The Clippers’ frustrations as a franchise are perhaps best embodied by Bill Walton. While in San Diego, the team signed him to return to his hometown (he’s from the suburb of La Mesa) in 1979. Although Walton had led the Portland Trail Blazers to a championship in 1977, he missed the entire next season with an injury. The Clippers acquired him anyhow in 1979, but Walton reinjured his foot and only suited up for 14 games. He sat out the 1980-81 and 1981-82 seasons, His return never led the team to the promised land and in 1985 he was traded to the Boston Celtics. It worked out beautifully for the big redhead, who played in a career high 80 games coming off the bench to support Boston’s Big Three frontcourt of Larry Bird, Robert Parish, and Kevin McHale. Walton wound up winning the NBA’s Sixth Man Award and another championship ring.
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.
