Harvard basketball dates back to 1900, when John Kirkland Clark, a Harvard Law School student, introduced the game to the school just eight years after Dr. James Naismith invented the game at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, eighty-eight miles west of Cambridge.
On a wintry mid-January morning in 1892, the PE instructor nailed half-bushel baskets to the lower rail of the gymnasium balcony, which happened to be ten feet off the ground, and told his class that they were going to play a new game called Basket Ball. The objective: heave a lumpy leather ball into your goal. Good thing the lower balcony wasn’t twelve feet, or we wouldn’t have the NBA Slam Dunk Contest every year.
Harvard didn’t have much to show for its 106 years of basketball tradition by the time Jeremy arrived on the Harvard campus in the fall of 2006. The Crimson had never won an Ivy League conference title, and the last time Harvard had played in the NCAA tournament was in 1946. In the four seasons prior to Jeremy’s arrival, the Harvard team was 13 – 14, 5 – 22, 12 – 15, and 13 – 14. Winning seasons happened once a decade.
So it was no surprise that student apathy greeted the program. The mediocrity continued during Jeremy’s first two years at Harvard (12 – 16 his freshman year; 8 – 22 his sophomore year), but both the Harvard basketball team and Jeremy were a work in progress. His coach, Tommy Amaker, who had been an All-American player at Duke and coached under legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski, liked Jeremy’s quickness and his slashing moves to the rim, but the glaring hole in his game was his shooting beyond the 3-point line.
In college hoops, the 3-point line is 20 feet, 9 inches (it’s between 22 feet and 23 feet, 9 inches in the NBA), so the guards are expected to keep defenses off balance by shooting the three — and making it nearly half the time. Jeremy, however, was a 28 percent shooter from beyond the 3-point line, and defenses noticed. They would back off to stop him from driving to the hole and dare him to shoot from beyond the arc.
At Coach Amaker’s request, Jeremy focused on his outside shooting between his sophomore and junior years. Many mornings he met assistant coach Ken Blakeny at 7:00 a.m. to work on his stroke and increase his range.
The dogged approach worked. When he became a consistent threat to make the 3-point shot, the whole floor opened up to him. “That’s why, in Jeremy’s junior year, Coach Amaker basically gave him the keys to the bus and said, ‘Let’s go,’ ” said Will Wade, one of the assistant coaches.5
With Jeremy behind the wheel, Harvard basketball began emerging into the spotlight during his junior year, especially after Jeremy scored 25 points to help the Crimson beat a Boston College team that was coming off an upset of North Carolina. The team’s improvement from 8 – 22 to 14 – 14 was significant, and Jeremy’s numbers progressed just as dramatically: 17.7 points per game, 4.2 assists, and 40 percent from behind the 3-point line.
Even more noteworthy was the fact that Jeremy was the only NCAA Division I men’s basketball player who ranked in the Top 10 in his conference in scoring, rebounding, assists, steals, blocked shots, field goal percentage, free throw percentage, and 3-point shooting percentage. He was improving quickly and becoming comfortable with his game, but Jeremy was also determined to live the life of a typical college student.
He lived in the dorms his freshman year and never put on the airs of being someone special because he played on the basketball team. Let’s face it, at Harvard just about every student has a special talent in something, and Jeremy was no different. He liked making friends, hanging out, eating too much pizza, and playing Halo, his favorite video game. He was social, but he wasn’t a partier.
Many young adult Christians lose interest in their faith when they go off to college, especially if they attend an elite, secular university like Harvard, which has been euphemistically described as a bastion of religious skepticism. Others get swallowed up by the nightly party scene and live prodigal lives.6
Jeremy, though, didn’t step off the narrow trail that he set before himself. He knew he had to read the Word daily, so he made sure he was reading Scripture in the morning and in the evening before the lights went out.
“When I first got to Harvard, I was suddenly around athletes all the time, and I wasn’t used to that,” he said. “It’s a tough environment, and if you don’t have appropriate boundaries, you’ll compromise your faith. I struggled spiritually for a while, and I didn’t have many Christian friends. It wasn’t until I connected with a small group during my sophomore year that things really started to change. I began to build a Christian community, learn more about Jesus in the Bible, and develop relationships that helped me with accountability.”7
Jeremy also told me he had a cousin who was a pastor at a local church at Harvard Square, so Jeremy went to his church too. But joining the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship (HRAACF), an InterVarsity chapter, really spurred his spiritual growth because he made friends he could talk to about his faith. He became a coleader his junior and senior years, and although his involvement with the group was limited by the demands of schoolwork and playing basketball, he met regularly with Adrian Tam, an HRAACF campus staffer.
Adrian became a spiritual mentor to Jeremy as they studied the Bible together and read books such as Bill Hybels’s Too Busy Not to Pray. “He loved his roommates, spending lots of intense one-on-one time with them, leading investigative Bible studies with them, and just plain hanging out with them,” Adrian said.
What Tam remembers most about Jeremy, from their very first meeting, was his humility. “Even though he was more accomplished, smarter, and just plain bigger than I was, he always treated me with respect and honor,” Tam says. “He was real with me, and he earnestly desired to follow God in all things. He had a quiet ambition — not only to be the best basketball player he could be but also to be the best Christ-follower he could be.”
One of the best things about being involved with the Asian American Christian Fellowship was seeing fellow students come to Christ and make lifestyle changes, Jeremy said. “When that happens, you definitely see God behind it. I’m really thankful God is changing somebody, or sometimes he’s changing me. To see that transformation brings me a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment. I definitely want to do something in ministry down the road, maybe as a pastor if that’s where God leads me.”8
Following his freshman year in the dorms, Jeremy spent his last three years living at Leverett House, a student housing complex that overlooked the Charles River. He formed a tight-knit group of friends who lived together in an eight-man suite, with a common area for studying and socializing. When Leverett House formed a flag football team, Jeremy became the star wide receiver. During the 2009 Harvard intramural flag football championship against archrival Winthrop House, Jeremy proved himself to be quite a pass-catching machine in a 35 – 20 victory, leaping high for touchdown passes and interceptions.
