Jeremy Lin Read online

  © 2012 by Ted Kluck

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6122-9

  Unless otherwise identified, Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Scripture quotations identified ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2007

  The Internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.

  Cover design by Dan Pitts

  Cover photo: AFP/Getty Images

  Author is represented by Wolgemuth & Associates

  For my sons, Tristan and Maxim. May we always shoot baskets together.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: An Open Letter to the Reader: What Does All of This Say About Us?

  1. A Cultural Oddity: Jeremy Lin and Shifting Racial Paradigms (or What Kind of NBA Superstar Will Jeremy Lin Be?)

  2. New York Knicks vs. Dallas Mavericks: February 19, 2012

  3. Jeremy Lin in the Context of Tim Tebow

  4. New York Knicks vs. New Jersey Nets: February 4, 2012

  5. I Did It My Way: No Fear of Man

  6. New York Knicks vs. Miami Heat: February 23, 2012

  7. Basketball and Gospel: God and the Christian Athlete; God and the Christian Fan

  8. Jeremy Lin Then and Now: vs. John Wall, NBA Summer League; vs. Kobe Bryant, February 10, 2012

  9. The NBA All-Star Weekend Is an Overproduced Gong Show

  10. New York Knicks vs. Boston Celtics: March 4, 2012

  11. On Making All Things New and Our Responsibility to Jeremy Lin

  Resources

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Jeremy Lin for playing great basketball. If you hadn’t had a couple of magical weeks on the court, I wouldn’t be writing this. You’ve made it much more fun to watch the NBA, and you seem like a genuinely great guy. Let’s hang out sometime.

  Thanks to Andy McGuire, my editor at Bethany House, for being cool and taking risks and bringing this project to me. Andy, you’re a guy who likes to push envelopes and roll dice on occasion, and to quote Rod Tidwell from Jerry McGuire, “I dig that about you.”

  Thanks as well to my agent, Andrew Wolgemuth, for shepherding this fast-track project as well as the rest of my career. There are undoubtedly easier, and higher-earning, clients in your stable, and I appreciate your loyalty and friendship. You’re a pro’s pro.

  As always (but more so this time), thank you to my wife, Kristin, for your love, loyalty, forgiveness, and grace. And thanks for putting up with all the NBA basketball I had to watch over the last few weeks. And please resist the urge to name our next child either Carmelo or Metta World Peace.

  Introduction

  An Open Letter to the Reader: What Does All of This Say About Us?

  Dear Reader,

  Let me be the first to acknowledge the weirdness that lies in writing a book about a man who, as I type this, is playing his sixth significant game of NBA basketball (tonight versus the hapless New Orleans Hornets). When I hit “upload” on this manuscript, I will have spent more days typing about Jeremy Lin than Jeremy Lin will have spent doing the thing about which I am writing.

  I’m writing from a basement in Nebraska, where I am on assignment doing research for another book, and was pressed into emergency Jeremy Lin action by an editor who called and said, “Do you think you can get me a Jeremy Lin book in three weeks?” Similar calls, no doubt, are being placed all over publishing. Even in Franklin, Nebraska (population 971), they’ve heard of him. When the evangelical/reformed blogosphere got wind that his favorite book was a John Piper title, it blew up in exultation. “Finally, a thoughtful one!” was the unintended subtext of many of the early fawning articles.

  All of that to say, what may be most interesting about Jeremy Lin—New York Knickerbocker and cultural object—is what the Jeremy Lin infatuation says about us. This is true of most cultural objects. In the 1960s and ’70s, liking Muhammad Ali (or Joe Frazier, conversely) said a lot about a particular fan’s worldview. By now, a full week and a half in, here are a few things we know about Jeremy Lin:

  He is Asian-American.

  He went to Harvard. And graduated.

  He toiled in the National Basketball Developmental League (NBDL), which is the only non-romanticized minor league in sports (besides arena football). There may in fact be nothing more depressing in professional sports than minor league basketball.

  He was released by two NBA clubs (the Golden State Warriors, Lin’s favorite childhood team, and the Houston Rockets) before catching on with the Knicks.

  He crashed on his older brother’s couch (or teammate Landry Fields’s couch, depending on conflicting couch-related reports) before finally signing a real contract with the Knicks.

  That contract will pay him in the neighborhood of $877,000 (give or take) per year.

  That’s the league minimum.

  He’s twenty-three years old.

  He has (now) had two consecutive Sports Illustrated covers.

  He scored 136 points in his first five starts—all wins.

  He’s been the only thing big enough to have rescued us from a winter of ESPN features on Tim Tebow, the lantern-jawed, clean-cut NFL quarterback and Great American Hero to whom Lin is being (unfairly, I think) compared (more on that later).

