Billy Packer, who was let go by CBS Monday as its lead college basketball analyst, is an institution behind the microphone, but it’s hard to think of another sports broadcasting figure of Packer’s stature and tenure who’s inspired as little affection as he has.
Packer called 34 straight Final Fours, the last 28 of them for CBS. Various people in the TV and college basketball industries have what often sounds like a kind of grudging respect for Packer’s basketball knowledge and all the years he’s put in. Even Jim Nantz, his longtime CBS partner, nodded toward Packer’s lack of popularity as he praised him.
“He protects the heart and soul of the sport,” Nantz told the Miami Herald, which broke the story Monday. “Fans don’t realize they owe Billy a thank-you.”
CBS announced that Packer, 68, would be replaced as Nantz’s color analyst by Clark Kellogg, who has worked as a studio and game announcer for the network for 16 years.
You can talk to a lot of college basketball fans about Billy Packer before you find one who enjoys his work. He’s a sharp analyst, but he’s also grouchy, imperious and overly fond of his native Atlantic Coast Conference, where Packer was a point guard for Wake Forest in the early ’60s. It’s a great basketball conference, but Packer’s job was color commentator, not ACC public relations man.
In three of the last five NCAA Tournaments, Packer has put his foot in his mouth in spectacular fashion. This year he declared, “This game is ovah!” when Kansas took a 38-12 lead over North Carolina in the first half. Nantz gave him a chance to back off, saying, “Is it?” and Packer said, “It is.”
Of course it wasn’t. Carolina roared back to make it a game before Kansas survived. Packer, in typical fashion, refused to really acknowledge his mistake afterward. “My job is to say what I see,” he said, “not have some kind of subconscious feelings about offending anybody.”
The problem wasn’t that he “offended anybody,” as if the only people who might have had an issue with what he said would have been hopelessly p.c. whiners. The problem was that Packer just flat-out got it wrong. His analysis was bad. And his job was to provide good analysis.
Everybody blows ‘em now and again, but it’s nice to be a human being about it and say, “Well, I screwed that one up,” instead of blaming the audience for being “offended.” The audience wasn’t offended, Billy. It just thought you sucked at your job that day.
In 2006 Packer ripped into the Tournament Selection Committee for including too many teams from so-called mid-major conferences, arguing that the big-conference bubble teams that got left out were superior to the various Missouri Valley Conference squads that made it.
Not only did the smaller-conference teams acquit themselves well in that Tournament, but George Mason of the Colonial Athletic Association electrified the nation with its run to the Final Four. But even if that year’s mid-majors had all gone down in flames, Packer’s comments would have been remarkably tin-eared. What Packer was doing was criticizing one of the very building blocks of the Tournament’s success, one of the things that makes it so exciting.
It’s simply more fun to have smaller teams from smaller conferences filling out the middle and lower parts of the brackets than to have underachieving big-conference teams there. Nobody cares if North Carolina State, seeded 11th in a down year, beats some solid big-conference No. 6. But make that 11th seed a team like George Mason or Wisconsin-Green Bay and you’ve got yourself a memorable Tournament moment. I wasn’t the only one who called 2006, with all its mid-major overachievers, the best Tournament ever.
Packer never understood that dynamic, and it left him out of touch with the people watching.
He had made a similar mistake in 2004, when he got into an on-air fight with Phil Martelli, the engaging coach at St. Joseph’s, arguing that St. Joe’s had no business as a No. 1 seed.
This was a team that had captured the public imagination that year, a small school that, led by the dynamic backcourt of Jameer Nelson and Delonte West, had gone undefeated until the conference tournament and entered March Madness at 27-1.
So maybe they were legitimately a No. 2, not a No. 1. Same difference. St. Joe’s ended up losing the regional final in a nail-biter to No. 1 Oklahoma State, so it turned out to be a coin-flip which team should have been the top seed. But in any case, here was a great story, and all Packer could do was spit all over it.
Packer won’t be widely missed in TV land because of that aspect of his personality. Kellogg, 47, is bland enough that we might end up missing Packer’s gruffness and willingness to shoot from the hip, even if he was often shooting up the wrong tree. But there won’t be any great outpouring of sadness over Packer’s departure.
