Media Hype for Lin Stumbles on Race
By DAVID CARR
You don’t have to be an economics graduate from Harvard like Jeremy Lin to do the math on the media explosion about Linsanity.
The suddenly celebrated Lin is a four-fer: a God-fearing, Asian-American, Ivy League benchwarmer who has changed the fortunes of the New York Knicks. That’s a lot of glorious idiosyncrasy in one camera-ready package, especially in a town teeming with copy-hungry journalists.
Add in the fact that he is an actual team player wearing a Knicks uniform and it’s like spotting a unicorn playing point guard at Madison Square Garden.
Since cracking the starting lineup because of an injury and other unusual circumstances, Lin, a 23-year-old, undrafted, unheralded, twice-cut player, has torn up the league, setting records for a first-time starter.
Unfortunately for Lin and the rest of us, the over-the-top coverage that followed ended over the line, exposing underlying racist tropes that still lurk in the id of American sports journalism, and by extension, the rest of us.
From the start, his run threatened the tabloid supply of puns and superlatives. “Lincredible!” shouted The New York Post on Feb. 11. And because tabloids have a back page and front page to shout from, we’ve sometimes been treated to a double dose of wordplay: “Lin and a Prayer” was the cover headline on The Daily News one day last week, while the back page blared “Just Lin Time.”
But all the froth and fun started to curdle, first on Twitter — the Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock tweeted a crude reference about Lin’s anatomy and the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. suggested that Lin was getting attention because of his ethnicity, not his accomplishments — and then in the tabloid press — on Wednesday, perhaps at a loss after several breathless days of punning, The Post went with the unfortunate “Amasian!”
The combination of Lin’s ethnicity and accomplishments created some excess, but no one could have predicted how low it might go. On Saturday, an article on ESPN’s mobile site recycled an ancient and blatantly offensive ethnic slur, and in the process suggested that some corners of sports journalism remained a backwater in the culture, a place untouched by a history of civil rights struggle and decades of progress. ESPN quickly changed the headline and has fired the person who wrote it, but not before all but ruining a sweet sporting story.
It would be lovely to rewind the tape and get back to a story that resonated with people like me — I wouldn’t watch pro basketball with your eyes — for reasons that have nothing to do with Lin’s ancestry and everything to do with his improbable rise.
Lin came out of nowhere — the last Harvard player in the N.B.A. was a half-century ago — which is all the more unusual in pro basketball, where, unlike pro baseball and football, almost every player comes with a strong pedigree and a high draft number.
The back story was irresistible: Lin was sleeping on his brother’s couch on the Lower East Side; as a high school recruit, he was ignored by Stanford even though he played almost just down the street. Every angle was explored, including his Taiwanese grandmother taking in a game on television. (You know that something bigger than sports is under way when a politician mediates a cable dispute that has kept Lin off the air in parts of New York and basks in the reflected glory, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York did on Friday.)
Pablo S. Torre, now a reporter for Sports Illustrated, first wrote about Lin in 2007 back when he worked at The Harvard Crimson. He has enjoyed watching and contributing to the mushroom cloud of coverage.
“I think there is every kind of demographic outlier in play with this story,” he said. “The beating heart of the story, no matter what anybody says, is the fact that he is Asian-American. Yes, the N.B.A. has Yao Ming, but Jeremy is normal-size and from this country, so it creates this huge cognitive dissonance. There is a novelty factor to seeing someone who looks like Jeremy doing this.”
Unfortunately, that novelty presented some asymmetries that turned an unlikely rise on any number of levels into a single note about race. The real story is more complicated and interesting than the one that lived in punny, lazy headlines: Lin is a proud Christian, which brings in the heartland. As an Asian-American, he represents the triumph of the immigrant. East Coast elites can find traction in his Harvard background, while actual basketball fans cannot resist his court knowledge and deft shooting hand.
This is a story that had something for everyone, including the journalists who covered it. Even though sports reporters are thought to be a deeply cynical bunch, every once in while a tale comes along that turns them all into fanboys. Here, amid the millionaires and endless contract talks, was a genuinely heartwarming saga. It may be bad manners to clap in the press box, but that doesn’t mean reporters can’t root for an amazing story.
The Lin story has broken out into the general culture because it is aspirational in the extreme, fulfilling notions that have nothing to do with basketball or race. Most of us are not superstars, but we believe we could be if only given the opportunity. We are, as a matter of practicality, a nation of supporting players, but who among us has not secretly thought we could be at the top of our business, company or team if the skies parted and we had our shot?
“I think once you get past all of these interesting variables of race, it is the quintessential underdog story,” said Jason Gay, sports columnist at The Wall Street Journal, calling it the stuff of Hollywood screenplays.
How important is the theme of under-recognized brilliance? Mr. Gay wrote a piece about Ed Weiland, a part-time blogger and FedEx driver who first predicted two years ago — based on a lot of wonky statistical analysis — that “Jeremy Lin is a good enough player to start in the N.B.A. and possibly star.” For two days last week, that article was the most popular one on WSJ.com. When a journeyman blogger spots greatness in a journeyman point guard and you insert the alchemy of achievement, you’ve got a tale with legs.
Of course, what Lin is achieving is most likely not sustainable. Reporters who are penning exultant homage will be more than happy to be part of the crew that installs his feet of clay. But for the time being, who can blame them for hopping into the froth and ginning up more?
Sports, even for those of us who spent a fair amount of time being the last picked, are a palliative to the small and large indignities of actual life, a way to change the subject to the triumphs and failings of others. When someone who had been written off takes over Madison Square Garden and owns all the monied players around him, it’s hard not to stop typing and marvel, along with the rest of the nation.
“A kid of out of nowhere plays lights-out basketball and has magical success in the center of the media world,” said Terry McDonnell, the editor of Sports Illustrated, which put Lin on the cover last week. “What’s not to like?”
What’s not to like is that part where some doofus writes a blatantly racist headline and a wonderful yarn turns ugly.
It turns out that the road to excess does not lead to the palace of wisdom, as William Blake said a long time ago. Sometimes the road to excess ends up in the ditch.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter.com/carr2n
