When Jeremy moved up to Palo Alto High School, he made a big impression on his freshman basketball coach — even though he was one of the smallest players on the team. Years of playing in youth basketball leagues at the Y had honed his skills. His freshman coach stood up at the team’s end-of-the-season banquet and declared, “Jeremy has a better skill set than anyone I’ve seen at his age.”1
And then something miraculous happened.
Jeremy grew.
And grew.
And grew.
By Jeremy’s junior year, he had sprouted nine inches to reach the magic number — six feet of height. He was still as skinny as a beanstalk, however, and weighed around a buck-fifty. The good news is that his growth spurt wasn’t over. He would go on to add two more inches of height by his senior year of high school to reach six foot two. Jeremy turned out to be a real late bloomer. He added another inch or inch-and-a-half during his college years to reach his present height, which is a tad over six foot three. He also added bulk by hitting the weight room. His body would fill out to a solid 200 pounds.
No longer the shortest player on the court, Jeremy showed his coaches and Palo Alto High opponents that he could run the offense, shoot lights-out, and make the player he was guarding work extra hard. His position was point guard, which may well be the most specialized role in basketball. The point guard is expected to lead the team’s half-court offense, run the fast break, make the right pass at the right time, work the pick-and-roll, and penetrate the defense, which creates open teammates when he gets double-teamed.
When Jeremy dribbled the ball into the front court, he played like a quarterback who approached the line of scrimmage and scanned the defense to determine both its vulnerabilities and its capabilities. Jeremy’s mind quickly calculated how an opponent’s defense was set up and where the weak spots were. His quickness and mobility were huge assets.
His father, always ahead of the technological curve, had been filming Jeremy since his middle school days. He would break down the film, and then father and son would review what happened in his games. There was always something to glean from the tapes.
During his sophomore season, Jeremy was not only good enough to win the point guard starting role, but his fantastic play also earned him the first of three first-team All – Santa Clara Valley Athletic League awards. His junior season was even better. Jeremy was the driving force behind the Palo Alto Vikings, helping the team set a school record for victories by posting a 32 – 2 record.
His coach, Peter Diepenbrock, recognized that he had something special and turned him loose. He sat down with his player and said, “Let’s tell it like it is. I’m the defensive coordinator; you’re the offensive coordinator. Just get it done.”2
Taking It Nice and Easy
Jeremy fearlessly pushed the ball up the court while playing for the Palo Alto High basketball team, playing an up-tempo game, but he was more cautious on the road when he was taking his driver’s license test.
He flunked his first time out because he drove too slow — 15 mph in a 25 mph residential zone.
And that’s just what Jeremy did in his senior year when he was the motor that propelled his team to the Division II California state championship. Going into the championship game, Palo Alto was a huge underdog against perennial powerhouse Mater Dei, a Catholic high school from Santa Ana in Southern California. No team had won more state basketball titles than Mater Dei, and the Monarchs, who had a 33 – 2 record, came into the game ranked among the nation’s top high school teams.
Talk about a David-versus-Goliath matchup. Mater Dei was loaded with Division I recruits and had eight players six foot seven inches or taller, while Palo Alto had no one over six foot six. Playing at Arco Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, Jeremy was all over the court, and he personally engineered the plucky and undersized Palo Alto team to a two-point lead with two minutes to play. Could the Vikings hang on?
Jeremy brought the offense up the floor, trying to eat up as much clock as possible. Suddenly, there were just seconds left on the 35-second shot clock. Jeremy was above the top of the key when he launched a rainbow toward the rim to beat the shot clock buzzer. The ball banked in, giving Palo Alto a five-point lead.
Mater Dei wasn’t finished yet, and neither was Jeremy. The Monarchs cut the lead to two points with 30 seconds to go, and then Jeremy dribbled the ball into the front court. Mater Dei didn’t want to foul him because the Monarchs knew he was an excellent free throw shooter, so they waited for him to dish off to a teammate. Jeremy, however, sensed an opening and drove to the basket in a flash, taking on Mater Dei’s star player, six-foot-eight Taylor King, in the paint. Jeremy went up and over King for a layup that gave him a total of 17 points in the game and iced the state championship in the 51 – 47 win. Palo Alto High finished their amazing season with a 32 – 1 record.
You would think that with all the college scouts in the stands for a state championship game, Jeremy would have had to go into the Federal Witness Protection Program to get a moment’s respite. But the recruiting interest had been underwhelming all season long and stayed that way after the win over Mater Dei. It wasn’t like Jeremy played for a tumbleweed-strewn high school in the middle of the Nevada desert. He was part of a respected program at Palo Alto High, and his coach, Peter Diepenbrock, was well-known to college coaches.
And Jeremy was highly regarded in Northern California high school basketball circles. He was named first-team All-State and Northern California’s Division II Scholar Athlete of the Year. The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper named him Boys Player of the Year, as did the San Jose Mercury News and the Palo Alto Daily News.
Despite all the great ink and the bushel basket of postseason awards, despite sending out DVDs of highlights that a friend at church had prepared, and despite Coach Diepenbrock’s lobbying efforts with college coaches, Jeremy did not receive any scholarship offers to play at a Division I school. That “missing in action” list included Stanford University, which was located literally across the street from Palo Alto High. (A wide boulevard named El Camino Real separates the two schools.)
