack of verisimilitude kills football movies in the cradle. That, and casting teeny Al Pacino as an NFL coach […]

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A lot of sports editors around the world today weren’t exactly surprised that, with the end of the World Cup, not a whole lot is going on … but it still represents an unpleasant reality. A limited number of scheduled events in the near future. It is the case in the UAE, and it is […]

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