Back in the IE, it was not unusual for me to have three bylines in one edition. It was fairly common, actually. Column, gamer, notebook. It also wasn’t rare to add a sidebar to that. If time availed and I was alone at an event we cared about. Here at The National, as in SoCal, […]

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I’ve talked about this with sports journalism colleagues over two or three decades. What is the best sports assignment in print? Because I spent three decades in American journalism, the answers sometimes would be “covering baseball home and road” … or “being a major metro’s NFL writer” … and somesuch. Maybe “international sports reporter” which […]

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I’ve resisted it. This blog seemed enough, certainly when we consider how much time is involved. But everyone is doing the Twitter thing, tweeting their hearts out, and as this has mushroomed it has struck me, more than once, that I bump into a lot of little stuff, while working in a newsroom, that might […]

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One of the original members of the sports department here at The National had a farewell event at a local hotel the other night. Small, quiet and informal, some liquid refreshment out on the patio. I used my time there to try to find out a bit more about the history of the department, which […]

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Bernie Ecclestone seems almost like a fictional character. No one like him actually exists, right? A guy who essentially took over a whole race series, made millions (billions?) of dollars in the process, runs that race series like an autocrat and at age 80 shows no signs of slowing down or going away. But there […]

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The guys at Caltech are conditioned to think in terms of big numbers, but this was getting ridiculous. Caltech, one of the world’s leading mathematics and science schools (if not the leading), finally won a conference basketball game today, 46-45 at home over Occidental. The victory snapped a 310-game losing streak in Southern California Intercollegiate […]

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Many of us in North America, in particular, have no expertise in various major sports competitions in other parts of the world. But we have a vague idea of them. The Copa Libertadores is big in South America. The UEFA Champions League is huge in Europe. So is the Euro Cup. The specifics may be […]

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The Super Bowl isn’t a new idea anymore, though some of us remember when it was. We are becoming fewer. Of course. And those intimately involved with the game … to the point of being at all of them … well, only a handful remain. I knew most of the journalism side of this story. […]

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Took me, what, three plane rides between Qatar and the UAE to realize that the airport code for Doha could be an homage to Homer Simpson. Yes, the code is … DOH No exclamation mark, though they may as well put one on there and be in on the joke. “The Simpsons” gets pretty wide […]

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Good game. Nice atmosphere. Stadium was almost full, more than 37,000, including about 5,000 totally-into-it Japan fans. Lots of scoring opportunities for both sides. Two complete different styles of soccer, which made it fun. Like a wishbone team against a run-and-shoot team. Japan won on the strength of a 109th-minute goal by an unlikely hero […]

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