The RP: Harvard alum takes pride in rise
to prominence of Knicks star Jeremy Lin

By Jonathan Miller
The Recovering Politician

Some random musings on the latest professional sports phenomenon, Jeremy Lin — the Harvard grad and current New York Knicks basketball point guard who came out of seemingly nowhere to light up a sports nation frozen in the post-Super Bowl, pre-March Madness tundra of February:

A recent Sunday ritual of mine — donning a Tom Brady jersey and stepping up to the bar at my neighbor Buffalo Wild Wings — continually was challenged by fellow Kentuckians who’ve wondered how I became a New England Patriots fan.  The first reason my man-crush on Pretty Boy Brady — (as revealed in this piece about Pretty Boys I Begrudgingly Admire) — is not sports bar-appropriate.  Neither is the other — my seven-year tour of Harvard University — so I would mumble something about living in Boston.  Next year, I know I can lift my head up proudly in this basketball-fanatic town and announce, “I went to the same school as Jeremy Lin!”

One previously unremarked consequence of our Twitter- and Facebook-dominated world is how quickly jokes now become old and clichéd. Recently, I must have read 500 tweets struggling for a laugh by adding appending “Lin” to a word or making some pun with a word that can be transformed somehow to use “lin” (i.e., “Linsanity” “Blew up like the Lin-denburg”) I received an email from a fellow Harvard alum (see now I don’t need to hide it!) who passed on this bon mot: Jeremy Lin’s ball-handling is so sick; the other teams are in need of some insu-Lin.  My response? That joke’s so Feb. 10.

I wrote this piece about my admiration for Tim Tebow’s non-proselytizing form of evangelical Christianity.  Lin appears of this mold, perhaps even less in-your-face about it.  I loved this story in the Sunday Times about his Christian fellowship leadership at Harvard, which I know from personal experience (see, I did it again) is not an environment generally warm to expressions of faith, particularly its conservative iterations.

Maybe Lin is a fluke.  But here’s a progressive, Jewish, Celtics fan who’s rooting for him.

This column first appeared at TheRecoveringPolitician.com. It is used by permission of the author and the publisher.