9 sports books for spring

Here are excerpts from seven new books about sports.

1. ‘Court Justice: The Inside Story of My Battle Against the NCAA,’ by Ed O’Bannon with Michael McCann

A former star player long removed from his basketball career may seem an unlikely crusader for the rights of college student-athletes, both past and present. Ed O’Bannon, however, decided to take up that cause upon playing a video game at a friend’s house in 2009. That’s when he discovered that the game about the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament was using an electronic image of him and his former UCLA teammates who won the 1994-95 national championship in a popular, commercially sold game. O’Bannon decided to file a case, which became a class-action suit, against the NCAA for making money on the backs of college athletes without their consent. In “Court Justice,’ he tells the fascinating story that earned him a landmark court decision, even if it was one that involved no compensation.

Here’s an excerpt from Court Justice: 

“I remember talking to Mom and Dad after I testified. They told me how proud they were that I was taking a stand for something I believed in and pursuing it all the way to a federal courthouse. Deep down, though, I kind of sensed that my parents had reservations about the whole thing. They knew I wasn’t going to get paid anything from this case, which I think they found to be admirable but also a little bit strange.

"And they knew that I had become a villain to a lot of people. I suspect that if my parents  took a truth serum, they would admit that they wished I wasn’t the guy doing this. I bet it was hard for them to sit back and watch this lawsuit play out.

"And that makes sense. At least to some degree, this case changed my public reputation from former college basketball star to ‘that guy who sued the NCAA over video games.’ ” 

1 of 9

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.