Jeremy Lin is a sports tale that comes to us maybe once every 20 years. And I've really never seen anything like it.
The Tim Tebow tale was nice, but nothing like this. Tebow was an accomplished college football player, maybe the best college quarterback ever. Yes, there were doubts as to whether he could play that position in the pros. But at the end of the day, Tebow was a first-round pick. Lin is the kid from nowhere. He's Roy Hobbs dropped in the lap of Pop Fisher with his bat in a violin case. And he's hitting game-winning home runs.
The Lin story has more layers than an Italian wedding cake. And if that's a little too ethnic for you, get used to it, because we're about to have an honest discussion on ethnicity. Beside the fact that Lin was the 12th man on a 12-man team, that he was undrafted out of Harvard, a school that produces CEOs and politicians, not pro basketball players; beside the fact that he was with his third NBA team in two seasons and got meaningful playing time only in a developmental league, he's also an Asian American. And if this is the story that keeps on giving, one of the things it gives some of us is a headache because we're not real comfortable talking about race.
The liberal view on Jeremy Lin is that his heritage should not be part of the fascination, for fear of cheating the noteworthiness of his accomplishment. But how in the world can we ignore it? Let's be honest, Lin's being an Asian American is part of what makes this story unique. A few Asians have made the NBA, but Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian were accomplished players imported from Asia, not point guards from Palo Alto, Calif., who may have been disregarded as basketball prospects from the jump because of race.
