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Old 02-10-2012, 07:40 PM   #1
MikeWaters
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Default I've got Linsanity!

I've actually been following Jeremy Lin's career for a while. Since last year. I was talking to my buddy who played college ball, and whom I play pickup with, that there are no Asian-Americans in the NBA. And he said "what about Jeremy Lin?" So I googled him up and started keeping track of him.

I guess it was Dallas summer league last year, did well. Then Golden State, some league time, and some D-league time. Then cut by GS before this season, went to the Rockets, and now to the Knicks, and BOOM! I may have some details wrong...

We knew he was good, but we didn't know if he would get a chance to really shine. Honestly, I haven't even seen him play yet, because I never saw a Golden State game last year while he was on the team (he was not getting much in the way of minutes anyway). And I haven't seen a Knicks game yet.

But that changes tonight. Lakers vs. Knicks at MSG on ESPN.

Here's a very nice article on SI. Kid wasn't even offered a scholie at a decent basketball school despite being very good. It's another example of how hard it is to look past a person's appearance, and be able to see the inherent value of the person.
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Old 02-12-2012, 01:23 PM   #2
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http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/...break-to-fame/

Quote:
One quarter into the game, unveiling an amazing ability to penetrate, discombobulate and elevate against the Lakers suddenly Swiss cheese-like defense, Jeremy Lin stood at 10 points, three assists, against future Hall of Fame lock Bryant’s six points, zero assists. Bryant frequently watched stunned as Lin made his teammate Derek Fisher look frankly ridiculous with jellyleg cartoon crossovers and one insane spin move to the basket that became the evening’s signature offensive play. Twitter suddenly boomed with people tweeting: “WHO SAID ASIANS CAN’T DRIVE?” and linking to pics of Lin whipping past a frozen Fish.

By midgame, the screen had lit up with Lin’s smiling portrait and the flashing words LINSANITY a half-dozen times, and Lin’s line was head and shoulders above anyone else on the court: 18 points, five assists, two rebounds. Numbers any player would be proud of at the end of a game. But this was at the half. Lin was clearly on track for a monster performance.

Kobe, meanwhile, who makes almost as much in salary per game as Lin had made all season, had hit just one of his first 11 shots, and put up an anemic (for him) ten points, zero assists, and four rebounds.

It wouldn’t stop for the rest of the game. When Lin was off the court, the Knicks lost momentum. When he came back in, good things happened. In the fourth quarter, with the Lakers making a last-ditch charge and coming within a handful of points, Lin walked off the sidelines onto the floor (ROAR) and threw stilettos into L.A.’s suddenly racing heart, dropping a pair of back to back buckets on Fisher’s noggin — technically beautiful layups, nothing fancy — and then letting himself get hammered to the floor on defense, drawing a charge and offensive foul that turned the ball over and pretty much put the hopes of Lakers fans to rest.

With the game out of reach, Kai Ma, former editor of the L.A. based Koream Journal and now managing editor for New York’s Asian American Writers Workshop, summed up the feelings of Asian American Angelenos watching the game with a tweet: “I’m so sad, BUT I’M SO HAPPY” — happy to see Lin lock down stardom with an unbelievable, Lin-conceivable game-high, career-high 38 points, seven assists and four rebounds.

At the post-game presser, every question Coach Mike D’Antoni got was about Jeremy Lin. D’Antoni looked ecstatic to take them. After all, Lin saved the season, the team, and D’Antoni’s job (at least for now). And then he left and it was announced that Lin would be brought in to the press room shortly. During the break, a veteran sports-beat guy audibly said to his seat neighbor: “I said Lin was a fluke. I should be fired. We should all be fired.”

And then Lin walked in, humble, eyes downcast, without the swash or swagger that one might expect from the NBA’s newest, biggest hero. “I just give all the praise to God,” he said, when asked about the game. God, and his teammates: Lin dished honor to the rest of the roster as smoothly and unselfishly as he distributed the ball on the court.