That’s apparently fine with Packer, who told the Associated Press that the decision to replace him was mutual. “This decision was made with myself and CBS over a year ago,” he said. “Their timing to announce it is their business.” Packer said he’s also leaving his gig doing ACC games for Raycom and that he’s working on a college basketball project he’s not ready to discuss yet. He had nothing but good things to say about Kellogg.
Whether the decision was mutual or not, it’s an odd way for an institution to go out. Usually when someone leaves a post after three decades, even when there’s a little shove involved, there’s some tribute paid and gratitude shown. But all of CBS’s comments Monday were about Kellogg’s promotion, as if he were moving into a newly created position. Packer was an afterthought.
CBS, seeming to have aligned its thoughts with those of its college basketball viewers at long last, all but invited Packer not to let the door hit him on the way out.
About two weeks ago, my son asked me how a team with an imposing lineup like the New York Knicks could possibly have a losing record. “Because they have no point guard,” I said. They played like strangers. Either nobody wanted the ball or everybody did. Long intervals would pass without the Knicks putting up a decent shot — although being NBA players they often made enough bad ones to stay close.
Well, as the world knows, they have a point guard now. The feel-good story of Jeremy Lin, the underdog Chinese-American player from Harvard, has made NBA fans of millions who scarcely know the 24-second clock from a goaltending call. Here’s hoping they stick around, because it’s a heck of a show. Meanwhile, how about if we dialed down the ethnic sensitivity meter until the kid settles in?
As a lifelong basketball guy married to a coach’s daughter, I’m bewildered by people who say they love the college game but dislike the professionals. Around our house, the end of the NBA owner’s lockout was cause for celebration. It was going to be a long winter without “Da lig” as ESPN’s Hubie Brown pronounces it.
Does my sainted wife ever wish I didn’t watch a NBA game most nights? Absolutely. But I’d also bet you $20 she can name the Boston Celtics’ starting five. As for my sons, well, freeloading off dad’s NBA Season Pass helps keep us together. Some families argue about politics and religion; we bicker about LeBron James and the Miami Heat.
Anyway, from a strictly basketball perspective, what’s not to like about Jeremy Lin? The kid’s got a nice all-around game and an ideal point guard’s temperament; he’d sooner pass than shoot. He’s aggressive, but rarely forces plays that aren’t there. He’s got terrific court awareness and tactical smarts. He makes adjustments.
If Magic Johnson says Lin’s the real thing, that’s good enough for me. Magic’s always diplomatic, but he doesn’t lie.
However, Lin also commits too many turnovers. His on-ball defense is suspect. The New Jersey Nets’ Deron Williams recently lit him up for 38, shooting threes over him at will. Lin’s no Derrick Rose, Steve Nash or Rajon Rondo yet. We’ll see how his stamina holds up through a full NBA season; he’s wondered aloud about it himself. The Knicks need to find a backup; if Lin keeps playing 46 minutes every game, he’ll get hurt.
As for the hype, if the Knicks had Ricky Rubio, the brilliant 20-year-old Spanish point guard for Minnesota, Spike Lee would be sitting at courtside in a bullfighter costume, and people would be writing dopey articles about the link between flamenco rhythms and basketball. It’s just New York being New York.
“Linsanity” ain’t necessarily good for its object. There may be days when Lin wishes he could change places with Rubio.
Few NBA fans are astonished at an Asian-American player achieving stardom. It’s been an international league for years. (Ivy Leaguers aren’t unknown in the NBA either. Remember Bill Bradley? He ran for president.) There are NBA players from all five continents and Australia. One could put together an all-star team from Spain, Germany, Turkey, France, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Serbia and Great Britain that could compete against an all-American squad.
All racial and ethnic theories of basketball are bunk.
Religious ones too. Maybe the most absurd commentary came from the New York Times columnist David Brooks, who pronounced Lin an “anomaly” as “a religious person in professional sports.” Brooks, who evidently doesn’t own a TV set, has somehow missed all those jocks thanking their Lord and personal savior for hitting home runs and throwing touchdown passes, silly boys.
Look, Jeremy Lin is a fellow fortunate enough to make a handsome living putting an inflated rubber ball through an iron hoop, as millions of his clumsier brethren dreamed of doing in our youth. Watching him gives the rest of us a playground break, sometimes with adult beverages and cute cheerleaders. It has no transcendental meaning. It’s a ballgame.
