It’s a curious fact here: Local sports news dries up markedly once we hit April. The European golf tour has come and gone, twice. The men and women of world tennis have been through the UAE with back-to-back events in Dubai. A batch of Premier League clubs dropped by for a little bit of sun […]

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As noted a day ago, this is a country in which the citizens are a small minority of the population. Expats often are encouraged to get to know an Emirati, but it’s not as easy as thinking, “OK, I’ll do that!” Not when most of the Emiratis you see are inside their SUVs, driving down […]

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Curious country, the United Arab Emirates. Expatriates … foreigners, that is … have far outnumbered Emiratis here for a while now, but the ratio continues to climb. Only a handful of countries in the world have more expatriates than citizens, and the UAE and Qatar seem to lead the way. According to numbers provided by […]

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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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Violence in Dodger Stadium, and commenting on it, certainly has caused a stir. If you want to see what sort of stir, look at the item from this blog and the 15 comments (and counting) I have been able to post. (Rather than edit those with obscenities, I don’t run them.) A few Dodgers fans […]

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Fellow employees at Abu Dhabi Media watching the India-Pakistan match on the sports department’s TV. A huge day in sports for this part of the world. India vs. Pakistan in the semifinals of the Cricket World Cup. What? Arabs are interested in cricket? Well, no, they’re not. No more than Americans are. But the UAE, […]

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Now that I think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever done a one-on-one interview with a soccer player who was not a member of the U.S. national team. What American journalists don’t entirely understand is the high degree of access we have to professional athletes in the U.S. and Canada — especially by comparison […]

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The UAE didn’t exist 40 years ago. It was hardly heard of 20 years ago. Now, the country has some name recognition, and particularly the name “Dubai”. Almost all Europeans seem to be aware of it — to the point that when the Brits I work with go home on vacation they typically are asked […]

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The city of Dubai likes to build themed construction zones. Dubai Motor City, Dubai Studio City, Dubai Media City, Dubai Internet City … you get the drift. The idea is to centralize industries and create, I suppose, synergy. Dubai also has a Knowledge Village, but the name is something of a misnomer if this video […]

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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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