But the question had to be asked, and so I did. “Jeremy,” I said, when the mike passed to me. “Do you think Kobe knows who you are now?”

A slow smile spread across Lin’s face as the room erupted in laughter. “You’ll have to ask Kobe that,” he said. “But he actually helped me up off the floor” — after Lin was nailed in a cross-court collision — “so I think he knows who I am now.”

Oh, Kobe certainly knows who “this kid” is now. And so does everyone else. Those Jeremy Lin jerseys? Sold out. “We’ll have more by tomorrow!” said a concession stand worker brightly. You’d better, or there’ll be riots.

In the streets outside the Garden, people were shouting “JEREMY LIN!” at the top of their lungs, and chanting, over and over, “MVP.” It’s hard not to feel like this isn’t a watershed moment. Hard not to feel like this is historic. Hard not to think that we’re at the cusp of an actual tectonic shift in the culture, when an Asian American “kid” could be the unquestioned king of one of the most storied franchises in sports, the guy that every guy in the room wishes he could meet and every kid in the room wants to group up to be.

Author and U. Michigan professor Scott Kurashige summed up the sense that we were in a new world now, living in the Year of Our Jeremy, with a Facebook post for his daughter that might have been only a little tongue in cheek: “Dear Tula,” he wrote. “When you were three years old and your father had a fellowship year at Harvard, I took you to see President Lin play when he was a mostly unknown college basketball player, many years before he went on to win seven NBA championships, two terms in the Senate, and the Nobel Prize for ending global warming and ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Love, Dad.”

Maybe that’s a lot to put on a 23-year-old kid just four starts into superstardom.

But maybe it’s not. As Lin put it, you’ll have to ask Kobe that.
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Old 02-13-2012, 07:38 PM   #3
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If you missed the Knicks vs. Lakers on Friday night, you missed one of the very special moments in sports. Asian-American kid, who did nothing but excel in high school and college, passed over time and time again, gets an opportunity to play for the Knicks due to a series of injuries. He excels in his first game with significant minutes. Then he starts the next two games, and has all of New York buzzing, with excellent performances. But they were against mediocre teams, and now Kobe and the Lakers are coming to town. The hype was intense. Could this kid (whom some are now calling Roy Hobbes-esque, because of how he came out of "nowhere") perform yet again, on the biggest stage in the world, with all the naysayers predicting failure?

Of course it's all history now. He slayed. He absolutely slayed. 38 points is more than he ever scored at Harvard. He had the night of his life and actually outshone Kobe, who loves to perform in front of the MSG crowd, just like Jordan did. It was absolutely brilliant, and so pure. Jeremy Lin had me hooting and hollering, jumping out of my chair, doing fist pumps, and rewinding time and time again. The interplay between the crowd and Lin was just incredible. It was electric. The crowd wanted to be dazzled, it wanted to reward, and it did.

I had the feeling that I was watching something special, something monumental, that I would rarely ever see again in my life. Hyperbole? Time will tell, but I feel like this game was a watershed moment in sports. By itself, the story of a kid who comes out of nowhere and lights the world on fire is awesome. But you throw in that this kid is Asian-American and it's a whole different level. It's the equivalent of some white trash kid from Kentucky showing up at the olympics and winning the 100m dash against all the West Africans, black Americans, and Jamaicans. Think about it? How many Asian-Americans can you think of who have excelled in the big three (football, baseball, basketball)? We've had Yao Ming and a couple of other tall Chinese players, but they weren't Asian Americans. Friday night was the Jackie Robinson moment for Asian Americans. I'm not trying to diminish the historical importance of Robinson, I'm just saying that Asian Americans have never had a moment of any kind! Thus, this is the one great moment.

My wife attended a dinner party that Friday night, and as it turns out almost all of the husbands of these women (mostly Asian, but at least one white woman) are Asian-Americans. The women all commented that their husbands were at home watching Jeremy Lin and this game. I know some of these men, and I doubt very much they are big basketball fans. I don't think of any of them play, for example. But that all were tuned in to that game Friday night? That tells me that something important happened. That this story had already caught on with all those Asian Americans out there.