  These are all things you know already if you have turned on a computer or a television over the course of the last nine days. The fact that we live in a world where we’re making a book-worthy superstar out of a man after nine days of work speaks volumes about us and is proof of the fact that we live in a crazy world in need of a Redeemer. We also know this:

  Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, has received lots of airtime in Tim Tebow interviews, and He is the one who gives and takes away athletic careers. Right now He has given one to Jeremy Lin. We’re all enjoying it tremendously.

  Jeremy Lin has vocally proclaimed a belief in that Redeemer, and it’s my job to write a little more deeply about that vocal belief. It’s a job I’m excited about, as there is nothing in life—even basketball, superstardom, or the ultimate rags-to-riches story—that can touch the glorious grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

  Jeremy Lin’s nine-day (and counting) run of NBA stardom is why I’m typing and why you’re reading. There are many things he can (and should) be for us, and a few that he can’t and shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be an idol. As great, smart, interesting, and capable as he is, he will disappoint us, as all idols eventually disappoint. He shouldn’t be a fount for our theology—even though he shows signs of depth and maturity there too. He shoul
dn’t even be a symbol for anything in particular, even though if his career somehow freakishly ends tonight he has already shifted paradigms about what people who look/act like Jeremy Lin can/should be.

  * * *

  Aside: As I type this, Lin is losing his first game as a cultural icon. He was photographed with a film director, Spike Lee, who is lately more famous for sitting courtside at Madison Square Garden than he is for making films. Lee was already wearing a piece of swag that will be available soon at a website near you (a Jeremy Lin Palo Alto High School jersey). Lin went for 26 points and 5 assists in an 89–85 loss.

  * * *

  What Lin can and should be is a kid who joyfully plays his game with heart and passion. He can and should be someone who livens up an interview room with his candor and thoughtfulness—a candor and thoughtfulness that hasn’t yet been veneered and lacquered beyond recognition by PR executives or greedy media-savvy parents or an agenda that extends beyond being thankful for an amazing opportunity to compete. One thing we enjoy about Lin is his newness. Perhaps in some small way it’s a reminder that Jesus makes all things new, even in a world (sports) where it’s easy to feel like we have seen and experienced it all already. A world where “meh” and ironic detachment are kings.

  I’m a white, male nonfiction author, which is just about the most boring thing someone can be these days. So I don’t find specific, personal inspiration in Lin’s Asian-ness. Nor am I even a rabid fan of a particular NBA team. Lin’s particular brand of genius is in the fun he appears to be having. It makes me want to go into the driveway and shoot baskets, which may be the highest compliment you can pay an athlete.

  A word regarding format: My publisher has given me all of three weeks and 15,000 words (give or take) to tell the Lin story. That said, there won’t be coverage of every game, and the games that I do cover may be out of order, as I’m choosing to look at Lin conceptually, rather than chronologically. Which is another way to say I won’t be “telling the whole Lin story,” as it were. If you want 275 pages of quotes like “Jeremy was a hard-working student and a real humble third-grader” and “Jeremy has been an inspiration to Asian-Americans everywhere over the last two weeks,” I would suggest going elsewhere.

  Watching the Knicks, and waiting for this deal, is like watching the stock market. I have a few shares of Jeremy Lin, Inc., and while I wait for my publisher to have the requisite fifty-five committee meetings necessary to approve a project, I’m praying Lin doesn’t sprain an ankle or have a horrendous shooting night. Time is of the essence. I’m breaking the cardinal rule of publishing (and pro sports, for that matter), which is “Don’t begin work without a contract.” Rod Tidwell would be ashamed of me.

  By the time this ebook hits the online shelves, you will be either still thinking about Lin or mostly done thinking about him, having journeyed on to the next Tweet or the next YouTube sensation. I’m inviting you, either way, to give him some thought with me. There is more to Lin than can be captured in catchy headlines and two-minute sound bites. By this point we will have used his image to sell beer, big trucks, jerseys, hot dogs, and maybe even this book. I think we owe it to him to give him a moment or two more of our thoughts.

  Yours, in sports and in Christ,

  Ted Kluck

  1

  A Cultural Oddity

  Jeremy Lin and Shifting Racial Paradigms (or What Kind of NBA Superstar Will Jeremy Lin Be?)

  We’re each other’s friends.

  —Celtics center Bill Russell, following the last of his NBA titles in 1969

  There is high school basketball footage of Jeremy Lin in which he looks not unlike all high school basketball players, i.e., skinny and unremarkable. He is the farthest possible thing from “man child” or “freak of nature.” LeBron James he isn’t. He isn’t plying his trade in some gritty inner-city gymnasium, nor is he performing in front of a gym full of college scouts at a shoe-company-sponsored summer tournament. In the same video package there is an interview with a high school coach who implies that discrimination may have played a role in Lin’s lack of recruitment. That if he were “another race” he may not have had to walk on, sans scholarship, at Harvard.

