Jeremy Lin: Faith, Joy, and Basketball
By Ted Kluck
3/5
()
About this ebook
Ted Kluck
Ted Kluck is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in ESPN the Magazine, USA Today, and ESPN.com. He’s the author of several books, including Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be, coauthored with Kevin DeYoung. Ted lives in Tennessee with his wife Kristin and their two sons, Tristan and Maxim. www.tedkluck.com
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Reviews for Jeremy Lin
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While the information shared about Lin was quite interesting, you can tell that it was a bit rushed during the height if Lin madness.
Book preview
Jeremy Lin - Ted Kluck
Peace.
Introduction
An Open Letter to the Reader: What Does All of This Say About Us?
Dear Reader,
Let me be the first to acknowledge the weirdness that lies in writing a book about a man who, as I type this, is playing his sixth significant game of NBA basketball (tonight versus the hapless New Orleans Hornets). When I hit upload
on this manuscript, I will have spent more days typing about Jeremy Lin than Jeremy Lin will have spent doing the thing about which I am writing.
I’m writing from a basement in Nebraska, where I am on assignment doing research for another book, and was pressed into emergency Jeremy Lin action by an editor who called and said, Do you think you can get me a Jeremy Lin book in three weeks?
Similar calls, no doubt, are being placed all over publishing. Even in Franklin, Nebraska (population 971), they’ve heard of him. When the evangelical/reformed blogosphere got wind that his favorite book was a John Piper title, it blew up in exultation. "Finally, a thoughtful one!" was the unintended subtext of many of the early fawning articles.
All of that to say, what may be most interesting about Jeremy Lin—New York Knickerbocker and cultural object—is what the Jeremy Lin infatuation says about us. This is true of most cultural objects. In the 1960s and ’70s, liking Muhammad Ali (or Joe Frazier, conversely) said a lot about a particular fan’s worldview. By now, a full week and a half in, here are a few things we know about Jeremy Lin:
He is Asian-American.
He went to Harvard. And graduated.
He toiled in the National Basketball Developmental League (NBDL), which is the only non-romanticized minor league in sports (besides arena football). There may in fact be nothing more depressing in professional sports than minor league basketball.
He was released by two NBA clubs (the Golden State Warriors, Lin’s favorite childhood team, and the Houston Rockets) before catching on with the Knicks.
He crashed on his older brother’s couch (or teammate Landry Fields’s couch, depending on conflicting couch-related reports) before finally signing a real contract with the Knicks.
That contract will pay him in the neighborhood of $877,000 (give or take) per year.
That’s the league minimum.
He’s twenty-three years old.
He has (now) had two consecutive Sports Illustrated covers.
He scored 136 points in his first five starts—all wins.
He’s been the only thing big enough to have rescued us from a winter of ESPN features on Tim Tebow, the lantern-jawed, clean-cut NFL quarterback and Great American Hero to whom Lin is being (unfairly, I think) compared (more on that later).
These are all things you know already if you have turned on a computer or a television over the course of the last nine days. The fact that we live in a world where we’re making a book-worthy superstar out of a man after nine days of work speaks volumes about us and is proof of the fact that we live in a crazy world in need of a Redeemer. We also know this:
Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, has received lots of airtime in Tim Tebow interviews, and He is the one who gives and takes away athletic careers. Right now He has given one to Jeremy Lin. We’re all enjoying it tremendously.
Jeremy Lin has vocally proclaimed a belief in that Redeemer, and it’s my job to write a little more deeply about that vocal belief. It’s a job I’m excited about, as there is nothing in life—even basketball, superstardom, or the ultimate rags-to-riches story—that can touch the glorious grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Jeremy Lin’s nine-day (and counting) run of NBA stardom is why I’m typing and why you’re reading. There are many things he can (and should) be for us, and a few that he can’t and shouldn’t. He shouldn’t be an idol. As great, smart, interesting, and capable as he is, he will disappoint us, as all idols eventually disappoint. He shouldn’t be a fount for our theology—even though he shows signs of depth and maturity there too. He shouldn’t even be a symbol for anything in particular, even though if his career somehow freakishly ends tonight he has already shifted paradigms about what people who look/act like Jeremy Lin can/should be.
Aside: As I type this, Lin is losing his first game as a cultural