One of those random Olympic TV moments. You’re sitting there, and the round-the-clock coverage by the BBC suddenly coughs up the team final of the men’s London 2012 archery team competition. The United States versus Italy. And the hero of the match? A fat, bald guy. And you know what this means?

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OK, yes: Spain 4, Italy 0. I’m still sick of Spain, and just because they had a nice game in the final doesn’t excuse (or make us forget) the long patches of Almost Unwatchable they gave us during the rest of their Euro 2012 campaign. My default setting for this tournament was, “Won’t They Please […]

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Euro 2012 began tonight, and if the Old World preening gets any worse these guys are going to dislocate shoulders from clapping themselves on the back. The quadrennial Euro soccer tournament involves 16 national teams from Uefa, and right about here in the discussion all Euro fans are obliged to inform the rest of the […]

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The world of professional football (international variety) seems enormous. Countries you couldn’t find on a map have professional leagues. Countries you’ve never heard of have leagues. Countries like England and Germany have about 28 tiers of leagues. I’ve been writing from the UAE for more than two years and, admit it, most of you have […]

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After another day of Fifa madness, including the Jerome Valcke e-mail (Qatar “bought” the 2022 World Cup), a Sepp Blatter press conference at which he barely kept control over surly and mocking journalists … and Sepp’s assertion that “Fifa is not in a crisis” … Well, any reasonable observer would have to say that he/she […]

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I believe many of us like to think we’re glass-half-empty people. Doesn’t a sort of world-weariness make us seem, oh, more sophisticated? More realistic? Cock-eyed optimism … doesn’t the “cock-eyed” tell us all we need to know about optimists? Certainly, in the news biz, where we document famine and pestilence and death and destruction, optimists […]

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Almost 11 months ago I did a blog post that generated as much hate mail as anything I’ve written at this address. Vile stuff. Unprintable. I posted eight comments, but another 20-plus I did not. Not because I didn’t like the criticism (I read them all), but because I didn’t feel like redacting the vulgarities. […]

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I celebrated, two weeks ago, while traveling in Italy, the fact that I would not be able to see the Lakers and Celtics on live television in the NBA Finals. Because 1) it would agitate me and 2) these things usually end so badly for the Lakers. That does not mean I haven’t kept close […]

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Where did we leave off? We mentioned Vietri, yes? Let’s back up a minute. We left Sicily two days ahead of schedule. Mostly because we were running out of interesting things to do within a reasonable drive … and because our hotel — Feudogrande agriturismo — was supposed to be about sublime, home-cooked Italian food, […]

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Wow. Was that fun! Show up with a vastly inferior team, smaller, slower, less-creative and less-skilled, withstand all but one of about 50 scoring chances, get a fluke goal that slips through the keeper’s Mickey Mouse mitts and trickles across the line at about 1 mph … and escape with a point in the World […]

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