[h1]Rise of New York Knicks’ Jeremy Lin delightfully confusing[/h1]
New York Knicks' Jeremy Lin (17) drives past Los Angeles Lakers' Matt Barnes (9) during the first half of an NBA basketball game, Friday, Feb. 10, 2012, in New York.
Frank Franklin II / AP
[h3]By Dan Le Batard[/h3][h3]
[email protected][/h3]
How does Jeremy Lin happen?
How is it even possible?
Sports are about the closest thing we have to a meritocracy. This sport scours the earth for granules of talent and doesn’t often get fooled by packaging. It doesn’t matter if you are a 5-3 bowling ball from Baltimore (Muggsy Bogues) or a 7-6 foul pole from the Sudan (Manute Bol), if you can play even a little, you will get an opportunity to prove it. With all the eyes and information and resources surrounding sports, in an obsessive era when even grade-school talent is being ranked and mined, basketball stars don’t just fall out of the sky as if by parachute.
But Lin didn’t get any athletic scholarships out of high school. He was undrafted out of college. He bounced around the D-League’s Reno (Nev.) Bighorns and Erie (Pa.) Bayhawks before being waived by Golden State and Houston, something the Rockets general manager now concedes was a mistake. I know the discovery of sports talent is very unscientific, but I have to wonder: Is this wonderful story a byproduct of — and I’ve never had this much difficulty separating these two particular things — magic or profiling? Was Lin overlooked because every expert doing the looking thought Lin was wearing a disguise?
Lin is equal parts sports miracle and magic carpet ride, but he is something else, too: Very confusing. His rise doesn’t have a lot of precedent, not in this sport, from end-of-the-bench obscurity to star in the snap of fingers. He was sleeping on his brother’s couch a week ago, and now the Atlanta Hawks are finishing off their win in another city and running to the locker room to find out what Lin did (38 points, of course, against Kobe and the Lakers). The NBA is littered with men who get waived and doubted, men who struggle and persevere to make it to the league. But none of them get to be dreams-do-come-true stars for a week, name in bright lights in New York, with the awe that follows domination and discovery. From struggle to role player in basketball, maybe. From struggle to star, never.
Startling streak
In basketball, the talent is obvious to the eye. You see it early, and then watch it grow. It doesn’t usually get off the bench to dominate a sport’s headlines for a week, never mind off its brother’s couch. Lin wasn’t even a rumor or a whisper a week ago, which seems nearly impossible in the information age. For four games, he has been LeBron, albeit a LeBron in Asian-American packaging. LeBron is the only other guy in the league this season who has put a consistent, four-game streak of 20-plus points, five-plus assists and 50-plus percent shooting. In the history of the league, nobody has ever scored more points in his first four starts than Lin has. Let that one marinate. Nobody in his first four starts has ever scored more points than this guy who was almost completely unknown a week ago. You might find this in fiction or fable, in a colorful book for children, but there’s no precedent for it in the cold, cruel world of competition.
And then there’s this: Lin had been buried on the bench of a bad team — a bad team desperate for a point guard, no less. His coach, a man who gets paid $6 million a year and is supposed to be an expert in point guards, was watching him every day in practice and needed a point guard, mind you. But Mike D’Antoni didn’t play Lin until Amare Stoudemire had to leave the team because his brother died in a car accident and Carmelo Anthony limped off with a groin pull and Baron Davis had a setback in his rehab. So a storm of things conspired to make this so, including a weak schedule, a New York hype math that Times Squares everything and the fact that somebody has to get the statistics to get an NBA team to 80 or 90 points each night.
This all could be a small sample-size mirage, four games of math not enough to prove the mysticism, because as both Shaquille O’Neal and Aristotle said, you are what you consistently do.
Four games don’t prove anything. Bob Sura once had three consecutive triple-doubles. But Lin at least has our attention, and it begs the question: Given what we’ve now seen, given how desperate his team was specifically for his type of play, given that his coach is an alleged expert in point guards and was watching him every day, how in the name of all that is holy and sane didn’t he get any of that attention long before now?
Eye for talent
Such an unscientific thing, talent evaluation in sports, kind of like searching for treasure with a metal detector on the beach. We like to give the dictators and generals in sports a special eye for seeing the unseen because the idea of leadership is a romantic one, and easy to worship, but Bill Belichick, patron saint of this religion, stumbled upon Tom Brady in the sixth round and didn’t play him until Drew Bledsoe’s lungs started filling with blood. Some things are obvious, like when Jimmy Johnson cut Jack Del Rio during training camp upon seeing a rookie Zach Thomas, but many things are not, which is how Kurt Warner made the leap from grocery store to Super Bowl and MVP.
And the experts doing the mining in sports are humans just as capable of bias and subconscious stereotyping as the rest of us, so part of this could just be that Lin didn’t quite look the part. It takes uncommon vision to believe in something no one else does when it looks different than anything you’ve ever seen, especially when your job is on the line and you have to sell it to others who might not be so willing to believe in different, either.
Packaging matters, whether it is with politicians or players, and Lin might have gotten his chance earlier if he had been African-American. He is like the now-famous Susan Boyle, the frumpy grandmotherly type who was underestimated until she got her opportunity and let the purity of her song soar above all the packaging and prejudice.
A blessing
But now? Well, now comes the coolest part. Because what has been something of an obstacle in this alleged meritocracy — overcoming appearances and bias — is morphing into a blessing right before our eyes, and in the center of New York city no less. The novelty is always one of the best things in sports, see? Fernandomania. The Fridge. Tebow. Different is good when different isn’t bad. Once you’ve gotten the opportunity, once you’ve overcome being different, it then pays to be different.
And when surprise and novelty merge, and both are real, it makes us all applaud and admire because sports don’t get any better than that.
Read more here:
http://www.miamiherald.co...eremy.html#storylink=cpy