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady probably said it best.
“Look at the attention I get,” he said. “It’s because I throw a football. But that’s what society values. That’s not what God values. God could give a [bleep] … He didn’t invent the game. We did. I have some eye-hand coordination, and I can throw the ball. I don’t think that matters to God.”
Meanwhile cueing up the MSNBC fake-outrage machine over a dumb ESPN headline about “a chink in the Knicks’ armor” doesn’t advance racial harmony. It impedes it. The phrase is what we pedants call a “homonym” — two unconnected words with identical pronunciation. It’s a hoary sports cliché having nothing to do with ethnicity.
The dope who wrote it in a 2:30 a.m. haze has apologized, and Lin was gracious enough to accept. So should everybody else.
Last week, I wrote a Salon essay about my experiences with racial bullying growing up in northern Minnesota; particularly, a pair of girls who decided to sing “ching-ching-a-ling” and pull their eyes into slits when they saw me in seventh-grade gym class. It was painful to write, and — from the responses I received — pretty painful to read, especially by anyone who had experienced bullying. Thus, it felt almost as if counteracting forces in the universe were acting to promote Jeremy Lin’s farm-team-to-bench-to-global-superstar ascent in the basketball world. Finally! Being Asian American was cool, not something to be bullied over.
I happened to be in New York at the apogee of Lin hysteria, and I stopped into a sports store near Times Square in hopes of scoring his jersey as a Valentine’s Day present for my husband. After swimming through a chaotic but amiable crowd, despite it being near midnight, I was dismayed to find only unwanted XXXXXXXL sizes. A clerk confirmed there were no more; in fact they’d just gotten their first shipment — and it had been decimated by feral shoppers.
Lin’s appeal has been decoded for two weeks now, and much of what has been said is true: As an Asian American, my ethnic pride has me following his career when I don’t even like basketball. He went to Harvard. A handshake with a teammate involves books, glasses and pocket protectors. One signature of his game is that he passes to teammates and makes everyone better; he isn’t a lonewolf showboater. Lin not only upends the nerdy Asian stereotypes, he owns them.
Yet I also hear white males unabashedly talk about weeping while watching him play. Other friends who, like me, don’t usually follow basketball know that he had a game on such-and-such night and scored more points that Kobe Bryant. The sports-store crowd in which I was displaying my Tae Kwon Do shopper skills was decidedly multiracial, multi-generational, multi-aged. We all want our Lin.
No athlete of late — particularly an Asian American athlete — has caught our American imaginations like this. To be Lin-spired is to watch Jeremy Lin on the court and want a little bit of that for yourself — you don’t want to be him, necessarily, you want to be a little more yourself. That’s why, as opposed to the recent editorials crowing the tired, ready-made (and implicitly condescending) narrative that he “transcends” race, the reality is quite the opposite. He’s not an Asian American Tim Tebow. His appeal comes from his unapologetic owning of who he is, whether that encompasses being Taiwanese American, a baller, a Harvard grad, economics major, a Christian, a nerd. He projects his specific Lin-ness with such grace and aplomb, it’s impossible not to be a little awed by that, to want a little Lin-spiration for yourself.
As a person who shares little of the above (just the nerdiness and the economics major) with Lin, when I watch him play, something deep inside me resonates, almost as if I am the one leaping like a gazelle and whisking in a three-pointer in the nail-biting last seconds of a tied game. This is I, graceful, unpressured, even as a person who cannot tie my shoes properly if someone is watching me.
What ties me to Lin is seeing that he is doing what he is good at and exactly what he wants to be doing. Which is what we all strive to do. Watching the ferocious joy — and the peace — that suffuses his face as he plays, this is the same feeling I have when I, a professional writer, am writing a great sentence. Flannery O’Connor, when asked why she writes, explains, “because I’m good at it.” What is life if not to find our purpose, our skill, pursue it, and to go for broke, as Jeremy Lin has done?
