The Grantland sports/pop culture website, inspired and formerly led by Bill Simmons, was shut down today by ESPN. Here is the ESPN media release on it. Some media reports suggested the site lost gobs of money, which is easy to believe given the number and competence of its many contributors, which could not have been […]

[Read more →]

I have been watching soccer/football for six years, here in the UAE. Seen lots and lots of matches. But very few big crowds. And very little passion. That changed tonight. Perhaps because the teams involved were imported from Egypt. Al Ahly and Zamalek, the two biggest and most successful clubs in Egypt, played the country’s […]

[Read more →]

Actually, we’re pushing 60 percent finished with the current decade, given that we persist in starting decades and centuries and millennia on years that end in zero. (Digression alert!) And, by the by, what are we calling this decade? Apparently we haven’t decided because it’s varieties of stupid/awkward. Back in 2009, the BBC did a […]

[Read more →]

I am a fan of the Arabian Gulf League. This is soccer. The top division of the domestic league. It may not be La Liga or the Premier League, but it’s what we have, here in the UAE. It’s indigenous. It’s hometown. And your local club is just down the street from where you live, […]

[Read more →]

Many, maybe most journalists at some points in their careers have thought about being a war correspondent. What could be more intense? What could tell us more about the human condition, and about ourselves, than the most destructive of human activities, seen first-hand? I was reminded of this while re-reading John le Carre‘s novel The […]

[Read more →]

It is beyond cliche, so much so that I will refer to it, for TV and radio news people to recite the title of the 1972 pop song — It Never Rains in Southern California — when it actually does rain in Southern California. Of course, it rains. Fifteen inches per year in Los Angeles, […]

[Read more →]

ESPN’s president yesterday told the New York Times that the network will not offer a new contract to Bill Simmons, the most prominent sports journalist in the U.S. now and, perhaps, ever. Simmons’s current deal, agreed to in 2010, runs out later this year and is thought to have been paying him $5 million a […]

[Read more →]

Some sports fans might be amused at the topics that come up on a sports desk while producing a newspaper. Arguments, declarations, declamations … it’s like being in a sports bar 365 days a year. And today’s topic? The ugliest athletes. Any sport.

[Read more →]

Stan Hochman died a few weeks ago. He had been a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Daily News since 1959, and for the past few decades probably was the city’s most prominent sports journalist. Before Philadelphia? He had worked as a sports writer at the San Bernardino Sun, my old paper. Actually, he went […]

[Read more →]

The Grantland sports website has a story that pretty much cuts to the heart of the lockerroom “relationship” between athletes and media. Deconstructing a rude comment Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder made to a hometown newspaper columnist. The relationship between jocks and hacks was never good, not when I entered the profession in […]

[Read more →]