9 sports books you may have missed in 2014

Check out these sports titles you may have overlooked earlier this year.

2. 'Bleeding Orange,' by Jim Boeheim with Jack McCallum

“Fifty Years of Blind Referees, Screaming Fans, Beasts of the East, and Syracuse Basketball” is the subtitle of Jim Boeheim’s look back at his 39 years as head basketball coach at his alma mater. He is the second winningest coach in the game’s history behind Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski. 

“Something happens to you as a coach when you get great players. You are no longer this teacher of basketball, this old sage who rounds up a group of dedicated kids and gets them to play together. Rather, you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company that is supposed to perform at the highest level, obligated to return premiums to your stockholders. After Jim Calhoun started getting blue-chip recruits at Connecticut, I told him, ‘Jim, get ready. Now you’ll be an idiot if you don’t win it all.’ ” 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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