Bill Russell: 12 quotes about basketball

4. Man of mystery

AP
Bill Russell signs a three-year contract to play with the Boston Celtics at a luncheon in Boston on Aug. 25, 1965. Looking on is Celtic President Jack Waldron (r.) and Coach-General Manager Arnold "Red" Auerbach.

“From the first day I turned up at practice to the last game I played, I quite deliberately cultivated an air of mystery among my teammates. I liked my teammates a great deal, more than I could ever show them then because I believed, as a matter of choice, that, in remaining unseen, who I was or what I did should never be confused. If ever I was taken for granted, as a player or as a person, my effectiveness as a teammate would have been compromised.”

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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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