Jeremy Lin: The Reason for Linsanity

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).