This week, the bloom is slightly off the rose. Not for Lin — he’s still on fire, still passing to his teammates. But deeply entrenched anti-Asian sentiments that lurk beneath the tectonic plates of society have to burp to the surface at some point (can we take a moment to remember that in the wide swath of American history, Japanese Americans were the only group ever to be interned on the basis of race/ethnicity?). There was ESPN’s sad and sadly predictable straight-from-the-bullies’-playbook “Chink in the Armor” headline about Lin done twice, both on its web site and spoken by an anchor. There was FoxSports.com’s Jason Whitlock’s “Some lucky lady’s gonna feel a few inches of pain” tweet, MSG’s airing the image of Lin’s head coming out of a fortune cookie, sportswriter Buzz Bissinger’s ingenious idea that Lin and Michael Vick should start a dog-meat (“Vietnamese-style”) restaurant, and the seemingly positive but still racially based “AMASIAN!” New York Post’s headline (just try substituting any other racial/ethnic group in there and see how that feels).
But ironically, these events have only strengthened the Jeremy Lin magic. He gracefully forgave the ESPN commentators, accepting their explanation of an “honest” mistake (while to me, it sounds just like my bully claiming she had amnesia during junior high and thus could not remember bullying me). Perhaps even more importantly, ESPN took it seriously, fired the headline writer and suspended the commentator. This is a seismic change for Asian America. It was in 1982 when Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American out for his bachelor party in Detroit ended up dead, pelted by racial epithets, his head bludgeoned by a baseball bat by some out-of-work autoworkers who were mad at Japan (“It’s because of you … that we’re out of work!”). The two murderers served no time, and were fined $3,000. It is easy for white males like Buzz Bissinger to say racial epithets are no big deal, that Lin continues to play well despite them — but racial epithets are only a verbal expression of the poison that exists inside.
I don’t necessarily feel ESPN hustled to punish the “Chink in the Armor” perpetrators out of a sense of racial justice, but even if not, Jeremy Lin, with his talent, popularity and his humanity has forced the people who cheer him on to acknowledge that he’s a person, as opposed to the way Asian Americans are so frequently seen as Wesley Yang wrote in New York magazine last year: “a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.”
I endured months of racial bullying, two girls to my one. It wasn’t until some “tough” girls took it upon themselves to stop the bullying, that I realized how pernicious my internalizing of the “ching-a-ling” trope. I thought I was ignoring the bullies, but what I was doing was not defending myself. By their action, the tough girls showed me I was worth defending. Just yesterday, as I have been continuing to muse publicly on the sad spectacle of racism following in the wake of Jeremy Lin’s rise, I received an angry note from a white man saying “Be like Jeremy Lin and GET OVER IT!” Now, I can tell him, yes, I try, but somehow I just can’t get over racism. Or having white men telling me how I should feel.
But perhaps Lin-spiration can help us see we are all special selves, worthy of nurturing, cheering on, and defending. Indeed, it might take you from thinking, “…I wish I were a baller… I wish I were taller…” to a place where you might find a little more joy in being yourself, just a little bit better.
David Brooks had to write a column about something, and his deadline was fast approaching, so he glanced at the sports page and saw something about New York Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin, and he was like, yeah, that works. Next stop, most-emailed list!
Lin is a point guard who rocketed to near-instant celebrity when he came off the bench and had a series of monster games, dragging the Knicks to a .500 record while their two biggest superstars were sitting out games. His celebrity then became a “mania” in part because he’s Asian-American and a Harvard graduate, two rarities in the NBA. It also obviously doesn’t hurt that he plays for the dominant team in the nation’s biggest media market (also it’s the fallow period between football and baseball). That’s basically the whole deal, and if you’d like to learn more read Andrew Leonard’s account of the early social media explosion and Alexander Chee’s take on Lin and Asian-American identity. Whatever you do, don’t read David Brooks’ take on the Lin phenomenon, because David Brooks doesn’t understand basketball or social media or race or religion or American society in general.
Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:
Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.
Here is the next sentence:
We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.
Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)
So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)
While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)
Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)
But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.
For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.
I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)
The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.
In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.
Lin-sanity has broken out all over the world. The kid nobody in the NBA wanted, from an ethnic group about as associated with the NBA as bullfighters are with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had just broken Shaquille O’Neal’s league record for the most points in his first five games as a starter. Adoring fans are holding up signs saying “To Lin-finity and beyond.” The Lin-ternet has broken under the strain of millions of tweets, many of them featuring even worse puns than “Lin-ternet.” Sports Illustrated put him on its cover.
