In February of this year a sports spectacle of unseen
proportions occurred. Jeremy Lin,
an unknown point guard with the New York Knicks, came off the bench to lead his
team to a win over the New Jersey Nets in Madison Square Garden. Big deal? The victory along with six more wins in
ensuing games propelled Lin from an obscure no name player to meteoric stardom
as one of the most admired athletes in the world.
In the book,
Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity, Timothy Dalrymple chronicles Lin’s historic role
through the amazing seven game winning streak while detailing the adversity he
faced growing up playing basketball as an Asian-American through high school,
college, and eventually in
the NBA. One thing that stands out
reading the book is Lin’s love for Jesus Christ and playing the game of
basketball for God’s glory.
Jeremy’s parents, of Chinese descent who immigrated through
Taiwan to the United States, played a major role in shaping his character,
instilling a drive to persevere, and to know Jesus Christ as His Savior and
Lord. Jeremy’s dad’s love for the
game of basketball resulted in taking him and his two brothers to the local
YMCA three nights a week for drills and games. Jeremy’s mom instilled within her son a “you can do anything
attitude” and that with hard work you can succeed at anything. She demanded excellence from her kids
and had a discipline to hold them to it in academics and sports.
The
Chinese Christian Church of Mountain View, CA was an
important part of Jeremy’s life growing up and remains an important part of his
life today. Dalrymple notes the importance the local church had on Jeremy’s
life. He writes,
“This would be the first community
(his church) to pour deeply into Jeremy’s life, and they continue to support him
to this day. Modern
sportswriting focuses too often on the individual and his talents. It’s a reflection of American
individualism. In the Chinese way
of looking at things, each person is in large measure a product of the people
around him – of the parents who sacrifice for him, of the family that shapes
him, of the community that nourishes him and raises him up. This is one of the great missing pieces
in the Jeremy Lin story as it has been told so far in the American media
(emphasis mine). Jeremy would not have succeeded apart from the quality of
his character, and it was his family and friends and his community of faith
who, over the years, planted and cultivated the seeds of character within him”
(p. 8)
Jeremy Lin lived out his faith in Jesus Christ high school
and college. He participated in Christian student groups on campus and reached
out to inner-city kids in the Palo Alto area.
In his senior year Jeremy led Palo Alto High to a state
championship against California’s perennial powerhouse,
Mater Dei.
Through his high school career he
amassed a number of honors.
He was
a two-time league MVP. He was NorCal player of the year. First team all-state.
Named Division II Boys Player of the year. First team all-state. Named Division
II Boys Player of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury
News and captained his team to a State Championship.
However, was not offered any scholarships to Division I
schools.
It’s rare for Asian
Americans to reach the highest level of D-1 basketball.
“According to the NCAA Student-Athlete
Race and Ethnicity Report, only 19 of the 4,814 Division 1 basketball players
in 2006-07 (Jeremy’s freshman year in college) were Asian Americans – and that
number includes Pacific Islanders and part-Asians” (p. 74).
In spite of this it did not stop Jeremy
Lin.
He was determined to play at
the collegiate level even if he didn’t receive a scholarship.
He wanted to go to Stanford.
He landed at Harvard.
During Jeremy’s time at Harvard, he grew as a Christian and basketball
player. He was supported not only by Christian brothers and sisters during his
games at Harvard, but Asian Americans began to come see him play. They wanted to see an Asian American
who had the potential to make it big.
They wanted to be a part of it.
In the midst of it, Jeremy received racial taunts and insults more than
ever before while playing on the courts of Ivy League institutions like Penn,
Princeton, Cornell, and Dartmouth.
Upon graduation from Harvard, Lin was not drafted by any team
in the NBA. In 2010, he received a
partially guaranteed contract with the Golden State Warriors. He rarely played and was sent to
the D-League (minor leagues) three times.
He was waived by the Warriors and the Houston Rockets. The New York Knicks picked him up in
the 2011-12 preseason. The amount
of playing time with the Knicks was still minimal until the first week of
February 2012. That’s when
Jeremy’s opportunity to show his God given basketball talent and hard work
turned into “Linsanity.”
“Statistically speaking, never before had anyone arisen from
such obscurity to extraordinary heights.
To take one measure: Jeremy
was the first player with at least 20 points and seven assists in each of his
five careers starts since at least 1970, when the Elias Sports Bureau began
keeping stats for the NBA. To take
another: Jeremy had collected 136
points in his first five starts, breaking Shaquile O’Neal’s twenty-year-old
record”(142).
As Bill Simmons, one of the most beloved sportswriters in
the country wrote, “What’s happening with Lin right now” is
“unprecedented. I have never seen
it before…I’ve never seen a [poor] man’s version of it before.” Jeremy’s story was “following the
real-life Rudy or Rocky script—and he’s more talented than either of them”
(142).
