Race Against The Machine: Jeremy Lin And The NBA’s Savior Myth

By Arturo R. García

In his own graceless way, Floyd Mayweather and his tasteless remarks about Jeremy Lin brought something new to light: maybe the best comparison point for the young New York Knicks guard isn’t Tim Tebow. Maybe it’s Larry Bird. With the link, however unpalatable, coming from tensions the NBA has tiptoed around for decades.

As Peter S. Goodman observed at The Huffington Post, Lin’s seven-game winning streak with the New York Knicks has already put him in the cliche crosshairs:

Even Lin, now celebrated as an affirming story of dogged pursuit and unlikely success, is suffering the framing of his achievement in terms that speak to persistent racial stereotypes. More than one announcer has noted that he is “stronger than he looks,” though he is 6-foot-3 and some 200 pounds. Anyone looking at that body and seeing anything less than strength is not getting past skin color, while buying into the notion that Asian men are less than fully such.

More than one commentator has described Lin’s success as a product of his being smart, which both diminishes his obvious athleticism (it’s all about Harvard!) while implicitly reinforcing a deep-seated and unfair stereotype used to diminish the achievements of black athletes: They are raw, innate talents, whereas everyone else has to work hard to compensate.

And that double standard is at the core of two racially-tinged barbs, spaced 24 years apart. Compare:

“I think Larry is a very, very good basketball player. He’s an exceptional talent. But I have to agree with [Dennis] Rodman. If he were black, he’d be just another good guy.”

- Isiah Thomas, 1987.

“Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.”

- Mayweather, 2012

It’s not hard to see the stereotypes Goodman was talking about factoring into the NBA’s growth during the 1980s, when the NBA hitched its promotional wagon to the “City vs. Country” rivalry between Boston and Los Angeles–and specifically, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, a rivalry in which, as ESPN’s Howard Bryant observed two years ago, race took center stage:

Black kids in Boston were taken by Julius Erving and the Philadelphia 76ers. It was no different in Plymouth, where the handful of African Americans and Cape Verdeans rooted for the Sixers and the Lakers (and later the Detroit Pistons, but never the Celtics). The Celtics were the white fan’s team. Me, I was the black kid who rooted for the Celtics but fell along the same racial divisions as my friends. My favorite Celtics were all black: Robert Parish, Gerald Henderson and Dennis Johnson.

There was a game being played beyond Bird and Magic that should have been compelling enough on its own, but feelings in Boston were still raw. The violent busing confrontations had cooled in the 1980s, but the hard sentiments were still fresh. The two men were playing for championships, but they had become vehicles for a disturbing racial narrative. Black Celtics believed the team catered to white attitudes by purposely stocking the roster with white players. In an overwhelmingly black game, 10 of the 14 Celtics on the roster in 1986 were white. Bob Ryan, the dean of Boston’s basketball writers, once told me that the loudest cheers at the old Garden often came when Kevin McHale would block the shot of a prominent black player.

Slate’s Josh Levin provided a more concrete link between the Lin and Bird legends in 2005:

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