9 sports books you may have missed in 2014

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

7. 'Johnny U and Me: The Man Behind the Golden Arm,' by John C. Unitas Jr. with Edward L. Brown

The son of one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history shares what that football career looked like from his perspective. Today John C. Unitas Jr. is a successful businessman and the president of the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Educational Foundation, Inc., which awards scholarships to deserving student-athletes.

“Everybody, it seems, has a story about bumping into Dad after he retired. Bragging in Baltimore about an encounter with Dad is like saying crab cakes are the Mid-Atlantic epicurean religion. No matter who bumped into Dad and no matter the circumstances, the stories follow a basic plot line: Dad gave time and attention to his fan, his demeanor both gracious and humble, listening, nodding, and agreeing, his grayish eyes locked into the face of his fan. Most of the time, it was a fan telling him about a game that he’d played in. He told me on many occasions that the fan had the wrong game or score or was mixing up two different games, but he never corrected them. The fans weren’t usually interested in hearing Dad’s perspective, either.” 

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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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