Lorem ipsum is a famous dummy text. Random words, Latin-looking, that designers use in page mockups. (Not to get too wonky about it, but “studies show” that when designers are creating new looks, real text often distracts non-designers who are looking at a page. They begin reading real stories, instead of looking at how marvelous […]

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So, Steven Gerrard replaces Landon Donovan with the LA Galaxy. Pretty much how it works out, yes? Landon goes off to do charity work (really, I think he will) … and Major League Soccer replaces him with Liverpool’s golden oldie midfielder, a guy who looks like the most boring soccer dad in your neighborhood. A […]

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A fairly significat chunk of what sports journalists do is cover scheduled events. Games. Press conference. Interviews. Unscheduled news generally sets off some scrambling. A hiring, a firing, a change in policy, a violent opinion — we expect that sort of unexpected, but it requires extra effort. What we do not expect is scheduled events […]

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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 remember when Redlands East Valley High School opened, in the fall of 1997. My son was part of the first freshman class. REV was the second high school in the Redlands Unified School District, and opened about a century later than the first — Redlands High School. In most areas of endeavor, it didn’t […]

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One of my favorite readers alerted me to this one: A look at Landon Donovan’s last Men’s National Team game, the one against Ecuador. Wayne Drehs wrote the piece for ESPN The Magazine, and it was posted to the espn.com site today — but I would have missed it entirely, having spent most of the […]

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Had not been home during college football season in a long time. So when we settled on this trip to SoCal, I checked the schedules of USC and UCLA. And there it was: USC home to Notre Dame. Even spending only 10 days in Southern California … I wanted to be there.

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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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I had forgotten the date. A former colleague sent me an email about it, and yes, he was right. It was 25 years ago today that the U.S. national soccer team recorded the most important victory in the history of American soccer. We can say that without reservation, actually, because soccer was languishing in the […]

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It often turns out this way, in the news biz. Weeks of making something out of nothing. And then a stretch of time where you have big events colliding on the calendar. This is one of those “colliding big events” weeks, here in the UAE. Four events that pretty safely fall into our top 10 […]

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