The
post-Ewing era has been tough for Knicks fans.
Time and again they have watched the organization bring in over-priced
under-performing free agents, assembling a mismatched Frankenstein team with no
room to maneuver under the salary cap.
The only hope was for an unheralded bench player to explode out of nowhere. In February 2012, Jeremy Lin answered Knick
fans’ prayers. Evan Jackson Leong follows
his long hard road to overnight success in Linsanity
(trailer
here), which
screens during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
There
are not a lot of undrafted Harvard alumni playing in the NBA. Lin is one.
He is also obviously Asian American—a fact many in the professional
basketball establishment have trouble getting a handle on (to put it
generously). In fact, Lin faced
adversity at every stage of the game.
Casual fans might be surprised to learn Lin’s prep career ended with a Hoosiers like upset state championship,
largely powered by his playmaking. Yet,
despite his stats, Lin was never recruited by a NCAA program.
Leong
probably should win this year’s right-place-at-the-right-time award at
Sundance, having begun to document Lin well before he became a Garden sensation
in that fateful February. Clearly, he
won over the trust of Lin as well as the player’s parents and brothers. As a result, viewers get an intimate look at
the central roles Lin’s close relationships with his family and his Christian
faith play in his day-to-day life. In a
sport filled with show-boaters, Lin emerges as one of the good guys.
However,
Leong seems a little too diplomatic in his coverage of the many problematic responses
to the sudden outbreak of “Linsanity,” as it was soon dubbed. While the filmmaker lumps it all together,
there seemed to be a peculiar resentment from some commentators, reflecting an
attitude of racial proprietorship over the game of basketball that allowed for
goofy looking Euro players like Dirk Nowitzki but not homegrown
Taiwanese-American talent like Lin.
Those are indeed torturous waters to navigate, so Leong understandably
takes the better part of valor. Still,
he forthrightly addresses the overtly racist taunting directed at Lin from supposedly
tolerant Ivy Leaguers during his Harvard away games.
