9 sports books for spring

Here are excerpts from seven new books about sports.

2. ‘Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don’t Walk: A Memoir of Breaking Barriers,’ by Lesley Visser

Although mostly retired today, Lesley Visser was once one of the most ubiquitous TV personalities in sports broadcasting. For more than 40 years, first as a pioneering female sportswriter with the Boston Globe and later in assuming a number of TV network assignments, she carved out a career inspired by her mother’s urging to follow her dreams (expressed in this autobiography’s title). Visser became the first and only woman enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and wound up rubbing elbows with countless sports celebrities, many of whom she’s photographed with in the book. Her story is a testament to the powers of persistence, humor, and a love and knowledge of sports coupled with a zestful, outgoing nature. Today, Visser appears on CBS’s “We Need to Talk,” which is the first-ever nationally televised all-female weekly sports talk show, according to the network.

Here’s an excerpt from Sometimes You Have to Cross When It Says Don’t Walk:

“The significance of being the first woman in the Pro Football Hall of Fame is that today women can do anything they want to do. My entire career came about because of my love of sports. I never for one second set out for the money or the fame. Being the first woman in Canton is stunning because I started out like everybody else – I just loved sports. It’s funny when I look back. At one point in my career I described myself as a ‘hardcore football, basketball, baseball guy.…’ It makes me laugh when I think about it. I always said there are two kinds of women who do this for a living: women who love sports and end up on television, and women who want to be on television and end up in sports. After a while, you can tell which is which. John Madden wrote me a beautiful note before the ceremony that contained words I often repeat when I speak in public. It said, ‘You can’t be born into the Hall of Fame, you can’t buy your way into the Hall of Fame, you have to earn it.’ ”

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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.”

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