Inside the 'linsanity' of Lin
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After we reverently celebrated the most sacred date on the American liturgical calendar ...
Super Bowl Sunday – with a dining-room table buckling under the weight of giant trays of lasagna, meatballs, chicken wings, kuay tiao, kanom and cheesecake, and the living room packed with men cheering on the New York Giants and the den equally packed with shrieking women playing dollar-bill poker, both rooms decorated with Giants flags and balloons, and the entire host family from 15-month Benjamin to 65-year-old me sporting quarterback Eli Manning No. 10 football jerseys and my son-in-law Todd a US$400 Giants helmet, all culminating in an hysterical whoop-de-doo over the grand 21-17 victory for our home team, we all slumped later into post-partum triste.
What were we going to do with our Sundays now?
Brewing even then was the answer: the mega-miracle of Jeremy Lin, the new point guard of the New York Knicks.
You don’t have to be a New Yorker to love Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese American from Palo Alto, California, an NBA midget at six feet, three inches, who had the great misfortune of attending Harvard University. He was undrafted and released from two other teams when he galvanised the court with his debut at Madison Square Garden. A protege of Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni ,who taught the diminutive Steve Nash, Lin is smarter and faster than the lumbering behemoths who tower over him.
He controls the pace of the game, dashes between much bigger opponents for lightning lay-ups, fires off pinpoint precision passes, and has won seven of his last seven games. He outscored the legendary Kobe Bryant of the LA Lakers with 38 points and beat the Toronto Raptors with a last second three-pointer, after which the Toronto fans gave him a standing ovation. TV cameras follow his every move on the court, his press conferences grace the end of every game, his face is plastered on the front and back pages of every tabloid and the cover of Time. New rush orders of his No. 17 basketball jersey sell out at every game, home and away. His exploits have electrified fans across Asia and America. Basketball fan Barack Obama called to congratulate him.
“Wow,” he said at a press session. “The President. It doesn’t get better than that.”
He did all this without the Knicks’ two superstars, Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire. He has made basketball fun again, the crafty team sport that the old sophisticated Knicks of 1973 – Reed, Bradley, DeBusschere, led by their wily point guard Walt Frazer – played triumphantly against much bigger and talented teams like the Lakers.
Chinese and Chinese-Americans are especially thrilled. The Italians had Joe DiMaggio, the blacks had Jackie Robinson, the Jews had Sandy Koufax, and now the Chinese – who make up ten per cent of cities like Toronto and Vancouver – have their own hero.
“You must be so thrilled,” a nursing colleague said to my daughter Elizabeth.
“What are you, crazy?” she responded. “I’m Thai.”
Her husband and her circle of friends – especially the “Core Four” who were waitresses at the same Japanese steakhouse in the Bronx years ago – are all second-generation Thai-Americans whose parents migrated from northern Thailand to New York in the 1970s. Their kids have all gone to college and married and are completely American. They are the ones who filled our house on Super Bowl Sunday and rooted for the manly New York Giants rather than some team of effete foreign soccer players. It’s a great thing to be an American.
And Jeremy Lin is a great American, fiercely talented yet humble and religious. The trick will be to maintain his integrity amid the media onslaught and to defy F Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum: “There are no second acts in American lives.”
