The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18. As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage: –The final score of the baseball All-Star game. –A result from an NBA summer league game. –And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists. And that was it. […]

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A couple of posts on this blog suggest the National Football League will not exist as we know it — if it exists at all — 20-30 years from now. By then, all the horrors of football-related brain trauma will have been clearly laid out and, barring some unexpected breakthrough in protective equipment, the lawsuits […]

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So, sitting here on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, clock reaches late afternoon, and the thought hits me that the Indy 500 might be televised over here. And this actually happened: The TV comes up on ESPN GB (Great Britain) … and the first image we see is a slow-motion replay of a […]

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In the suite of British sports, Formula One auto racing is something like the No. 4 competition. Behind soccer, cricket and rugby … but not much else. They don’t seem to mind that the sport is shockingly dull and depressingly predictable, featuring entire races in which the pole-sitter is never headed. One team tends to […]

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Talking about the weekend that just passed. The one after the Super Bowl but before pitchers and catchers report. It is a weekend, in American sports, anyway, that has pretty much nothing that matters. Or it seems that way to me. A former colleague and I had a bit of a discussion on this — […]

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As a sports editor, it is easy to wonder why various fields of endeavor cannot arrange their schedules so that they don’t overlap and dilute their audience — as well as the media recognition they might get that night or the next morning. Today, for instance, we had at least four events that could have […]

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I have written more than once that only two sports accept death as a part of doing business: Boxing and motor racing. Racing lost another competitor today, when Englishman Justin Wilson succumbed to head injuries suffered when hit by debris yesterday during an IndyCar race at Pocono Raceway. That led to a melancholy conversation, over […]

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For the past few years, The National newspaper, in the United Arab Emirates, has been paying fairly close attention to the National Hot Rod Association, back in the United States. It wasn’t just because we like to watch people driving 300 miles per hour. (We can see that on the UAE’s freeways. Just kidding. Not.) […]

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The 2015 Formula One season began in Australia on Sunday, and it began about as poorly as was possible. Lewis Hamilton won easily. Nico Rosberg, the other Mercedes-GP driver, was 30-plus seconds ahead of the third-place car. a clear second. And Hamilton and Rosberg finished 1-2 last season in the most dominant team performance in […]

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It often turns out this way, in the news biz. Weeks of making something out of nothing. And then a stretch of time where you have big events colliding on the calendar. This is one of those “colliding big events” weeks, here in the UAE. Four events that pretty safely fall into our top 10 […]

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