A converted soccer goalkeeper from Nigeria, Hakeem Olajuwon learned most of his basketball skills at the University of Houston and then with the NBA’s Houston Rockets. When he entered the league in 1984, he and fellow seven-footer Ralph Sampson were the Rockets’ “Twin Towers.” They took Houston to one Finals series in 1986, but it was only after Sampson left that Olajuwon reached the zenith of his playing ability. That came in 1994, when he not only became the first foreign-born player to ever be named the NBA’s season-long Most Valuable Player, but he also became the first player also collect Defensive Player of the Year and NBA Finals MVP in the same season. In an interesting footnote, the center he faced in the finals was New York’s Patrick Ewing, who was born in Jamaica.
Mark Sappenfield
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.
