I don’t like the NBA, but lately, I can’t help but hear the name Jeremy Lin. Apparently, he’s the wunderkind of the New York Knicks. Several things make Lin special. Number one, this undrafted, claimed-off-waivers player is running circles around many players in the league. Second, he played basketball at Harvard and wasn’t even there on an athletic scholarship. That makes him the first Harvard player to play in the NBA since Ed Smith played 11 games with the Knicks in the 1953-54 season. And finally, Lin is one of the few Asian Americans in history to make the NBA and the only one of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.
And it is that last thing that is bringing out the racism in many people. First of all, the MSG Network, that televises the Knicks games, choose to show a homemade poster a fan was holding. It showed a fortune cookie, broken in half, with Lin’s photo above it and it read, “The Knicks Good Fortune.”
Racism probably comes as no surprise to Lin. In high school, Lin entered the gym for a game, only to be told he was in the wrong place for volleyball. When he played for Harvard, a spectator during a Harvard-Georgetown game yelled “Sweet-and-sour-pork.”
Okay, I’ve been a spectator in the stands at many sporting events and people can be crude. You can’t police people like that. But, it gets uglier.
Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock tweeted a comment about Lin’s sexual prowess that I am not even going to reprint here. I’d think as an African American, Whitlock would be a little more sensitive to racism.
Last Saturday, former ESPN writer Anthony Federico wrote the headline “Chink in the Armor: Jeremy Lin’s 9 Turnovers Cost Knicks in Streak-stopping Loss to Hornets.” Federico was fired over the headline and later apologized to Lin, calling the ethnic slur an “honest mistake.”
Lin seems like a nice guy and like Tim Tebow, he is a Christian. For some reason, if you are a young, talented, Christian athlete, some people like taking potshots at you. The media needs to leave him alone and let him play basketball.