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February 21, 2012

Oh the humanity, stop the Linsanity

By Jeff Mullin, columnist Enid News & Eagle

Poor Jeremy Lin.

A month ago nobody outside his family and friends knew who he was.

He’s a smart kid, a Harvard graduate, and they don’t give Harvard diplomas away in boxes of Cracker Jack. I should know. I’ve looked.

He played basketball at Harvard and decided to try to make a go of it in the professional game.

As of a month ago that wasn’t going real well. He wasn’t drafted, but signed with his hometown team, Golden State, in 2010. He averaged 2.6 points per game in his rookie season, but the Warriors waived him. He was picked up by the Houston Rockets prior to this season, then waived again.

So the New York Knicks claimed him off waivers to be a backup point guard. On Jan. 17 they sent him to the Erie BayHawks of the NBA’s developmental league. On Jan. 20 he had a triple double for the BayHawks, 28 points, 11 rebounds and 12 assists. The Knicks recalled him three days later.

He didn’t want to commit to a lease in New York, so he slept on the couch in the home of his brother and teammate Landry Fields.

That was just more than a month ago. Today, Jeremy Lin is the biggest name in the NBA.

Based on their coverage of him, in fact, ESPN seems to think Jeremy Lin has become bigger than the sport itself.

Since early this month Lin has led the Knicks to seven wins in eight games, and has sparked a national craze known as “Linsanity.”

He is being compared to Tim Tebow (he says Tebow inspires him), and being linked romantically to Kim Kardashian (he says she’s not his type). Now Notre Dame basketball coach Mike Brey is comparing his overachieving team to Lin.

Members of Lin’s family in Taiwan, including his grandmother, are being hounded by the media. He asks the media to respect their privacy.

Even Lin himself has become something of a target because of his Asian-American heritage. ESPN’s website published a headline slammed as racist after the Knicks’ loss to New Orleans on Friday. The network took down the headline, fired the headline writer and suspended an ESPN anchor who used the same phrase on the air. The network also apologized to Lin, who said he is putting it behind him.

The next thing you know someone is going to put him in the same New York icon realm with Reggie Jackson, Joe Namath and Derek Jeter.

Let us step back just a moment and take a deep breath. Lin is a good player and his story is a great one — an undrafted, unheralded kid who comes out of nowhere and takes the NBA by storm. Good for him. More power to him.

That said, let’s not clear out a spot for him in the hall of fame just yet. He still has much to learn, as evidenced by the fact he turns the ball over too much, 7.2 turnovers per game, in fact, in his last five contests. Not that he can’t learn, mind you. They don’t admit dummies to Harvard (I should know, I tried).

If Jeremy Lin was playing for the Charlotte Bobcats, let’s say, nobody outside of the most hard-core NBA junkies would have heard of him. But he just happens to play in the media capital of the known universe, so he is no longer Jeremy Lin, but JEREMY LIN.

Jeremy Lin can no longer go to the corner store for a soda and a candy bar after practice without attracting thousands of fans, at least five minutes of air time on the next ESPN SportsCenter and, presumably, Kim Kardashian.

And he’ll spend the rest of his career trying to live up to the hype surrounding the first part of it.

Poor Jeremy Lin.

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