Skip to footer

6 eclectic sports books

For those with wide-ranging sports interests, this Whitman’s Sampler of recent releases may be just the ticket.  

4. ‘Players: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution,’ by Matthew Futterman

  • By Ross Atkin

It’s common knowledge that today’s sports salaries are staggeringly high. Fortune magazine’s 50 highest paid athletes reportedly all make more than $20 million a year, and even journeymen are pretty much set for life if they handle their finances wisely. How did this happen? Matthew Futtrerman, a senior special writer on sports for The Wall Street Journal, decided to take an in-depth look across a number of sports. In his estimation, a seminal moment came in 1960, when attorney Mark McCormack signed Arnold Palmer as a client and quickly began to maximize Palmer’s endorsement potential. But Futterman identifies numerous other influential developments, including baseball free agency, a player boycott at Wimbledon, and the “Nike-ization” of sports

Here’s an excerpt from Players:

“By the time [Michael Jordan] and the Chicago Bulls got good enough to win championships, in 1991, NBA basketball had become the hottest sports property in the world. Soccer was more popular internationally and probably always will be. NFL football had its lock on the American autumn. But the NBA had become the ultimate growth stock, a captivating, aesthetically remarkable mix of sports, art, and theater perfectly presented by the NBC Sports chairman, Dick Ebersol, in a neat, immensely profitable corporate package. Within a span of fifteen years, the drug-riddled NBA that couldn’t get its championship on live television became the world’s model sports organization. Jordan stood at the pinnacle, a $50-million-a-year juggernaut who hawked everything from Gatorade to underwear.”

4 of 6
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.”

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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.