[Grantland] Oak Hill Academy's Chris Tang, The Next Jeremy Lin (Nope)

This is a very long piece of writing, but it's an incredible read pertaining tangentially to the Rockets. It tells the story of Oak Hill, one of the very best High School basketball teams in the nation. They currently have a 6-3, athletic SG/PG who just happens to be Asian, and who's weighing a potential offer to play at Harvard.

But really, this is less of a story about Jeremy Lin's influence, and more about the influence of Yao Ming:

[Rquoter]Chris Zihao Tang's basketball story starts, of course, with Yao Ming. As a kid growing up in Jiangsu, a province on the eastern coast of China, just northwest of Shanghai, Tang obsessed over Yao and the Rockets, and, like all inspired young kids, went out to the local playgrounds to mimic the big man's moves. Tang was always faster, taller, and more athletic than everyone else on the court, one of those prodigies who just pick up the game, almost through evolutionary directive. By the time he turned 8 years old, Chris Tang never went anywhere without a basketball, a habit that seemed curious to his parents, who at first asked their son to pursue other interests. He did not. "I watched basketball every day like it was my job," Tang explained. "When I got out of school, I'd go straight to watching the Rockets on the Internet. My dad used to get mad at me because I would skip meals sometimes to watch the fourth quarter of a game, but I couldn't stop. It was crazy just how much I loved to watch those guys play."[/rquoter]

And how has Jeremy Lin affected him personally?

[RQUOTER]On January 14, 2011, Chris Tang scored 41 points in a loss against Highland of Warrenton, Virginia. Ten days later, he went 18-for-21 from the field and scored 42 against Bishop Sullivan Catholic of Virginia Beach. If you read the newspaper reports and watch the local sportscast footage after those games, there's no mention of Jeremy Lin. But if you skip just two weeks forward in time, past the start of Linsanity, you'll never see Chris Tang's name again without its conjoined twin. Interestingly enough, even Tang can't quite keep the events straight in his own head. He told me that people started calling him Jeremy Lin right after his 41- and 42-point games. In late January, Chris Tang, scoring dynamo and prep superstar, most likely did not remind anyone of a reserve buried deep on the Knicks' bench who hadn't had a relevant moment in two NBA seasons. But after February 4, those two late-January games and the entire phenomenon of a 6-foot-3 Asian point guard who scored a ton of points was absorbed into a new, monolithic context.

Chris doesn't have much of an opinion on Linsanity. He told me he likes Jeremy Lin, but mostly because Lin plays for the Rockets. And although Tang understands why someone would compare him to another Asian basketball player, the asymmetry — basketball-wise — bugs him. "I wish they would call me Dwyane Wade," Tang said, cracking a smile. "I want to play like Wade. An athletic guard who gets to the rim."[/RQUOTER]

And the man himself weighs in on the strange racial trailblazer role that has been forced upon him...

[RQUOTER]Jeremy Lin remembers what it was like to be Chris Tang. "Since I was in fifth or sixth grade," Lin says, "everyone called me Yao Ming. Every time I stepped on the court, I heard 'Yao.'" Lin says it's definitely "weird" to think that his name has been substituted for Yao's, but he seems both cognizant and respectful of his platform as one of the most famous Asian Americans in the world. "At first, I let all that put a lot of pressure on me," he explained, "but over time, I had to re-prioritize my life to play for God. That's when I'm at my best, when I play for Him." No matter whom Lin plays for, he will be the representative of his people for the sole reason that his very visible and widely celebrated workplace simply has no other options. Lin, who watched Chris Tang's highlight videos last year and has high hopes for Tang's career, has some advice for his next coming: "If people are calling him Jeremy Lin or whatever, he should just play harder and better. Make it so that when the game's over, they don't have anything to say that's not about your game."

Neither the real Jeremy Lin nor the next Jeremy Lin think much of the Jeremy Lin effect. The real Lin says the idea makes him uncomfortable because he still has so much improving to do as a player. The next Jeremy Lin sees the whole thing as a bit of an annoyance. "There's nothing I can do about people calling me Jeremy Lin," Tang said. "I know I'm Chris Tang and he's Jeremy Lin. We're different."[/RQUOTER]

Check it out, it's a great, hopeful piece beyond basketball. It's the type of longform writing and meandering narrative that Grantland.com has been doing such a great job with, whatever your beef might be with it's editor and figurehead.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id...-chris-tang-pressures-being-great-yellow-hope

 

Kang actually makes that exact point.

[RQUOTER]"The next Jeremy Lin" is one of those meaningless phrases born out of basketball's superstar economy and its tendency to divide its worldwide fan base down into easily defined, component parts. Somewhere in this country, there's a 6-foot-3 kid who plays a lot more like Jeremy Lin than Chris Tang does, but unless that kid has some Asian heritage or unless he ends up at an Ivy League school, the comparison will be moot. In part, an idea like "the next Jeremy Lin" comes from historic, and frankly inexcusable, laziness by generations of sportswriters who refuse to compare athletes across races, leaving us with absurdities like "Keith Van Horn reminds me of Larry Bird" or "Danny Amendola plays like a young Steve Largent" or whatever other stupidity has been spilled in the name of being "careful about race." This is all obvious, and I suppose the tendency to divide all second comings along racial lines happens in nearly every American forum, whether politics or poetry. But it happens more in sports, where stars are held up as proof of a people's physical worth. Once Jeremy Lin became a referendum on all things Asian American, the next Jeremy Lin was an inevitability. And unless this Chris Tang makes it to the NBA, the next Chris Tang will be called Jeremy Lin, as will the next and the next and so on until a Chris Tang goes out and actually supplants the legend of Jeremy Lin. The great American underdog narrative demands a hopeful coda — when you come out of nowhere to inspire a people, the last shot in your movie will always show a bunch of kids running around a playground in your replica jersey.[/RQUOTER]

There are few things more aggravating to me than when sportscasters and fans use the article "a" before a players name, e.g. "The Rockets will be able to add a Josh Smith, or a Paul Millsap in the off-season, but in reality they really need a Zach Randolph or a Pau Gasol to be a low-post scoring threat". It makes every player sound as if they have rolled off a production line, where each is only an iteration or knockoff of something we've seen before.

Kang's other point that while we as fans love to attach narratives to players, turning their triumphs and failures into character traits and windows into their souls, oftentimes no neat narrative exists, and very few players outside of the obsessive-compulsive sociopaths like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan will ever care about fan perception. Guys like Chris Tang are unique, and don't fit into the roles we want them to play.

When the only story we know how to tell in the NBA is of a team gathering enough talent to eventually win a championship, we are bound to disappointed. Yet in college basketball, where 300+ teams do not win a championship every year, yet the vast majority of fans are upbeat. Throughout the years fans have learned to adapt, to embrace their players' uniqueness, and to appreciate players who are always becoming older and being replaced.

I think it's something many of us here would do well to keep in mind occassionally; that while our loyalty is to pieces of laundry, the people wearing them are all unique, all with their own stories of triumph and failure. A win is a win, a loss is a loss, and a championship is like going to the roulette table and betting it all on 00. Embrace the players themselves; come to understand that while every fan knows what a victory feels like, no-one else knows every one of Yao's moves by heart, or how painful it was to see Rafer Alston slinging 3s starting from his left shoulder, or the names Tierre Brown, Oscar Torres and Juaquin Hawkins. Particularly in a rebuilding year, sit back and take in the oddities, foibles and quirks of this team. Don't worry about whether James Harden is a #1 guy, or if Lin can roll off another incredible hot-streak. Just appreciate the present, and marvel at this unique moment in history, with these unique players.