2013 college football: 17 odds and ends you might have missed

17. Don’t bully this Spartan

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Blake Treadwell is a senior lineman and co-captain for Michigan State.

To look at Michigan State University’s Blake Treadwell today, you might figure he’d be the last person anyone would pick on. But that wasn’t the case in elementary school, before he started playing football and grew into a 6 ft. 3 in., 304-pound block of granite. From fourth through sixth grade, when he had trouble communicating with other kids, he came in for a lot of verbal bullying in East Lansing, where his dad was an assistant football coach at MSU. Today Blake is a starting offensive guard for the Spartans and has been named a tri-captain on this year’s team.  

Although he doesn’t care to elaborate on the verbal taunts that stung him as a boy, Treadwell says that despite the adage about words not being able to hurt you, that’s not true. What helped him weather the bullying, he says, was his supportive family and a close friend. His advice to young people who experience bullying is to talk with their parents and not keep it in. “ My parents were on top of things,” he told Steve Grinczel, the online columnist for MSUSpartans.com.

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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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