Except something extraordinary happened due to a confluence of factors. The Knicks, who have had problems finding a reliable point guard, picked up him up after an even shorter stint with the Houston Rockets. After trying unsuccessfully to have Iman Shumpert (more of a shooting guard), Mike Bibby (should have retired years ago) and Baron Davis (making former Yankee Carl Pavano seem durable in comparison) run the point, the Knicks were forced to give their point guard at the end of the bench some serious playing time.
And amazingly, Jeremy Lin started to play some solid basketball and increasingly won the trust of head coach Mike D'Antoni. And then he shocked everyone by leading the Knicks to back to back wins, scoring 25 and 28 points. The amount of adulation he received was over the top, with jubilant fans at Madison Square Garden chanting "MVP! MVP" during his post-game interview. As I quipped on Facebook, Jeremy Lin pretty much lived out the fantasy of every Asian kid who lived or grew up in the New York area. He's been able to sustain a solid level of play ever since, following those performances with an even better showing against the Lakers (on national television) and a solid effort against the Timberwolves. The Knicks haven't lost since.
I'm thrilled with his success and the fact that he's getting some well deserved publicity. I think it's terrific that this will make a small dent in the perception that Asian-American athletes are mostly relegated to things such as golf, tennis, figure or speed skating (hockey player Richard Park was actually born in South Korea, and I'm not counting mixed-race Asians like Hines Ward and Patrick Chung). Asian-Americans even have it worse than "native Asians", who have also made headway in baseball (Hideki Matsui, Ichiro, Dice-K and Yu Darvish) and basketball (unusually tall folks like Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian). But Asian Americans? It's like the fit-for-light-reading "Famous Jewish Sports Legends" leaflet from the movie "Airplane!"
Given the agility, athleticism and height which tend to help in basketball, Asian-Americans have pretty much been an afterthought in the sport. The great thing about Jeremy is that his height, while tall by Asian standards, isn't a freak of nature in the same way the 7-foot-6 Yao Ming is. He's a guy who is similarly built to his non-Asian competitors, but he's largely doing it based on hard work and skill. That's almost unprecedented. That he's doing it for my hometown team makes his success all the sweeter.
That being said, there's a lot about Jeremy Lin's ascension that makes me nervous.
First, there's the basketball side of it. There's a couple of standard moves that Jeremy seems to frequently employ - notably the hesitation dribble and the fake-left-go-right move - which are going to eventually fade in success once teams get a book on him. It's possible that he's not revealing his repertoire of moves until he absolutely needs to, but another Knicks fan and I noticed that he rarely goes to his left as he makes his penetration move. As he plays more and scouts notice holes in his game, opponents will start providing help towards his right side and force him into a direction where's he's left adept at making plays.
Also, the guy has on a couple of occasions looked utterly gassed by the fourth quarter. While Jeremy isn't a rookie, this isn't a player who has experienced a traditional first season in the NBA since he mostly rode the bench. In his first start against the Utah Jazz, the fatigue clearly affected his play as he became increasingly prone to turning the ball over. A a player who hasn't been a full time player since he was playing a 30 game Ivy League basketball regular season at Harvard where you play Friday and Saturday with the rest of the days off, it's clearly a big intensity jump to a shortened NBA season with many more games and back-to-backs. If Coach D'Antoni continues to play him 35 to 37 minutes a game, Jeremy Lin is going to lose his effectiveness fast.
But even more than the basketball aspect of Jeremy Lin, I'm nervous about how this phenomena can backfire quickly both in terms of the perception of Asian-Americans, as well as how he'll personally conduct himself in the midst of his ascension and likely ride back to earth.
Like every Asian-American, I'm proud that Jeremy Lin is getting recognition for his good play, but there's something that doesn't sit well when a couple of 18 point / 8 assist performances starts getting chants of "MVP! MVP!" from the capacity crowd. 18 and 8 is nice line, but does anyone seriously consider Jeremy Lin an MVP candidate? This isn't last year when Amar'e Stoudemire was putting up 30+ points every night and leading the Knicks back to relevance. Let's face it - most fans are pleasantly surprised that an Asian-American (and to a lesser degree, Harvard grad) can play basketball as well as Lin has, and the result is an overcompensation of the platitudes. Let's face it, in some ways it's condescending.
