Skip to footer

2012 sports year in review: records, achievements, plus sundry feats and streaks from Brees and Bryant to Cain and Ko

It’s impossible to list all the records set in 2012, but here’s a short rundown of some heralded highlights, plus 20 of our favorites, including some you might have missed.

14. Women’s golf: a geographic pattern

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

For women golfers from the western Pacific Rim, it was a very big year. New Zealander Lydia Ko, who was born in South Korea, became the youngest player, at 14, to ever win an LPGA Tour event, the New South Wales Open in Australia. She later captured the Canadian Open title.

Meanwile Shanshan Feng, the only player from China on the LPGA Tour, became the first player from mainland China on the circuit to win a major event, the LPGA Championship in Pittsford, NY.

And for high drama, there was South Korea’s Jiyai Shin, who won the longest playoff in LPGA history by outdueling American Paula Creamer on the ninth playoff hole at the Kingsmill Championship in Willamsburg, Va. After being unable to break the tie by playing the 18th hole eight times, play was moved to the 16th hole on Monday, when the shootout resumed. Shin won when Creamer, an excellent putter, three-putted from 30 feet.

14 of 20
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.