Lin move win-win for Raptors
Years after Linsanity, guard still an icon for Asian hoops fans
If you cared, if he made you care, you remember where you were. Knicks-Raptors, Valentine’s Day 2012, four days after Lin lit up Kobe and the Lakers for 38 at the Garden, a week before the first of Lin’s back-to-back Sports Illustrated covers, or the cover of Time. Linsanity.
Remember? Lin was a sensation, a miracle. Undrafted Harvard grad, firstgeneration Taiwanese-American, waived by two teams, sleeping on a couch, hanging on. Injuries gave him a chance. He scored more points in his first five starts than any player since 1976.
The fifth was in Toronto, with 4,000 people in the sellout crowd there for Asian Heritage night. Lin tied the game on a driving three-point play, got the ball with the game tied, and asked his coach to let him go one-on-one without taking a timeout. Mike D’Antoni nodded. Lin drilled a three over Jose Calderon to win.
The whole crowd went wild, just wild. I remember laughing. Magic.
Unless Dallas does something crazy, the Raptors will sign Lin Wednesday following his buyout from Atlanta. Lin is 30 now, coming off two injuryplagued seasons; Toronto will be his eighth team. The Raptors are loading up for a playoff chase. With everyone healthy, Lin will be Toronto’s fourth guard, and will get a chance to help.
And he will be an icon. It’s not something he asked for, but it’s something he still carries.
“What he was able to do in just those two weeks — I will follow him wherever he goes,” says Canadian actor Simu Liu, who stars on CBC’s Kim’s Convenience and whose parents brought him to Mississauga from China at the age of 5.
“I’ve been a fan of every team he’s ever been on. Until very recently, I was trying to keep up with the Atlanta Hawks, even though that was not a particularly fruitful pursuit.
“I see so much of myself in Jeremy not only because he’s Asian, but because he’s an underdog. He’d defined expectations that were put on him by everybody else. He said, I get to choose.”
Lin is the NBA’s first Asian-American player of significance. He has carved out a respectable NBA career, and he unlocks some of the most powerful parts of the North American Asian experience: the stereotypes; the sense of perpetual foreigner syndrome; the lack of representation in a culture that never reflected them; the power when somebody does. So much is bound up in Jeremy Lin. “One stereotype is we can be passive and timid, and … I see that a lot,” says talented Torontobased freelance writer Alex Wong. “There’s some truth to that.”
“It’s not just put on us by the media, but it’s put on us by our teachers, by our peers, from a very young age,” says Liu. “So it’s very difficult not to internalize.”
“(We were) starved, yes, because it wasn’t just that we were looking for an Asian basketball player,” says Ursula Liang, a filmmaker in New York whose documentary, 9-Man, chronicles the Chinese sport that started in North America in the 1930s.
“We were looking for anybody, anywhere.
“You probably couldn’t name another Asian-American celebrity that people on the street would recognize.”
And then came Linsanity, full of glorious swag. Liang calls those times, “an emotional memory,” the kind that can still give you goosebumps. Pablo Torre, who co-hosts ESPN’s High Noon and wrote the two Sports Illustrated cover stories, says, “It’s crazy how vividly I remember those games.” Wong and his friends in Markham would tell one another, “It’s gonna end, it’s gonna end.”
“I was in New York when it was happening,” says Liang, “and part of the excitement was there were 8-year-old white kids with jerseys that said Lin on the back. Like, that was exciting, to see that it wasn’t just us. Like we can be looked up to by other groups, too.” Lin doesn’t like talking about Linsanity. Wong has interviewed Lin several times, and when Lin was in Brooklyn public relations would say, “just don’t mention the Lword.” As Wong says, “It’s like a musician who had one single and you’ve been living off it for 20 years. No, he’s been an NBA player for nine years, and that’s unprecedented.”
But the impact remains. In 2012, Lin was second in NBA jersey sales. Playing a smaller role in Charlotte in 2016, he was still in the top 20. For firstor even second-generation Asian immigrants, Lin was different from Yao Ming, who was a distant, foreign colossus. Lin was personal.
“He’s a couple inches taller than me,” says Liu, who recently sat down and interviewed Lin. “You see him walking around, and he carries himself so humbly as well. He’s just another guy. He’s everybody. All of us.”
“The Asian-American experience is so much about seeing yourself in people who look nothing like you,” says Torre. “And I think about it in terms of the immigrant experience. You, as the Asian-American, especially first generation and second generation, you must see yourself in others. In order to really survive, in order to feel any sense of connection to the culture, you must be able to see past race and find elements of someone — celebrity, athlete, whatever — that you can connect to and find important.
“And what I didn’t appreciate until years later, really until Linsanity, was that all of that circuitry that had sort of been numbed to the idea of visual, racial, cultural, ethnic similarities, that circuitry that never really got activated. When it got activated, it was like being set on fire.”
“My friends and I who watch basketball, even casually, we’ll pull up those YouTube highlights,” says Wong. “Like, we don’t go two months without saying: Remember Linsanity? We won’t even be talking about basketball. We’ll just be feeling sh---- about something and we’ll say: Let’s just watch that 10-minute YouTube clip of his highlights from the Lakers game.”
“It was incredible,” says Torre. “It was, I didn’t know I could feel this way. I didn’t know this was available to me as a human. So when it’s Alex Wong, when it’s me, everybody that I know that’s just a little bit Asian, the reason Jeremy Lin matters is because of that feeling.”
Around the time of Linsanity, Liu had just lost his job as an accountant. He decided to try to enter the film industry. Lin changed his idea of what was possible. It was rocket fuel.
“Like, my role model was Will Smith, or Matt Damon,” says Liu, from Los Angeles. “So in 2012 when Linsanity broke out, yeah, getting set on fire is a really good way to put it.”
This is a global city, an immigrant city. As of the 2016 Census, 18.1 per cent of Toronto’s 5.9 million people, or a little over a million, were of Asian descent: Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean or Southeast Asian.
And Wednesday afternoon, Jeremy Lin will be a Toronto Raptor. He will be a part of a team that hopes to go somewhere unexplored, and do something nobody here has ever seen. He should fit right in.