Jeremy Lin: Too humble for interviews

New York Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin doesn’t really mind the spotlight, but he’s not feeding all the attention he’s been getting, either. The Harvard alum is just content to be doing his job. Aside from mandatory pre-game interviews and postgame press briefings, Lin is shying away from the cameras and microphones.

“He is not doing any interviews right now and he is focused on playing,” Michelle Harris, a Filipina who is director of entertainment marketing at Madison Square Garden, told The STAR in an e-mail. “Will keep you posted if that changes!”

The excitement over Lin has hardly died down even after the Knicks’ seven-game winning streak was snapped by the visiting New Orleans Hornets late last week. Harris, whose family hails from Batangas, even posted on her Facebook page a photo of a deliriously happy MSG cleaning lady with an autographed Jeremy Lin Build-A-Head photo.

Others have corroborated the fact that success and fame have not changed Lin’s attitude. Boston Herald sports reporter Dan Duggan tweeted “It bears repeating that Jeremy has remained as humble as ever. He’s no different now than when I covered him at Harvard.”

Meanwhile, with Lin keeping to himself and away from the spotlight, several sports media and even mainstream media have been making desperate attempts to ride on the “LINsanity”. After the Knicks lost to the Hornets, ESPN came under fire for a headline which read “Chink in the Armor” in a piece on the game, right above a picture of Lin. ESPN had used the same words before in reference to a USA Basketball game in China. “Chink” is a grave derogatory term referring to anyone Chinese or Asian or even Asian-looking. Needless to say, the headline, made available to ESPN mobile users, caused an uproar and was quickly withdrawn. ESPN apologized for the insult late Saturday Manila time.

“Last night, ESPN.com’s mobile Web site posted an offensive headline referencing Jeremy Lin at 2:30 a.m. ET. The headline was removed at 3:05 a.m. ET. We are conducting a complete review of our cross-platform editorial procedures and are determining appropriate disciplinary action to ensure this does not happen again. We regret and apologize for this mistake,” reported the International Business Times website.

Even such staid and revered mainstream agencies as The Wall Street Journal’s website have published lessons learned from Lin’s sudden rise, even publishing two versions of the article. In an even bigger stretch, The Seattle Times printed a piece by staff columnist Steve Kelley comparing Lin to the “Black Superman” Billy Ray Bates, recounting the meteroic rise of the two guards.

“Thirty-two years before Lin-sanity hit New York, Billy Ray Bates came to Portland from the Maine Lumberjacks of the Continental Basketball Association,” Kelley writes, adding “Bates’ career was reborn in the Philippines, where he played from 1983 to 1988, averaging 46 points and winning three championships. He became a star, nicknamed Black Superman, and he lived a star’s life, drinking and womanizing like a Roman emperor. The lifestyle finally undermined his talent.”

Most far-reaching of all was an op-ed piece by The New York Times, written by columnist David Brooks entitled “The Jeremy Lin Problem”. It begins with “Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the NBA, an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.”

Brooks then launches into a myopic lecture on the dichotomy between self-aggrandizement in professional sports and the selflessness intrinsic to spirituality and religiousness, even going so far as to claim the professional athlete “makes himself the center of attention when the game is on the line.” He goes so far as to say “this ethos violates the religious ethos on so many levels. The religious ethos is about redemption, self-abnegation and surrender to God.”

As Lin says, he is playing for God, and in the process, finding out what that means and helping his teammates get better. That doesn’t seem to come into conflict with any religious ethos at all. In fact, it is downright selfless, humble and generous.

The American press does not seem to know what to do with Jeremy Lin, because he isn’t feeding the big media machine that revolves around athletes and celebrities. So they’re trying to use a different set of rules on him because of his Asian heritage. He isn’t playing by their rules. But if they thought about it, even before Lin and the suddenly forgotten Yao Ming, Asian athletes have conquered America before.

As early as World War II, Korean-American army doctor Sammy Lee suffered discrimination while unable to compete as a diver in 1940 and 1944 due to the war. But Major Lee won the Olympic gold medal in 1948. And in 1952 at the age of 32, became the first man to repeat, decades before Greg Louganis. Even before that,  a Filipino christened Pancho Villa became the first Asian world boxing champion while campaigning in the US.

There seems to be some prerequisite of generational suffering before athletes of Asian descent are fully accepted in the country calling itself the land of the free. The fact that Lin is playing in a big media market like New York, where millions of immigrants and “tired huddled masses” have been entering America for generations only makes it more glaring, and ironic.

And Jeremy Lin simply chooses to stay above it all.