And, of course, Asian-Americans are going wild.
I’m one of them. As a half-Japanese, half-white ex-jock, I’ve always followed and rooted for that tiny number of Asian-Americans who make it in any of my three favorite sports, the all-American Big Three of football, basketball and baseball. (There are lots of Asian baseball players, but not many Asian-Americans.) Half-Japanese players get even more points. The triumphs of Olympic speed skater Apolo Ohno had me feeling my half-breed oats. And when former Giants’ hurler Atlee Hammaker, a hapa like me, melted down in the 1987 playoffs, my inner mulatto got a lot more tragic.
There’s no great mystery why I root for Asian-American jocks. It’s the same reason any member of a minority group pulls for one of their own: racial pride and solidarity. There are so damn few of “us” in the big leagues (I’m an “us” with an asterisk) that when one makes it, it’s cause for celebration.
The first thing to note about Lin-mania is that America is basically just fine with it. The mainstream media features photos of Asian fans wearing Lin T-shirts and runs stories in which they are quoted as expressing racial pride. It is all deemed benign and heartwarming, a multicultural Cinderella story in which everyone wins. The Asian kid overcomes impossible odds and racial stereotypes – if white men can’t jump, Asian men are not even supposed to be able to hop – to make it in the NBA. Horatio Alger meets the Statue of Liberty in the land of the melting pot.
But race is such a minefield in American society, and honest conversation about it is so constrained by politically correct politeness, that even the Lin story makes people tongue-tied, as if they thought that admitting that yes, people root for players because of their race would cause the Ku Klux Klan to rise again.
Case in point: an ESPN panel’s reaction to boxer Floyd Mayweather’s now-notorious tweet in which he said, “Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.” The latter part of Mayweather’s comment, implying that black players are not praised the way Lin has been because of racism, is a total crock, another one of Mayweather’s heavy-handed attempts to provoke a race controversy. But his comment that the hype over Lin is because he’s Asian is clearly true. Not all the hype, but most of it – and the most interesting part of it – is precisely because Lin is Asian. Does anyone think SI would put Lin on the cover if he were black or white?
This is so obvious that it strains credulity to think that anyone would even try to dispute it. And yet when four panelists on ESPN’s First Take were asked to comment on Mayweather’s comments, only one of the four, Bomani Jones, was able to forthrightly acknowledge it. Absurdly, sports reporter Beto Duran actually denied that Lin’s race had anything to do with the hype, saying it was simply because “he’s balling.” Eventually, they all admitted that race played a role in the hype, but their reluctance to go there spoke volumes about how radioactive all discussions of race in sports continue to be.
And the Lin story is the most non-threatening possible race-in-sports story, one involving a societal minority group that is also so underrepresented in the NBA as to be positively exotic. If America has trouble admitting that it’s OK for Asians – or members of any other race, for that matter – to root for Jeremy Lin because he’s Asian, just imagine how it deals with the issue of white people rooting for athletes because they’re white. Even to suggest such a thing is considered way out of bounds.
But there’s nothing wrong with it. I’ve been doing it for years. And it’s completely racially innocent.
Just as the Asian part of me celebrates the unlikely success of Jeremy Lin, the white part of me celebrates the almost equally unlikely success of New England Patriot running back Danny Woodhead. Rooting for white players who break out of racial stereotypes is harmless. It does not mean rooting against black players or those of any other race. It’s fun. And I suspect a lot of other people do it, too.
I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh and his followers, most of whom I suspect are bigots who are rooting against black players as much as they are rooting for white ones. (In a brilliant, half-crazy 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books, “The White Man Unburdened,” Norman Mailer argued that one of the reasons Americans supported Bush’s Iraq war was that so many reactionary white men needed to regain a masculinity threatened when their white sports stars were replaced by blacks.) I’m talking about people who are able to acknowledge the reality that white running backs and cornerbacks are almost as rare as Asian point guards, and are sufficiently free from racial uptightness or self-consciousness to root for them for precisely that reason.
