[MikeWaters]

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/...break-to-fame/

One quarter into the game, unveiling an amazing ability to penetrate, discombobulate and elevate against the Lakers suddenly Swiss cheese-like defense, Jeremy Lin stood at 10 points, three assists, against future Hall of Fame lock Bryant’s six points, zero assists. Bryant frequently watched stunned as Lin made his teammate Derek Fisher look frankly ridiculous with jellyleg cartoon crossovers and one insane spin move to the basket that became the evening’s signature offensive play. Twitter suddenly boomed with people tweeting: “WHO SAID ASIANS CAN’T DRIVE?” and linking to pics of Lin whipping past a frozen Fish.

By midgame, the screen had lit up with Lin’s smiling portrait and the flashing words LINSANITY a half-dozen times, and Lin’s line was head and shoulders above anyone else on the court: 18 points, five assists, two rebounds. Numbers any player would be proud of at the end of a game. But this was at the half. Lin was clearly on track for a monster performance.

Kobe, meanwhile, who makes almost as much in salary per game as Lin had made all season, had hit just one of his first 11 shots, and put up an anemic (for him) ten points, zero assists, and four rebounds.

It wouldn’t stop for the rest of the game. When Lin was off the court, the Knicks lost momentum. When he came back in, good things happened. In the fourth quarter, with the Lakers making a last-ditch charge and coming within a handful of points, Lin walked off the sidelines onto the floor (ROAR) and threw stilettos into L.A.’s suddenly racing heart, dropping a pair of back to back buckets on Fisher’s noggin — technically beautiful layups, nothing fancy — and then letting himself get hammered to the floor on defense, drawing a charge and offensive foul that turned the ball over and pretty much put the hopes of Lakers fans to rest.

With the game out of reach, Kai Ma, former editor of the L.A. based Koream Journal and now managing editor for New York’s Asian American Writers Workshop, summed up the feelings of Asian American Angelenos watching the game with a tweet: “I’m so sad, BUT I’M SO HAPPY” — happy to see Lin lock down stardom with an unbelievable, Lin-conceivable game-high, career-high 38 points, seven assists and four rebounds.

At the post-game presser, every question Coach Mike D’Antoni got was about Jeremy Lin. D’Antoni looked ecstatic to take them. After all, Lin saved the season, the team, and D’Antoni’s job (at least for now). And then he left and it was announced that Lin would be brought in to the press room shortly. During the break, a veteran sports-beat guy audibly said to his seat neighbor: “I said Lin was a fluke. I should be fired. We should all be fired.”

And then Lin walked in, humble, eyes downcast, without the swash or swagger that one might expect from the NBA’s newest, biggest hero. “I just give all the praise to God,” he said, when asked about the game. God, and his teammates: Lin dished honor to the rest of the roster as smoothly and unselfishly as he distributed the ball on the court.

But the question had to be asked, and so I did. “Jeremy,” I said, when the mike passed to me. “Do you think Kobe knows who you are now?”

A slow smile spread across Lin’s face as the room erupted in laughter. “You’ll have to ask Kobe that,” he said. “But he actually helped me up off the floor” — after Lin was nailed in a cross-court collision — “so I think he knows who I am now.”

Oh, Kobe certainly knows who “this kid” is now. And so does everyone else. Those Jeremy Lin jerseys? Sold out. “We’ll have more by tomorrow!” said a concession stand worker brightly. You’d better, or there’ll be riots.

In the streets outside the Garden, people were shouting “JEREMY LIN!” at the top of their lungs, and chanting, over and over, “MVP.” It’s hard not to feel like this isn’t a watershed moment. Hard not to feel like this is historic. Hard not to think that we’re at the cusp of an actual tectonic shift in the culture, when an Asian American “kid” could be the unquestioned king of one of the most storied franchises in sports, the guy that every guy in the room wishes he could meet and every kid in the room wants to group up to be.

Author and U. Michigan professor Scott Kurashige summed up the sense that we were in a new world now, living in the Year of Our Jeremy, with a Facebook post for his daughter that might have been only a little tongue in cheek: “Dear Tula,” he wrote. “When you were three years old and your father had a fellowship year at Harvard, I took you to see President Lin play when he was a mostly unknown college basketball player, many years before he went on to win seven NBA championships, two terms in the Senate, and the Nobel Prize for ending global warming and ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Love, Dad.”

Maybe that’s a lot to put on a 23-year-old kid just four starts into superstardom.

But maybe it’s not. As Lin put it, you’ll have to ask Kobe that.