For the sixth anniversary of The National, tomorrow, the newspaper at which I work, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, it was decided by the editor, Mohammed Al Otaiba, to do something different. Something very different. Our four standard news sections … with almost no words. The mission: Telling the news of the day through […]

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James Milner is an Englishman who plays for the Manchester City club. He is in the starting 11 now and then. Mostly, he is an industrious backup midfielder. With the emphasis on industrious. Supreme fitness seems to preoccupy him. At a Euro 2012 tournament game, he famously ran 1.4 kilometers more (in excess of .86 […]

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And this does not involve soccer. I never thought I would encounter, in the UAE, anything even vaguely similar to the “prep football Friday nights” all sports journalists in the States know. For one, “football” here involves a round ball and, two, American football is rarely played here. As of about three years ago, it […]

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I saw Demetrius Walker play three or four times when he was a freshman and/or a sophomore at Fontana High School, about 50 miles east of Los Angeles. I remember thinking “he’s OK, but not great”. He was good around the basket, he could leap, but he was only 6-foot-3 (later reduced to 6-2, in […]

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Chuck Pettersen died on Tuesday. He was a successful high school football coach in the city of San Bernardino. He put in 31 years on the sidelines. I saw his teams play probably 20 times. Maybe more. In this space I originally went on at some length about what I remembered about the man. He […]

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We spend a lot of time in the UAE thinking about Floyd Mayweather Jr. No. Really. We do. The strange part of that is … he is an American boxer, on the other side of the world from us in the Gulf … and he is a boxer in an age of UFC … In […]

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I took a break from the production of the sports section tonight to run an errand across the parking lot, behind the back of the newspaper. It was 8 p.m., and twilight had long since turned into night, and as I returned to the newspaper campus. I found myself walking parallel to the windows on […]

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Came out of a middle-of-the-night coma long enough, here in the Land on the Other Side of the World, and saw all but 15 points of Super Bowl 48 on some once-only, no-cost streaming video from Fox. Pete Carroll coached the winning Seattle Seahawks team, and he bucked some actuarial odds, and also reached the […]

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This is kinda obnoxious, isn’t it. “Yeah, I’ve seen so many Super Bowls that I can do a list of my favorite five. That I saw. In person.” I have watched most of all of the 47 played so far. Which mostly means I’m old. I watched 35 of them on TV, but the other […]

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We are our own revisionists. What we know now as fact is something we would not have espoused a few years or months or weeks ago. We change our minds a lot; we don’t always remember we have done so. This is a particular problem for sports journalists. Given long enough, we embrace every side […]

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