Linsanity and some personal soul-searching on race

The New York Knicks and Asian-American rookie phenom Jeremy Lin were in town last week to play the Toronto Raptors, and it led me to some personal soul-searching on race, particularly when it comes to Asians and Asian-Americans and Canadians.

By now, many of you already know Lin’s story, and you know what he inflicted on the Raps – a last-minute, buzzer-beating three-point shot to win the game, which only enhanced his growing celebrity.

For those of you who live under a rock or couldn’t care less about basketball (or sports in general), this is what you missed:

Lin isn’t the first person to star in the NBA after going undrafted. Indeed, Knicks shooting guard John Starks was an all-star in 1994, and Bruce Bowen, Ben Wallace and Avery Johnson all played key roles on championship teams.

But Lin, the American-born son of Taiwanese immigrants, is the first true Asian-American pro baskeball star, one who seemingly came out of nowhere.

This undrafted  23-year-old Harvard grad (the first in the NBA since basically forever) was cut by two NBA teams before the start of the season and was only picked up by the Knicks on Dec. 27 as third-string point guard insurance. He subsequently spent time in the minors with the Knicks’ D-League team before injuries gave him a freak chance to play, and shine.

Lin has taken a team that was sinking fast and seemingly transformed them into the contenders everyone thought they might be if only they could find a point guard to complement the league’s best front court: superstar Carmelo Anthony, uber-power forward Amar’e Stoudemire and newly signed centre Tyson Chandler, fresh off a championship season in Dallas.

Since the start of his improbable run, Lin has been averaging close to a double-double in assists and points, and the Knicks have clawed back to .500 and into a playoff spot.

Yes, he’s running coach Mike D’Antoni’s trademark run-and-gun, wide open offence, one that plays to Lin’s strengths of pick-and-rolls and driving and dishing the ball, and this type of offence tends to inflate the stats of point guards who play under it (although others, besides future hall of famer Steve Nash in Phoenix, haven’t succeeded under it to nearly the same degree as Lin).

As well, Lin has only been a featured part of the Knicks offence for a short time. And yes, he turns the ball over a lot (upwards of 6 to 9 times a game since he came of the bench Feb. 4 to score 25 points against the New Jersey Nets).

But his turnover average is only about 3.5 per game (lower than Nash’s), and he can drive to the hoop and see the court very well.

It may be too soon to compare Lin to Nash, Deron Williams, Russell Westbrook or Chris Paul – the NBA’s premier point guards – but he’s for real.  And he may just take the Knicks deep into the playoffs.

It’s a great story, and Lin has persevered to make it happen.

Yet we shouldn’t underestimate the racism he’s faced and will likely continue to endure along the way, the kind that assumes Asians, aside from Chinese-born pituitary cases (hello Yao Ming), aren’t good at sports.

Some of this narrow-mindedness has come from people you’d hope would know better, which only proves that being a member of a group that’s been victimized by racism (or some other odious attitude or behaviour, such as bullying) doesn’t make someone immune from dumb thoughts.

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Mayweather was rightly flayed for that brain fart. There’s no doubt that much of the hype over Lin is because he’s Asian. But some of it is about him having been undrafted and having played at Harvard, a non-basketball powerhouse. And, putting that aside, why does Lin’s success in any way diminish black players’ accomplishments?

In response to the criticism, Mayweather subsequently tweeted, “Other countries get to support/cheer their athletes and everything is fine. As soon as I support black American athletes, I get criticized. Wow what a country.” He added: “I’m speaking my mind on behalf of other NBA players. They are programmed to be politically correct and will be penalized if they speak up.”

Some of the biased comments from black players and coaches have been couched in more positive, well-meaning terms, but they’ve been offensive nonetheless.

Dwayne Casey, a former Dallas Maverick assistant coach and current head coach of the Raptors, is an an intelligent man. We know this because he’s been able to make the Raptors, and especially centre Andrea Bargnani, actually play defence.

Speaking to reporters last week ahead of the game with the Knicks, Casey, who coached the then-aspiring pro Lin in 2010 with the Mavericks NBA Summer League team in Las Vegas,  acknowledged Lin’s skills and noted that he nearly made the Mavs roster out of Summer League that year.

He also said he developed a rapport with the young player and spoke to him about his future goals. “My question to him was, ‘Why in the hell do you want to be an NBA player? You’re smarter than all of us. You’ve got an honours degree from Harvard.’”

Would Casey have asked that question of a black player, even if the player had gone to Harvard? Probably not, and yet he meant well.

Personally,  I wish I could say that, as a Jew, I don’t make some of the same assumptions as Casey about Asian-Americans, or Asian Canadians, even if they’re positive. I wish I could say that it doesn’t come as something of a shock to see Lin playing, never mind succeeding, in the NBA, even after Yao Ming.

The excitement over Lin reminded me of feelings that I had when my wife and I recently tried to help our oldest son apply for a specialized program in math, sciences and computers at a public high school in Toronto. In the process, I realized that I harbour some of the same prejudices exhibited by Casey. Perhaps I sometimes excuse them because they’re positive stereotypes, despite the fact I’d object to stereotyping of Jews, positive or negative.

We went to an information night for the program, which is very competitive and attracts some 600 applicants from across the city for 90 spots. The school itself used to be predominantly Jewish, but as a result of changing demographics in its surrounding area, it’s now much more multicultural, and the faces at the information session were mostly East Asian and South Asian, with a smattering of white faces than included some Eastern European immigrant families and a handful of third-generation Jewish families like us.

My Linsanity-like prejudices manifested themselves in that situation in a couple of interrelated ways.

First, I romanticized the scene as being reminiscent of the days of ambitious Jewish sons and daughters of immigrant parents attending Harbord Collegiate in downtown Toronto for two generations up until the early 1960s. (I got a lump in my throat during the question-and-answer session when I saw kids translating questions on behalf of their parents. I thought about stories my dad had told me about doing the same kind of thing in public for my Yiddish-speaking grandfather.)

Second, we and some of the other of Jewish families we knew at the information evening looked around and probably assumed that our coddled third- and fourth generation, iPod-listening, video-game-playing Canadian kids could never muster up the kind of drive and moxie that we assumed these first- and second-generation immigrant kids had. (We also probably assumed these kids had natural affinities for math, science and computers that our kids somehow completely lacked.)

Guess what? Our brainiac 14-year-old made the cut and will be attending that specialized program next September. I wonder what his success says about my own assumptions.

But back to Jeremy Lin. I’m not ashamed to admit that as a die-hard Raptors fan, I was cheering on the couch after he hit his buzzer-beater to slay the local heroes of the hardcourt. (Who knows? It just might help the Raps get a lottery pick in the 2012 draft.)

And with apologies to Jewish NBAers Omri Casspi and Jordan Farmar, I’m hoping the next off-the-radar, come-from-nowhere NBA whiz kid hails from New York City and is named Shloimie Greenberg.