Journalists who work inside the office need to get out once in a while. To see anew how the other half lives.

To get reacquainted with the realities of reporting. The untidy and inexact process of going onsite, piecing together what has happened, interviewing people who may not want to talk, making sense of what has been learned (synthesizing it), banging out a story that gets the good stuff up high, figuring out a way to file said story to the office and, often, doing this on deadline. All of which is a particularly difficult process, perhaps the most difficult in daily journalism and, thus, the most rewarding when you see your story in the newspaper the next morning and don’t wince.

Which brings us to Desert Bowl III, the Dubai Stallions versus the Dubai Barracudas.

I assigned myself to cover this one because I thought I needed to, even if it meant a three-hour round-trip commute to Dubai. Because I’m not sure what our non-American sports reporters would make of a game they have never covered as a news story (like asking an American to cover rugby or cricket) and would have to do so in circumstances rather like a Friday night high school football game. That is to say, primitive circumstances.

What I didn’t take into account, fully, were two aspects of how this turned out:

–Following and quantifying a game with even fewer aids than one would normally find at the least significant of varsity football games.

–Doing so at an age where perhaps this whole concept is a bad idea. Most sports reporters have that moment, maybe around age 40, where they wonder: “How old could I be and still cover things on deadline … even prep football on deadline?”

So, the Desert Bowl.

In the fall of 2012, a batch of UAE-based American football fans/practitioners turned years of talk into reality by creating a four-team American football league. The two Dubai teams, mentioned above, one in Abu Dhabi named the Wildcats and one in Al Ain named the Desert Foxes.

About half the players are Americans or Canadians who played the game back home before jobs brought them to the UAE, usually not before age 30 — since you need a certain professional foundation before you are likely to get hired over here. The flip side to that being, the guys going out there and crashing into each other are doing so at an age when the NFL, for example, would consider them in the twilight of their careers. Lots of guys get hurt.

The football season here goes from October until March — that part of the year in the Gulf that is not lethal to someone who is going to wear a helmet and pads and exercise strenuously while suited up.

Thus, this was the third March in succession where the two top teams played in what the Emirates American Football League dubbed, naturally, the Desert Bowl.

For the first two editions of the Desert Bowl, I had another American on staff to assign to this game, a guy who had done his share of prep football and knew what he was looking at. He, however, returned to the States.

Leaving me to cover the third.

I was looking forward to it. I had not covered a game of American football since early 2008, and the last game might well have been one of the greatest Super Bowls, No. 42, where the underdog New York Giants shocked the perfect-in-18-games New England Patriots 17-14 in Glendale, Ariz. (The Helmet Catch, remember.)

But covering a Super Bowl, where they bring you stats and quotes, is cake, compared to the rigors of on-your-own prep football reportage. Especially if the practitioner is on the high side of age 50.

The participants in this game were not kids, as suggested above. They are adult men, most of them with successful careers who are in the UAE making pretty good money.

That does not mean, however, that the game came with the accoutrements one might hope for, when watching them play.

Nice field. Nice grass. You wonder how it survives the summers. It actually was designed as a rugby field, at a facility called Dubai Sports City. A grandstand on one side of the field, capable of seating a few thousand. A sound system. Cheerleaders. Music. A merchandise trailer. Food and drink, including mixed drinks. Pretty impressive.

But then came the logistical issues.

–A scoreboard that was not working. Reporters can envision the horrors that suggests. No way to see an official clock. And, thus, trouble figuring out when points were scored and when turnovers were made or drives begun.

–A field that was 90 yards in length despite having a 50-yard-line. And it took me until the second half to notice this. Each of the 40-yard-line markers was followed, 5 yards later, by the 50 — when it was really the 45.

–Which made the already difficult process of keeping statistics even more baroque. I had to go back, after the game, and spend time subtracting 10 yards from every play that crossed midfield. (I thought those punters were awfully effective, despite what appeared to be something very like a shanked punt.)

And then we had the dignity issues. When a reporter of a certain age (at which he never envisioned himself covering a football game from the sidelines) finds himself dodging players in an attempt to figure out where the ball has been spotted, and following a program in which players have been listed not by number, not by family name but by first name, alphabetically. (Which is common, in this part of the world.)

It meant trotting along the sideline to get ahead of punts (the bane of the on-field reporters), but only after mentally noting the number of the punter as well as the long-snapper, in case the ball went over the punter’s head.

I had dressed as “young” as I could. Jeans, Stan Smith sneakers, gray sweatshirt over my dress shirt, my Long Beach State baseball cap.

But under the cap was an old guy.

(One advantage to being old, when covering on the sidelines. No one treats you like a kid or a nuisance. Clearly, an old person must have some very good reasons to be down in the mosh pit that is the sidelines of a football game, and no one challenges him on it.)

