T***c
发帖数: 17256 | 1 其实这边老中特别是有小孩的老中们这么激动的原因，并不是因为都指望自己的小孩去
打NBA--那个是比高考残酷百倍的真。千军万马过独木桥，能有实力竞争大学奖学金的
都是极少数。而是希望自己的小孩学习之余，以后起码可以大声的说“我喜欢打球”不
给周围老中视为异类（“你看我家孩子都谈钢琴”），在球场上分拨pickup时少遇到几
次“一黑二白三花四黄”的场景。
Hoop Dreams
How Jeremy Lin is affecting the lives of thousands of Asian children.
by Keane Shum
There is one, and only one, very specific demographic rooting against Jeremy
Lin, the sudden, inexplicable new star point guard for the New York Knicks.
They are the conspirators behind an age-old scheme, one in which the dreams
of young Chinese children all over the world have been dashed for
generations. They may seem well-intentioned, even loving, but their true
motives are quite nefarious. They are—and I know them well—the Chinese
mothers of basketball-obsessed teenage boys (and sometimes girls).
To these mothers, this past week, in which Lin scored more points than
anyone else in NBA history has in their first four starts and led the Knicks
to five straight wins, including one over Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles
Lakers, was neither entertainment nor inspiration. Instead, it has been a
troubling foil to their master plan. For no longer can they say, as my
mother often did to me, that there is no way a little Asian kid can ever
play in the NBA.
“Yes I can,” their kids will now say. “Just like Jeremy Lin.”
—
It’s halftime, Knicks at Wizards. Jeremy Lin has 8 points and 8 assists.
There’s just under three minutes left in the third. Jeremy Lin just blew by
John Wall and threw down a dunk.
The third quarter is over. Jeremy Lin has 20 points. For the third straight
game.
One minute left, Knicks up by double digits. Mike Bibby just came in for Lin
, who finished with 23 points and 10 assists. Mike Bibby, coming in to give
Jeremy Lin garbage time rest.
Let me explain the absurdity of this.
In May 2002, Bibby hit the game winner in game five of the Western
Conference finals, giving the Sacramento Kings a 3-2 series lead against the
Lakers. He was the starting point guard for a great Kings team that was a
Peja Stojakovic airball away from beating the Lakers in game seven and
moving on to the NBA Finals, where they would have easily dispatched the New
Jersey Nets. Bibby averaged 20 points a game against the Lakers, and for
his efforts, the Kings signed him that offseason to a seven-year, $80
million contract.
In May 2002, Jeremy Lin was finishing the eighth grade. I don’t know this
for sure, but I can make a pretty good guess about what he was doing that
summer, while Mike Bibby was dotting the i’s in his name next to an eight
followed by seven zeroes. I’ll bet you Jeremy Lin spent most of his days
that California summer outside on the blacktop, messing around with a bunch
of other pubescent teenagers with black hair and brown eyes in ridiculously
baggy And-1 t-shirts and shorts, and some nice kicks, and when they pass
they do a little lookaway, or they stick their tongue out as they go for a
layup, or try a couple mixtape stunts that have no practical use on a
basketball court.
I know this because that’s what I did the summer after I finished the
eighth grade. I’m five years older, so if Lin sweat through a no. 8 Lakers
jersey that summer, with “Bryant” on the back, I wore a no. 9 Lakers
jersey my eighth grade summer, “Van Exel” on the back. We might even have
rocked the same sneakers, maybe Nike Air Max Uptempos that had their first
release when I was in the eighth grade and their retro release five years
later.
But even when my basketball dreams were most vivid, when I spent hours going
make-it-take-it on a boiling summer day, they were so ludicrous that even I
knew they would always just be dreams. I went to basketball camp in high
school, but by then the dream was well past due; I never once entertained
any real thoughts of how I could play ball at a U.S. high school level,
never mind trying to walk on a college team.Even before it was clear I would
never be good enough—and that was pretty early on—I never asked, what’s
the road to playing college ball? How do you actually get to the NBA? No, I
put my head down into my books, not my defender, and settled on covering Ivy
League basketball for my college newspaper.