It's condescending in the same way if an African-American presented the keynote address at the International Society of Microbiologists conference and the crowd gave a standing ovation, because deep down inside they didn't think black people could be such brilliant researchers (sort of the "you're a credit to your race" syndrome). It's a revelation of hidden negative biases and prejudices which people hold which somehow get glossed over because, heck, they're cheering!
And what will happen if and when Jeremy Lin starts to wear down? What happens when teams get a book on how to stop him and he starts getting relegated to bench again? And what happens when there's the inevitably backlash of the publicity from both fans and players. Like Tim Tebow (more on this later), I'm certain that the publicity will incite jealousy on both his teammates and competitors, who will try twice as hard to embarrass him to steal the spotlight. I wrote about the "player jealousy" factor in a previous post about Tebow, and Jeremy Lin's going to bear the brunt of it as well.
When Lin's star begins to fade, this season of "the coming out of the Asian-American athlete" will suddenly (unfairly) evolve into "the exposure of the phony, over-hyped gimmick". Jeremy Lin will be lampooned as the guy who took the league by storm, but was eventually exposed as the overmatched Asian-American athlete the haters say he is. Let's keep these expectations reasonable, people. If he becomes a serviceable rotation player, he'll still be a pioneer for Asian-Americans in basketball and should hold his head up high.
There's also the Christianity factor and the inevitable comparisons to Tim Tebow, which Les Carpenter touches on in his excellent article. Like Tebow, Jeremy Lin was a player who endured some degree of ridicule and skepticism around their ability to play in the pros (granted, Tebow was a former Heisman Trophy winner and a 1st round draft pick). Both are also devout Christians, but it's already obvious that they carry their faith in a very different way.
Tebow has been extremely outspoken and visible about his faith, and that's something which is very commendable. Lin's devotion is more nuanced - in the context of a conversation about religion, he'll be very specific about his Christian faith, and he'll share openly that if he wasn't a basketball player, he'd probably be a pastor. When interviewed post-game, Lin doesn't open his interviews with "First of all, I'd like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," as Tebow does.
This is neither a compliment or condemnation, but rather an observation of a difference in how they carry their faith, quite possibly related to Tebow growing up in a Caucasian missionary family in north Florida and Lin growing up in a Asian-American Christian family in Northern California. You take a devout white Christian from Jacksonville and an Asian Christian from San Francisco, and the outward expressions of that faith will differ based on cultural and regional norms and such. There's nothing wrong with that. It's very much of the spirit of what the apostle Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 9:20 when he says, "To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law." I hope Jeremy feels that freedom and recognizes that's part of his call as a Christian.
The concern for me here is that Lin will get well-intentioned pressure to carry his faith as Tim Tebow does, or Kurt Warner once did. For better or for worse, Tim Tebow is now forever associated with Focus on the Family and his pro-life views, and I'm proud that he's been bold about those convictions, which I happen to share. I care deeply that Jeremy is a bold witness and that he brings glory to Jesus Christ in everything that he does, but there are different ways to do this - Tim Tebow's way is but one of those ways.
My former pastor's daughter is an actress who has achieved some level of success. In her first major film role, she co-starred with Ed Harris and Debra Winger and word quickly leaked that not only was her father a pastor, but she was a faithful Christian in her own right. Soon, Christian media outlets got wind of this and tried to run with this. The actress, while noting the good intentions of Christian media, confided to her dad that too often they were looking for oversimplified sound bites about "how she prays for Debra Winger" and what not. The sports world might very well be similar to Hollywood in that respect, and Tim's way may not be the same as Jeremy's.
While he has this platform, many movements and groups will try to ride the wave, and most with totally good intentions. As much as some of us would like to believe that we know the guy since we share similar backgrounds, we really don't. I've seen "open letters" written to him and well-meaning advice given to him by bloggers and Asian pundits. But the fact that I bunch of things in common with him doesn't give me any special right to entry into his life. I don't "know what he's going through" any more than the next guy simply because I'm an Asian Christian guy who went to an Ivy League school.
Because of who Jeremy is, Christian ministries will try to make Jeremy the face of the scrappy and upstanding Christian athlete. Asian-American groups will try to make Jeremy the face of the underestimated Asian-American athlete. Jeremy is his own man, and I hope and pray that he never feels that this special time has been hijacked by something different than he ever wanted it to be.
Leave him be - and let him play with joy.
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1 comment:
I sense a good fatherly undertone.
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