6 new sports books for good holiday reading

Here are excerpts from six new sports books.

5. 'No Limits: My Autobiography,' by Ian Poulter

Englishman Ian Poulter has gone from working as an assistant pro staffing a club golf shop to ranking as high as fifth in the world golf rankings. He is known for his riotous brand of clothing and his strong performances in Ryder Cup team play.  

“Some people talk about the clothes I wear and say I’m an attention seeker. I don’t take that as criticism. I’m just doing my job. My job is to be happy on the golf course and perform as well as I possibly can. My job is to be a credit to the brands I represent. My job is to be as good as possible at getting more television time by playing excellent golf, because more television time means better value for my sponsors.

“A few months before my Ryder Cup debut at Oakland Hills, I had caused a bit of a stir at the Open at Royal Troon by playing my first round wearing a pair of Union Jack trousers. It was the kind of thing that I’d been wanting to do for a long time. I was bored with the clothes I’d been wearing until then. I didn’t feel comfortable in them. I didn’t feel they were me.”

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“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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