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9 sports books for holiday reading and giving

If you like variety, these 2017 sports releases offer an abundance of that.

3. ’But Seriously,’ by John McEnroe

  • By Ross Atkin

It’s probably safe to say that John McEnroe has never had an opinion he wasn’t willing to share publicly. The former tennis great is still doing so 33 years after winning his last Grand Slam titles (Wimbledon and the US and French Opens in 1984). Although he still occasionally plays in a celebrity event, his real platform for opining and pontificating about the game is as a TV commentator who doesn’t hold back. Now as tennis’s elder statesman, he has even more anecdotal material and insights to unload than he did in his first book, “You Cannot Be Serious,” a bestseller, that he wrote 15 years ago.

Here’s an excerpt from But Seriously:

“Even while I was pursuing other career options and interests at the start of the 2000s, I had no intention of turning my back on my work as a commentator.

“For me, being in the commentary box is an opportunity to have a voice in the game. It won’t surprise you that I’ve got a few things to say – on doubles, on the lack of serve-and-volleyers in today’s game, on wooden racquets, on let-cord serves, on gamesmanship, on … Do you want me to go on? As self-appointed ‘Commissioner of Tennis,’ it is my duty to do that.

“At first I would get upset when people told me I was a better TV commentator than I was a player – it took me years to realize they were paying me a compliment. I started out behind the microphone back in 1992, when the dominant style of commentary was incredibly dry and boring (or at least, I thought it was). My timing was good, because tennis on TV was crying out for a change of style.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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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