The Asian American male occupies a strange niche in American society. He is regarded as smart, competent, professional, likely to excel in medicine or science. But even this professional competence is dismissed as a kind of "Asian borg"--can do work, but isn't creative and lacks personality. Doesn't play sports, doesn't fish, doesn't hunt. And most important, doesn't get the girls. The Asian American male is on the very bottom of the ladder when it comes to the attractiveness scale. The white male is the default choice. The black male is stereotyped as masculine, with sexual prowess. The Hispanic male commands a certain kind of maschismo, the "Latin lover." But the lowly Asian American male commands nothing. The Asian American female on the other hands is widely regarded as attractive, even fetishized. You probably know more than one white male who was primarily attracted to Asian females ("yellow fever"). But how many white women do you know who were primarily attracted to Asian American males, compared to white women who were attracted to other races (white, Hispanic, black)? The same kind of phenomenon is widely reported regarding black females--lowest on the attractiveness scale. Black males/white female relationships are much more common than white male/black female ones. And the same applies to white male/Asian American female vs. Asian American male/white female.

The Asian American male can feel both successful and kicked around at the same time. Thus the importance of a Jeremy Lin, the Asian-American everyman who just kicked over the can, who embodies the cultural hope of many Asian American males. To kick ass. On their own terms. To not be judged by their appearance, but by their abilities. To dunk it in your face. To get the girl. And not just because he helped her with her math homework.

This cultural touchstone may not be recognized by the greater body of Americans right now, but I think something very important happened on Friday night. Something that will reverberate going forward. Lin described an immigrant father who fell in love with basketball and taught his sons. Not that many Asian American kids have that father. But more will. And they will come. And someday it will seem quite quaint and strange that there was a time when the NBA had no Asian-Americans. Until Jeremy Lin.

After the game, when Lin was being interviewed mid-court, to see this kid's unaffected joy held back by a kind of humble reserve, but the smile said everything, and I couldn't help but feel joy for this young man as I wiped away a tear.

That is what sports is about. That is why we care. For moments like this that teach us something about the human condition.

Last edited by MikeWaters; 02-13-2012 at 07:40 PM.
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Old 02-13-2012, 07:58 PM   #4
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This encapsulates what I am talking about, a tweet re: Jeremy Lin on Friday night:



@WhitlockJason
"Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight."
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Old 02-14-2012, 08:36 PM   #5
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This made me chuckle:

Quote:
2:31 — Mike Bibby comes into the game for Lin. The crowd groans. This is like swapping out a GT-R for an '88 Pontiac LeMans with a f***ed-up door and a few mysterious stains in the backseat.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7570431/jeremy-lin
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Old 02-15-2012, 04:29 AM   #6
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Had a 3 point play (layup + freethrow) then a 3 pointer with less than a second left to lead the Knicks to a win tonight against the Raptors.
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Old 02-15-2012, 10:41 PM   #7
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Jimmer vs. Lin tonight. I actually called Directv about getting League Pass. Just because of this game. But they would charge me the full $170 even though a big chunk of the season is done. Screw them.
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Old 02-20-2012, 04:32 AM   #8
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Watching Lin and the Knicks play in the Garden--pure joy. What fun. I guess I'm pretty fickle about my fandom, rooting for the Knicks over the Mavs. It's not a conscious choice. Who was it that said the heart wants what the heart wants.
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Old 02-21-2012, 09:15 PM   #9
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My roommate has league pass (he is a devout Jazz fan), so I watched Jimmer vs. Lin yesterday (delay). Too bad the two never went head-to-head as Lin sat out garbage time while Jimmer played. Jimmer's not a PG all the time anyway.
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Old 02-21-2012, 09:45 PM   #10
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Jimmer is proving not to have the handle to be an effective PG in the NBA. Plus he can't finish in the lane.

He ends up driving inside, but has no option to shoot, making him (and everyone else) much easier to defend.

It looks like Jimmer may end up as a midget off-the-bench scoring 2-guard.
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