Same song, difference verse. Yesterday, I mentioned I had never seen a rugby match. Not so much because I don’t like rugby, but because I do not follow it and it is unfamiliar to me. Then we get to sports I know well, perhaps even quite well, which I would prefer not to see, going […]

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Wow. Hard to remember the last time a guy screwed up the greatest opportunity in his professional life as quickly as did Sam Allardyce. A year ago, he was an unemployed English soccer coach of middling reputation whose claim to celebrity, as far as it went, was “never being relegated” — a reputation he burnished […]

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Forty years ago today I walked into a newsroom for the first time as a full-time professional journalist. That was a very long time ago, and even longer in the context of print journalism’s modern era — where the only certainty has been change. Looking back, we can see at least three significant eras in […]

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Rio 2016 is the first Summer Olympics I will not attend since Moscow 1980. Yes, it was a good run. I made it to eight consecutive Summer Games. Beginning with Los Angeles 1984 and continuing with Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The first four with […]

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The most frustrating aspect of the nearly 40 years I spent in sports journalism was how the blight of doping always lurked in the rear-view mirror. We sped up, slowed down, turned left, turned right, and we could never shake the druggies. Eventually, we suspected nearly everyone — which was unfortunate because I’m pretty sure […]

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Could have seen this coming. Not that the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union … but that I would last long into the night watching results come in. Like, 3:45 a.m. late. Watching the BBC‘s coverage of Britain’s national referendum on whether to stay in the EU or exit it — the […]

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Sometimes I feel I’m at the far end of the Jurgen Klinsmann must go spectrum. I believe the German coach of the U.S. national team is an ongoing disaster who is actively making the team worse by denigrating American players and the country’s domestic league … and who continues to bring in faux Yanks, insta-Yanks, […]

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It would seem a bit late, as well as irrelevant, to conduct a post mortem of the U.S. failure to win a point from the 1998 World Cup. But Alexi Lalas, one of the best-known players on that U.S. team, and Steve Sampson, the U.S. coach, spend 40-plus fascinating minutes on The Mutant Gene Podcast […]

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It was the ultimate career fantasy for a certain fraction of American journalists. At some time in their careers they wanted to live in Paris and work for the International Herald Tribune. They had read it during their travels in Europe and it became a sort of newspaper of record for their vacations, fondly remembered […]

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As an American living across the pond, having a secondary news source to, say, the New York Times, is pretty much essential. If for no other reason than to keep track of the English Premier League — which may be the one sports competition we covered in Abu Dhabi that I will remain interested in, […]

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