—
It has been a surreal, ridiculous, and completely joyful eight days for
Jeremy Lin and for all of us who have been following his every dribble-drive
and pass out of the pick-and-roll. Some of us have been watching Lin for
years, ever since he began leading the Harvard basketball team in strangely
tight games—sometimes even victories—against powerhouse NCAA programs like
Boston College and Connecticut. Others—now, millions of others—have only
caught on in the last week, rubbing their eyes at what appears to be a
Chinese kid running up and down and circles around some of the NBA’s
premier point guards, in actual NBA arenas.
All of us, our mothers excluded, have been transfixed. Everyone loves an
underdog, and New Yorkers love scrappy point guards that beat up on the
Lakers. But the Jeremy Lin show has been especially addicting, its high like
no other sports high we know, for the legions of Asian kids whose
relationship with basketball is a tortured devotion in which we love it
above all other sports but can never seem to break through. We can’t break
through at school, where we get cut from the team, and we can’t break
through at home, where our mothers tell us to read books, not defenses. We
can’t break through even in casual pick up games at the gym, where guys
call us Yao or Wu-Tang but don’t pass us the ball, where we are novelty
acts whether we score off floaters or from behind the arc or even dunk.
Until now.
Jeremy Lin has broken through. Broken out, and broken through. Unscouted out
of high school, undrafted out of college, he, too, has gotten cut time and
time again. His parents, I guarantee you, also told him to finish his
homework before he could go out and play, and were probably not too
disappointed with his choice of school. And even after three straight games
of at least 23 points and 7 assists, even after crossing over John Wall and
dunking on the Wizards, it wasn’t until Lin dropped 38 improbable points on
the Lakers on Friday that (most of) the haters finally stopped asking if he
was legit.
There are a lot of guys in the NBA who are living out their dreams,
impossible dreams, dreams that start when they are born inches away from
bullets to their graves and end up with them signing hundred-million dollar
contracts the day before they suit up for an All-Star Game. But that’s not
a dream that most Asian kids, in California or in Hong Kong, know. We’ve
never lived it, never felt it, never dreamed it. But Jeremy Lin? An Asian-
American kid from Harvard who is now the starting point guard for the New
York Knickerbockers? Who Spike Lee talks up courtside at Madison Square
Garden, and who Magic Johnson compares to Steve Nash and John Stockton on
national television? That dream?
That dream we know. We don’t just know that dream; we own that dream. At
home with a controller and in front of a TV, we used to create ourselves in
video games with black hair and a light tan complexion and fill up imaginary
box scores with exactly the kinds of stats Lin has been filling up real box
scores with: points and assists. Point guard stats, because that is the
only position most of us could ever even imagine playing in the NBA. Outside
on the blacktop, shooting around alone on a quiet day, we’ve heard 20,000
people at the Garden stand up and roar as we run out the tunnel and win a
game in its dying moments. And somewhere in computer heaven, there is a
dusty 386 hard drive with the complete, typed-up recaps of NBA games and
whole NBA seasons that were only ever played in my head.
I can’t stop watching Jeremy Lin highlights. I’ve been trying to figure
out why, whether it’s his infectious style of play, or how giddy his Knicks
teammates look whenever he does something else spectacular, or just the
satisfaction of seeing basketball at its most flowing and free-wheeling.
I think it’s all that, but also something else. It’s almost as if I keep
waiting for a glitch in the videos, something that shows this has all been a
ruse, that his jerky drives into the key and awkward, off-balance lay-ups
have been doctored to make the ball go in the basket, and that Deron
Williams and Kobe Bryant and 20,000 delirious fans have simply been
Photoshopped into the picture.
Because there is something eerily, wonderfully familiar about watching
Jeremy Lin play, and play so well. It’s like when you wake up from a dream
that you wish you could dream again, if only you could have recorded it, and
saved it, and played it back over and over. It’s like someone downloaded
the fantasy basketball sequences I dreamed up when I was 11 and has now
posted them to YouTube, where they will live on for perpetuity, whether or
not Jeremy Lin keeps this up any longer.
—
Whether or not Jeremy Lin does keep this up any longer, maybe the mothers of
the next generation of Asian kids can now at least find some room to
compromise. Maybe in a few years, when some kid holding a basketball under
his arm is pointing desperately to the clips of that magical week in
February of 2012 when Jeremy Lin shocked the world, maybe his mother will
say, “You really want to play in the NBA? Fine.”
And the kid will smile, his hopes raised.
“But you have to go to Harvard first,” his mother will then say. “Just
like Jeremy Lin.” | T***c
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