I had solved, sorta, the “time of game” problem by talking to the back judge, who promised to bring me the time of game after every score, which he did, bless ‘im.

Oh, and the game started about an hour behind the scheduled 6:30 p.m. kickoff because the age-division games had run long. It was approaching 7:30 when this one started. It was going to be a deadline write.

The teams didn’t help much in one critical sense — they could hardly run a play without being flagged, which slowed the game markedly. Twenty-three penalties were accepted, for 215 yards. Lots of motion penalties, lots of delays of game, lots of personal fouls because guys were coming in with late hits on players already down. Perhaps forgetting the rules or adopting rugby usage.

I was impressed, however, by how much hitting went on. These were big guys running into each other at some speed. The collisions definitely were bigger than you find in a prep game, where players tend to be 20-40 pounds lighter than they will be at age 32, 33, 34. That was serious football, if more than a little sloppy.

(And one semi-funny bit, which I would have enjoyed more had I not been running around trying to keep perfect stats, was the swearing on the sideline — in non-American accents. Imagine, if you will, a guy with an English accents letting loose a torrent of obscenities pertaining to what they call “gridiron”, or a guy with a Gulf accent complaining about the ref — or the very low-and-wide guy who had to be 40 and the incredible stream of verbal abuse that came out of his mouth with a Scottish burr.)

At a certain age, the very notion of standing/walking/jogging on a grass field for three hours becomes an issue, and if I am not completely there, I could see if from the Barracudas sideline. But I did not break down, physically.

Mentally? Almost, just from keeping stats. I forgot to mention that not only was it a 90-yard field, it had no hash marks between each striped multiple of 5 yards … so I was eyeballing the football all the time to figure out if I was going to call it the 32 or the 33 — and my stats would be official (as far as I was concerned) since the league (amazingly) does not keep them.

It was an interesting game, but not exciting. The Stallions, losers in the first two Desert Bowls, were markedly better, something I correctly diagnosed on the first play from scrimmage, when a fit and low-to-the-ground tailback named Davion Miller rumbled 13 yards, shedding tacklers along the way.

It finished 30-6. But the hard part was about to begin.

Anyone who has covered prep football — and remember, the execution of this was very much like it — knows what trouble it can be to do interviews when a game ends. Players milling around, coaches wandering here and there, and a championship game is the worst sort. Celebrating, moping, not particularly interested in an interview, first thing.

The Barracudas coach asked me to come back; he needed to talk to his team first. The Stallions coach was not immediately available because he was spraying champagne from his place in the center of his players.

Then, the quick and dirty interviews. One coach, the star running back (three touchdowns, 84 yards on 18 carries), the famous linebacker, formerly of the NFL, the losing coach.

Done without benefit of tape recorder, because an office-bound editor is never going to need one, right? And because, certainly, I will be able to read my own writing afterward. (Hah.)

Then the rush to the writing site — a Starbucks about two miles away in a sort of strip mall across from the Dubai Autodrome.

Bought a “tall” (which means small) hot chocolate, got a password for the wifi, and sat down to get cracking. It was well after 10 and my deadline was about 11:15, and I could write up to 650 words.

I lost time to updating and verifying my stats. I had taken note of every play in the game. (A beautiful thing, if anyone wants to look at it … aside from that one catch-and-run-and-fumble-and-long-return-the-other way, which I am still not wholly certain about where the fumble-and-return part of it began, which also impacts the passing and receiving stats.)

But it was getting late, and I moved on. Came up with a lead I didn’t hate, tucked in a few of the most germane quotes, made some assessments about what went on (a butt-kicking) … and I had maybe 500 words when a Starbucks employee came by, at 10:55, to tell me they were shutting down in five minutes.

I was already nervous and overstimmed. Which is not a good place to be, past a certain age. It can feel uncomfortable when you’re 31, never mind three decades past it.

And now it really kicked in. I fell faintly nauseated, from the time pressure as well as the ill-advised (very rich) hot chocolate. I sent what I had on my screen for fear that Starbucks would turn off the wifi, and then I would be left dictating for 30 minutes. I immediately got back a “we did not get all your text” message from the office, because I had quit in the middle of a sentence, which I then sent to them as the lights went out and we were asked to leave the premises.

So, that was my story. Which I annoyed me. “Another five minutes was all I needed,” and my driver (thank goodness I didn’t drive) said, “The mantra of the prep writer: “Another five minutes.”

The office called again. I had neglected to send them the scores from the three earlier championship game, in the age-group competitions. I dictated those from the moving car.

And then the nerves really hit me, and didn’t quite abate until reaching the Abu Dhabi border.

So, I have a renewed appreciation for my reporters, who often are filing under stressful and primitive conditions, when on deadline …

And some new information about covering prep football from the sidelines. If you are over, say, 55 … try to avoid it.

(By the by, here is the story I filed, and here is the photo gallery we posted in the morning.)