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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One of our British colleagues walked into the sports department of The National today and said: “Johnny Football is a joke!” Referring to the Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel, Heisman Trophy winner, first-round draf pick — and a badly beaten man in his first NFL start, a 30-0 victory by the Cincinnati Bengals. He had […]

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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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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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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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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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This comes up every four years. Or every four years after the U.S. national team has, at least, made the second round of a World Cup. Like this time around. “Is soccer about to make a breakthrough in the U.S.?” Will it be mentioned in the same breath as football and baseball and basketball? Or […]

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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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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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It seems silly to have to go back to the records to come up with statistics on your own journalism career, but when you have been around long enough … Five seconds ago I realized that I covered six of the first nine BCS college football championships games. Did I just take a moment and […]

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