I’ve never agreed with the quasi-official view, expressed in endless “diversity” seminars held by big corporations and piously promulgated in schools and universities, that everyone is to some degree a racist and needs to engage in constant Maoist “constructive self-criticism” to become more racially enlightened. That ortho-liberal view has always struck me as a sterile guilt-trip, a recipe for racial constipation that only breeds more racial animosity and misunderstanding. However, it does contain a grain of truth. Everyone is not a racist, but everyone is aware of race. Unfortunately, much of the time this awareness is lugubrious and heavy, both because of America’s long and painful history of racism and because we haven’t come up with any lighter ways of dealing with race. Sports offers one of those ways.
When I root for white NFL players like Danny Woodhead or retired New York Giants’ cornerback Jason Sehorn, or white 2004 Olympic 400-meter gold medalist Jeremy Wariner, I’m not rooting against black athletes. In fact, the very fact white running backs or cornerbacks or 400 runners are so rare is a testament to the sheer dominance of African-American athletes at those ultimate bad-ass positions. It just makes my white-boy self happy to have a few Caucasians in that Olympian company. It’s exactly the same attitude expressed by Charles Barkley when he says, “Steve Nash is one bad white boy.” Is acknowledging this really going to make Lester Maddox rise from the grave, baseball bat in hand?
I suspect that many of those white fans who do root for unlikely white stars are uneasy about acknowledging it for the same reason that they (rightfully) believe that only blacks can use the n-word. It’s the liberal racial double standard, which is predicated on the fact that racism, in particular bigotry against black people, is still very much alive. (Have you checked out the GOP primaries lately?) Charles Barkley is allowed to say “Steve Nash is one bad white boy,” but white people are not, because when they do, it could be construed as racism. White talk about race in America is governed by a priori semiotic censorship: Any statement that could be interpreted as racially suspect is ruled out.
This prior restraint on white speech makes sense in some areas. If someone goes around complaining that white people are all discriminated against and black people get all the breaks, and celebrates some white businessman for that reason, he’s either a fool, a racist or a demagogue. (See above comment about the GOP primaries.) But cheering for white running backs or cornerbacks is different. They aren’t discriminated against. It’s just that 99 percent of the time, they aren’t good enough to play the position. That’s a fact. And when they do make it, it’s fun to identify with them.
It would be stupid to make too big a deal out of this. It’s strictly lighthearted. It’s a holiday from racial politeness, a bit of benign tribalism. I don’t usually hold with tribalism, but we all have a little of it in us, and as long as it’s innocent, we might as well enjoy it from time to time. Besides, as someone who has covered three Olympics, I can attest that national tribalism trumps racial or ethnic tribalism. Every red-blooded American, of whatever race, watching the finals of the 4×100-meter relays at Sydney or Athens was for that moment an honorary black person.
And anyway, it’s all changing. When I saw Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang win the 110 meter hurdles in Athens, I knew that the world of sports would never be the same again. Races and ethnicities are mixing more and more, old athletic stereotypes are dying, and great athletes are popping up in the most unexpected places. Right now, the Jeremy Lin show has captured the world. Tomorrow, a black hockey player will challenge Wayne Gretzky as the Great One, or a heavyweight champion will come from Iceland. The infinite diversity of the human race is displayed in all its glory in sports, and there’s nothing wrong with appreciating every last part of it. Even if it means rooting for a bad white boy.
I have never cared about basketball, ever. Not once. Yet inside of the last two weeks I have learned what a point guard is, what he does and why it matters. I had a roller-coaster night Saturday, when I wanted to watch a New York Knicks game for the first time, then learned that a squabble between Madison Square Garden and Time Warner has left about 1 million fans without MSG Channel (including me). I didn’t even know how to start finding a bar with the game on — something I’ve previously resented, in fact — so I contented myself by watching the video diaries on Lin’s YouTube channel.
Days later, sometime yesterday, in fact, when I caught myself reading a post about the couch Jeremy Lin slept on before his first night as the Knicks’ new star point guard, I had two reactions. First, it didn’t look big enough for him. The next one: Wait, who am I — and more important, what is happening to me? It was like I was in a “Portlandia” sketch about Linsanity.
The gated community that was the NBA has had a crasher arrive and jump the fence: JLin, the Linja, the Linsanity, Super Lintendo, the Yellow Mamba to Kobe Bryant’s Black Mamba. (Kobe learned this the hard way the other night, when the Knicks beat his Lakers, right after he had asked “Who is this kid?”) That nickname alone is as good a place as any to begin. Before Jeremy Lin arrived, there was not even the thought of a Yellow Mamba. There was no major Asian American NBA star who captured the hearts of fans. There were no fans wearing cutout masks of an Asian American player courtside as a group. Houston Rockets center Yao Ming may have been a forerunner, but he was an import, the beloved alien.