  What that coach is saying without coming out and saying it is that we expect professional basketball to be played by tall, tattooed black men who either didn’t go to college or, if they did, didn’t stay there very long. The fact of the matter is that college is usually a very brief stepping-stone on the way to the NBA for basketball’s elite. The number of college graduates playing in the NBA is woefully low. The number of Asian-Americans playing in the NBA is, currently, one. The last Harvard graduate to play in the NBA played in an era (the 1950s) when canvas Converse All-Stars were worn by NBA players rather than worn ironically by emaciated hipsters in Brooklyn.

  “Jeremy Lin is a good player,” Tweeted boxer Floyd Mayweather, “but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.” Granted, Mayweather is a boxer, so he’s expected to be some kind of an idiot. (And he’s proven this assumption correct time and time again.) If what Mayweather said were really true, NBA teams would be calling up new black NBDL point guards every week and expecting similar results. What Lin has done is noteworthy because of what it is, not just because he doesn’t look the part.

  “This is beyond anything I could have ever imagined,” says the high school coach. I am inclined to believe him. “This is a miracle from God, is how I would describe it,” says Lin in another interview clip. “He knows it’s a gift . . . and it keeps him grounded,” explains a pastor.

  The New York Knicks website landing page featured a screen-filling image of Lin with the words “Join the Linsanity! Follow the Knicks!”

  The list of big-name players signed or drafted by New York who have failed to capture the imaginations of fans or the New York media is longer than I have room for in this project. It includes but is not limited to players like New York’s own Stephon Marbury and current Knicks Amare Stoudamire and Carmelo Anthony.

  While taking nothing away from those players, their greatest flaw is that in word and in appearance, they are basically like everyone else in the NBA. Perhaps the most unique thing about Lin isn’t his Asian-ness or even the fact that he went to Harvard. It’s the fact that he had other options. Harvard economics grads usually go on to buy and sell people. They become rich by conventional, non-basketball means. Lin is perhaps most interesting because he chose to pursue basketball, which was in many ways, at least on paper, the least sensible of his options.

  * * *

  Aside: You can by a T-shirt on eBay that features a graphic of a Chinese takeout box with the words “That’s My Linja!” on it.

  * * *

  It will be Lin’s job to do what is essential but also often impossible in today’s NBA—bringing together the disparate parts that make up an NBA roster. By the time this book hits your e-reader, we’ll hopefully be done being awed by the fact that Lin went to Harvard and is Asian-American. His job, if he’s still playing at a high level, will be much more difficult—getting the most out of Anthony and Stoudamire, and doing so in a league where individual compensation is closely tied to individual statistical production. It’s a league where Stoudamire can be considered a star even though he is often a defensive liability and usually does very little to create shots for his teammates.

  What remains to be seen is whether Lin is the one great player around whom NBA championships are built—like Tim Duncan, young Shaq, Kobe, Magic, Bird, and Jordan. Or, more likely, if Lin is one of the one or two elite role players also necessary for a title run—guys like James Worthy, Horace Grant, Joe Dumars, and Tony Parker, who complement the marquee player. These are players who aren’t obsessed about their stat sheet and do whatever it takes to win.

  What’s so interesting about these Knicks is that we don’t yet know what role Lin will fill, because let’s face it, he really didn’t exist a few weeks ago. And what’s more, we don
’t know what role Stoudamire and Carmelo Anthony (injured, thus far, except for the breakout Nets game) will fill on the suddenly Lin-led Knicks. They formerly sat atop the star-system pecking order, but now that Lin is the toast of New York, it will be interesting to see how they fall into place and if they’re able to accept new roles.

  In his great book Life on the Run, former Knick Bill Bradley says, “I believe that basketball, when a certain level of unselfish team play is realized, can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish personal impulses. . . . Statistics—such as points, rebounds, and assists per game—can never explain the remarkable interaction that takes place on a successful pro team.”

  Of course, Lin is being measured, mainly, by his statistics. He’s being lauded for the 38-point effort against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, mostly, as well as the potential for the kind of team greatness and cohesion that has eluded the Knicks since the Oakley/Starks/Ewing era. We’ll get a glimpse of whether or not there’s “remarkable interaction” as the season wears on and the Knicks, with Lin, struggle. Sports, at this level, no longer builds character, it reveals it.

  “You have to watch the games,” says ESPN columnist Bill Simmons in The Book of Basketball. “You have to pay attention. You cannot be seduced by stats and numbers.” It is in the games where Jeremy Lin is most interesting, and it’s in watching the games where the quest for Knick chemistry will or won’t be revealed. The smallness of the rosters, the ridiculousness of the salaries, and the emotional ebb and flow are, to me, what makes NBA basketball so compelling.

  “The point,” Bradley writes in Life on the Run, “is not how well the individual does, but if the team wins.”