10 quotes from Basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton

Basketball Hall of Famer Bill Walton’s life in basketball has been anything but dull. The Big Redhead, as the 6 ft., 11 in. carrot top came to be known, played on two championship teams, both in college, at UCLA, and in the NBA, with the Portland Trail Blazers and the Boston Celtics.  During his college career, he was the National College Player of the Year three times and turned in one of the most sensational individual performances in NCAA tournament history, making 21 of 22 field goal attempts and scoring 44 points in leading UCLA’s over Memphis State in the 1974 championship game. The native of La Mesa, Calif., is also known for attending 650 Grateful Dead concerts and overcoming his stuttering to enjoy a career as a colorful, quipping basketball analyst. He’s scheduled to come out of retirement this coming season to work Pac-12 Conference games for ESPN.

AP

1. Second-guessing a referee

AP

“Come on, that was no foul! It may be a violation of all the basic rules of human decency, but it’s not a foul.”

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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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