Sincerity Endears Jeremy Lin to General Public
It’s easy to grow restless with ESPN’s coverage of the Jeremy Lin phenomenon–as a matter of fact it’s pretty easy to grow restless with ESPN’s coverage of ANYTHING these days–but through it all the one thing that I can’t say is that I’ve become tired of is Jeremy Lin.
Sure, the up to the second updates and rampant rumors have turned every minuscule aspect of the rising star’s life into a public spectacle, and the hot air flowing freely across the Eastern seaboard has created a vortex that could uproot a man’s most intrinsic values, but Jeremey Lin remains grounded. He’s practically bolted down in that regard.
That humility is the one thing Jeremy Lin actually has in common with Tim Tebow, although the “mothership” has fabricated several more to make it seem like their careers have somehow run parallel. They haven’t, but squeezing the names of Tebow and Lin into a headline almost guarantees an audience on just about every medium there is, so they’ll continue to sell you on their careers being somehow congruous and they’ll continue to do so under comically false pretenses.
Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow have about as much in common as John Wayne and Rip Taylor. Taylor and Wayne were both entertainers and Tebow and Lin are both nice guys. The similarities pretty much stop there, and anything else is almost purely coincidental.
Jeremy Lin, of course, didn’t even receive a scholarship offer out of high school and he was undrafted out of Harvard. Since graduating in 2010, he has already had a journeyman-like career in the fact that he’s already done stints in Golden State, Houston, Reno, Erie, and some city and province in China that has the word “dong” in it too many times for me to be comfortable.
Tim Tebow was an All-American with offers from everybody. He won a Heisman trophy and two national championships, and then was selected in the first-round. In his rookie season he was given a three-game test drive while most rookie quarterbacks weren’t given anything but a clipboard. In season two, he became the outright starter just five games into the season.
This is all stuff that you can find on Wikipedia and that you’ve seen and heard debated on sports talk shows, but to me the biggest difference between the two isn’t something you can find in a stat-line or in the “personal life” section of an internet encyclopedia. The two have very different demeanors overall.
They’re both nice guys, and I’d admittedly have a beer with either assuming either one of them actually drank (perhaps I could interest Mr. Tebow with a delicious all-natural FRS?) They’ve both also got an Andy Griffith quality that lends them innocence, but the fact that Tebow has taken on the pressure of a higher calling makes him more reserved than Lin.
That’s not to say that Jeremy Lin isn’t religious because he very obviously is, but Tim Tebow has made it very clear to us that his purpose in life is to spread the word. It’s incredibly noble and undeniably admirable, but it makes him unrelatable to a large segment of his audience. I understand the negative connotations of the word agenda, but for lack of a better term, Tim Tebow has one.
Jeremy Lin has one too, but his is just to play ball and that’s something that is more universally endearing than religion in a place where religion can often be a touchy subject. People often say that America is a melting pot, and if religion were a flavor, Tebow would be garlic. He’s absolutely fantastic, but everyone’s palate is different and garlic can be incredibly overpowering.
Before Anthony Bourdain starts yelling at me for ruining people’s perceptions of food and before I start talking about elephants, Ayn Rand, Jack Daniels, and a million other topics that would be relevant only in my own incredibly psychotic world, I should probably get to the point. That point is, both these young men happen to be great people and they should be celebrated for that, but they should be celebrated separately.
Personally, I find myself inclined to appreciate the Jeremy Lin story because it doesn’t require the added illusion of disrespect. However, I appreciate what Tim Tebow is doing, as well, and you don’t actually HAVE to pick one or the other. The sad thing is, these two inherently good stories are easily targeted with negative energy because of the misappropriation of resources by a network as powerful as ESPN.
If you want to hate anybody, feel free to hate the pencil-pusher in Bristol who crunched the numbers and created the spreadsheet that said we needed more Tebow and more Lin when we were already getting plenty. Hell, you could even take it to the societal level and hate the fact that we’ve allowed ESPN to surgically remove the part of our brain that allows us to recognize gluttony.
At about five dollars per month from every cable bill (essentially what ESPN charges for subscribers fees), that’s the most affordable lobotomy America has to offer.Now we get to eat McDonalds, drink Bud Light, and be largely indifferent to the wrongdoings of the network as a whole.
Isn’t it “Lin-sane”?
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