It’s perplexing why Stanford didn’t offer Jeremy a scholarship. After all, Jeremy checked off a lot of boxes for the Cardinal:
• great high school basketball résumé
• local product
• strong academic record good enough to pass Stanford’s stringent academic standards
• Asian-American
Regarding the last bullet point, almost 20 percent of the undergraduate Stanford student body was Asian-American, and, as you read earlier, the school was located in a part of the country with a strong Asian population. But the Stanford basketball program took a pass. Some Stanford boosters interceded for Jeremy, telling the coaches that they simply had to give this Lin kid a look. But the best response the family received was that Jeremy could always try to make the team as a walk-on.
The Lins’ eyes turned across the bay toward Berkeley, but the University of California coaching staff said the same thing: You can try to walk on, but no guarantees. During one recruiting visit, a Cal coach called Jeremy “Ron.”
The disrespect continued at Jeremy’s dream school — UCLA — where Josh was enrolled. Jeremy would have loved to have played for the storied Bruin program, and he was the kind of upstanding young man the legendary Bruin coach John Wooden would have loved to recruit back in the 1960s and 1970s. But the message from UCLA coaches was the same: You’ll have to make the team as a walk-on.
Jeremy knew that few walk-ons — nonscholarship players invited to try out for the team — ever stick on a Division I basketball roster. He would never say it himself, but some basketball observers thought the fact that Jeremy was Asian-American cost him a Division I scholarship. Recruiters couldn’t look past his ethnicity, couldn’t imagine an Asian-looking kid having the game to compete against the very best players in the country. For whatever reason, they couldn’t picture him playing basketball at the Pac-10 level.
Running Up Against a Wall
Jeremy had run into a “system” that blocked his path like two Shaqs in the paint. College coaches, who are the decision makers, look for something quantifiable in a high school player — like how tall he is or how high he can jump or how many points per game he scores. Jeremy’s greatest strengths didn’t show up in a box score. His game was running the show, leading the offense, and setting up teammates. He had an incredible feel for the game, a Magic-like peripheral vision, and a take-charge attitude that coaches love to see in their point guards.
“He knew exactly what needed to be done at every point in the basketball game,” said his high school coach, Peter Diepenbrock. “He was able to exert his will on basketball games in ways you would not expect. It was just hard to quantify his fearlessness.”3
The problem likely stemmed from the fact that major college coaches had never recruited a standout Asian-American player before, so they didn’t know what to do with Jeremy. Asian-American gym rats like him were a novelty in college basketball; only one out of every two hundred Division I basketball players came from Asian-American households. In many coaches’ minds, college basketball stars had a different skin color or looked different than Jeremy.
The family had some options, however, thanks to Gie-Ming’s and Shirley’s insistence that their sons study and perform just as well in the classroom as they did on the basketball court. You could say that Shirley was a bit of a “tiger mom,” insisting that Jeremy put as much effort into hitting the books as he did into improving his outside jump shot.
One time, Coach Diepenbrock received a phone call from Shirley, who had some distressing news: Jeremy’s grade in a math class had slipped to a precarious A-. “Peter, Peter, Jeremy has an A- in this class. If it’s not an A by next week, I am taking him off basketball,” she threatened.
“Yes, I will stay on top of Jeremy,” the coach promised.4
Thankfully, Jeremy righted the listing academic ship. Throughout high school, he carried a 4.2 grade point average (in the grade point system, an A is worth 4 points, but AP, or Advanced Placement, classes were weighted more heavily because of their difficulty) at Palo Alto High, where he had scored a perfect 800 on his SAT II Math IIC during his freshman year. Jeremy’s parents felt that if Pac-10 and other Division I teams didn’t want their son, then maybe he could play for a top-ranked academic college — like Harvard, for example.
The Lins looked east — toward the eight Ivy League schools, which are the most selective (and therefore elite) universities in the country. Harvard and Brown each stepped up. Both coaches said they would guarantee Jeremy a roster spot. Each made the case that they really wanted him to play for their basketball programs.
In the Lin family, there was no discussion. If Harvard — the assumed No. 1 school in the country in nearly everyone’s eyes — wanted him, then he was going to play basketball for the Crimson, even if that meant his parents would have to pay for his schooling out of their own pockets. Harvard, like Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the rest of the Ivy League schools, didn’t offer athletic scholarships.
This was no small consideration for Jeremy’s parents. In round numbers, a year of undergraduate studies at Harvard costs fifty thousand dollars, which covers tuition, room and board, books, fees, and the like. The Lins were already shelling out money for Josh’s education at UCLA.
“The tuition is nuts,” Jeremy told me in our interviews. “My parents did everything they could to get me through school. I received some financial aid from Harvard and took out some student loans.”
“You were probably glad your parents stressed academics because you probably wouldn’t have gotten into Harvard without being a strong student, right?” I said.
“Oh, definitely, I wouldn’t have made if they hadn’t been pushing me.”
“Did they push you more in academics or athletics?”
“Academics. They were pushing for that.”
Good thing that Gie-Ming and Shirley kept their eyes on the academics ball. Harvard turned out to be not only a great basketball school for Jeremy — where his game could grow — but a place that added to the Jeremy Lin legend.
By the Numbers
18: The number of Asian-American men’s players in Division I college basketball (0.4 percent). This statistic comes from the 2009 NCAA Race and Ethnicity Report, which released during the time when Jeremy Lin was playing basketball at Harvard.
23: The number of students at Harvard with the last name of Lin while Jeremy was attending the university and playing basketball there.