The NBA, much like America’s conversation about race, has been something of a black and white ball — and Asian American stars were simply not invited to the dance. Consider the college coaches who overlooked him because they “didn’t have a frame of reference” for his talents, or the NBA teams that released Lin, suddenly red-faced as the moribund Knicks win six straight.
Whatever screen you’re watching on, your phone, computer or TV, it’s the Jeremy Lin show now, and the whole country is tuning in. The boxer Floyd Mayweather insisting that Lin’s only getting attention because he’s Asian — do we think Floyd knows anything about basketball? There are Pinterest posts of his sixth-grade class photo and endless online nickname contests. He’s everywhere you look. When was the last time you saw a bigger crush of people trying to nickname a new star?
This urge to nickname Lin is an effort by people to act like they know him. What we’re learning, however, is that he’s as difficult to pin down culturally as he is on the court. He continues to defy expectations. Maybe you thought there were no tall Asians, didn’t know about Asian Christians or didn’t think Asians could play basketball. Maybe you never cared about basketball, never cared about the Knicks. Or maybe you didn’t need a crash course on what a point guard does. Maybe you thought you were done with Christian sports figures. Either way, chances are you’ve learned something new watching Jeremy Lin, about him, yourself and other people.
My first thought on seeing Jeremy Lin was that he reminded me of my cousins. Like many, I felt like I knew him. He’s a kind of kid I’ve seen my whole life — funny, smart, quick and brave. And Asian American. When I heard he was a Harvard grad, I thought: Of course, the first Asian American NBA superstar also had to go to Harvard and get better than a 3.0. And then: Way to raise the stakes on the Asian American overachiever. It’s still true that whatever color you are in America, if you’re not white you have to be twice as good to get half as far. But the Jeremy Lin paradox is that this champion — this skinny kid just out of college, this overlooked smiling Taiwanese American kid with, as we say, ‘the good Asian hair’ that is thick and stands straight up — he is making room for the rest of us. Part of the Jeremy Lin moment is America looking at an Asian American and realizing he’s just an American, too.
The great irony to his moment is that Jeremy Lin as a national figure is so much better than anyone I might have dreamed up as a possible solution to a problem with a body count: Asian Americans are currently the No. 1 most bullied demographic in America. The same invisibility that kept Jeremy Lin outside the “frame of reference” of coaches also kept the two different units who hounded Cpl. Harry Lew and Pvt. Danny Chen to suicide last year with constant racist taunts and physical abuse from realizing they were well outside the limits of respectful internal military discipline.
It would be laying way too much on Jeremy Lin to ask him to help turn this around, as if he didn’t have enough to do as point guard for the Knicks. But we don’t have to ask him — it is already just happening. Jeremy Lin’s getting slapped around a lot at Madison Square Garden, but it’s all love — when he drained that game-winning three-pointer in the last half-second against Toronto Tuesday night, he was covered in punches — the kind you can only give the hero who pulls it out of the bag. I still have a strange impulse when I see him, like I want to run out there, help on defense — me who has never played basketball! — or yell “Back up off the skinny kid!” even when they rush him with love. It’s just from a whole lifetime of watching bullying happen, a lifetime of people — white, black, Latin — coming up to me, my brother, my sister, my cousins, muttering under their breath “Ching Chong Ching Chong,” the prelude to a beating. But it’s only post-traumatic stress disorder; it’s not the present. No one on the Knicks is saying that to him. He has this.
And while Jeremy Lin may not single-handedly make all of the bullying go away, somewhere in America, at least one Asian American kid right now is getting invited into a pick-up game instead of cornered and beaten. That’s the game that matters, more than anything you’ll see during a Knicks game. And Lin is helping win that one, too.
(Credit: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz) 
Jeremy Lin (Credit: Reuters/Adam Hunger) 
David Brooks 
Why so excited? (Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese) 
Fans of Jeremy Lin hold up signs during the second half of the New York Knicks/Toronto Raptors game on Tuesday. (Credit: Reuters/Mike Cassese) 
