No one. After putting in his time in the Developmental League, attending endless NBA tryouts, and sitting for a year on the Golden State Warriors' bench as an undrafted rookie, Lin has scored 136 points in his first five games as an NBA starter, including 27 last night. The Knicks, a star-laden team so dysfunctional that just 11 days ago the sacking of their coach seemed a matter of days if not hours, are now undeniably stealing Big Apple attention from the Super Bowl-champion Giants and their Garden cohabitants, the NHL-leading Rangers. And Lin is the sole reason why.
Now comes the sad part. Some are claiming Lin has received undeserved attention because he is Asian or, in the worst vein of this, not African-American. That was the gist of boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s tweet the other day. "Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he's Asian," he typed. "Black players do what he does every night and don't get the same praise."
This is not that simpler America. It is the America of broad categorization and extremist cable television networks on both sides of the political ledger, an America that too often demonizes good men, good women and even the purest of stories. And so in the wake of a football season in which a quarterback kneeling in an end zone was deemed more offensive by some than any dance or demonstrative gesture ever has been (as I recall, Randy Moss once simulated wiping his butt on a goal post), we have, in the plight of the boyishly bubbly blue-tongued Lin, somehow found fuel for hours of vitriolic sports-talk debate, taunting tweets and a misguided and mean-spirited race debate.