If Jeremy showed no fear on the football field, he wasn’t so brave when it came time for his annual flu shot. Alek Blankenau, a Leverett House resident and Harvard teammate, recalled the time when the basketball players were directed to get flu vaccinations at the start of the season — a sensible directive given how a flu bug can sweep through a campus. Jeremy was having none of it, though, because of a deep-seated fear of needles.
As the players queued up, Jeremy started to freak out. An agitated Jeremy whispered to Alek that he couldn’t go through with it and wanted to step out of line. “I said, ‘Are you serious? We’re grown men. You need to get it together,’ ” Blankenau recalled. “That was definitely the most flustered I’d ever seen him.”
He certainly wasn’t as troubled on the basketball court, where the first green sprouts of Linsanity pushed through the soil during Jeremy’s final season at Harvard. His quiet ambition fully flowered on the basketball court, where Jeremy was a hit, pure and simple. The Harvard team rode his back to an unprecedented 21 – 8 record. As the Crimson kept winning games — and beating conference rivals like Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth — the 2,195-seat bandbox known as Lavietes Pavilion filled up with Harvard students wearing “Welcome to the Jeremy Lin Show” silk-screened across the front of their T-shirts.
Suddenly, showing up at college basketball’s second-oldest arena (which opened in 1926) and cheering for Jeremy and their team was relevant again at an Ivy League college normally bereft of school spirit. Cheng Ho, the senior running back on the football team, saw a kindred soul in another Asian-American athlete on campus and sprang into action. He started a Facebook campaign called “People of the Crimson” to get people to come out to the Harvard basketball home games, which is ironic, since Facebook had started in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room six years earlier.
Instead of the sparsely populated student section, Lavietes Pavilion was energized by a full house of spirited undergrads, curious alums, and even kids from the poor neighborhoods in nearby East Cambridge — with many of them wearing either “white out” or “black out” T-shirts (whole sections of fans wearing all-white or all-black) as directed by the latest Facebook post from Cheng Ho.
During Jeremy’s senior year, the basketball program at Santa Clara University, located fifteen miles from Jeremy’s hometown of Palo Alto, invited the Harvard team to the West Coast for a “homecoming” game during Jeremy’s senior year.
News of the matchup created a buzz in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“If you want to see an arena filled with thousands of Asian-Americans rooting for the best Asian-American basketball player ever, you should come to this historic game,” wrote a blogger on the Golden State of Mind website, urging everyone to wear black in support of Jeremy’s and Harvard’s road uniforms.9
And come they did on January 4, 2010, when thousands of Jeremy Lin fans shoehorned into the 4,700-seat Leavey Center area dressed in their black T-shirts in support of the visiting team. The pressure of playing in front of parents and family, his old buddies from high school and youth basketball days, and his new fans took its toll. Jeremy suffered through a case of butterflies and scored only six points. He ran the offense well, though, in helping Harvard defeat Santa Clara, 74 – 66.
The reception was far chillier on the road, where college basketball crowds can be brutal. When the student section is not rhythmically chanting “bull@#$%, bull@#$%” after a call they don’t like, they’re dressing up in ways that mock the other team — such as wearing the clothes of Mormon missionaries (white short-sleeved shirts, black pants, thin black ties, and black bike helmets) whenever Brigham Young University plays on the road.
When the Sacramento Kings sharpshooting guard Jimmer Fredette was finishing up at BYU, the San Diego State fans gave him the full treatment. One fan held up a sign that asked, “Which wife gave you mono?” in reference to Fredette’s bout with mononucleosis earlier in his senior season. But that was tame compared to the mean-spirited “You’re still Mormon!” chants from the student section.
So it should come as no surprise that the sight of a prominent, all-over-the-floor Asian-American basketball player personally beating their team would prompt a few immature — and likely drunk — members of student sections to taunt Jeremy.
Some yelled really stupid (and racist) stuff, like “Hey, sweet and sour pork” or “wonton soup” from the stands. “Go back to China” and “The orchestra is on the other side of campus” were some of the other dim-witted taunts. One time at Georgetown, Jeremy heard terribly unkind remarks aimed in his direction, including the racial slurs “chink” and “slant eyes.”
Jeremy showed God’s grace and gave his tormenters the other cheek. But he also played harder. Granted, the catcalls bothered him at first, but he decided to let his game speak for itself. In the process, he helped make Harvard relevant in college basketball and revived a dormant program.
Once again, he led the Ivy League in ten different offensive categories, as he did in his junior year. His scoring average during his senior year was 16.4 points per game, which is remarkable because he only took an average of 9.9 shots per game, a dramatic example of his unselfish play. For the third year in a row, he won Raymond P. Lavietes ‘36 Most Valuable Player Award, voted on by teammates. He set several records at Harvard: first all-time in games played (115), fifth in points (1,483), fifth in assists (406), and second in steals (225).
Jeremy’s stock was never higher during his senior year than when Harvard played the then No. 12 – ranked University of Connecticut, a traditional college basketball powerhouse, on the road. He dissected and bisected UConn for 30 points and 9 rebounds and threw a scare into one of the top teams in the country. Harvard lost 79 – 73, but Jeremy earned a set of new admirers.
The East Coast media heard of the Jeremy Lin Show and sent reporters from New York and Boston to check him out. They wanted to measure the player who had turned around such a dismal program.
Here are some of the more memorable quotes:
• “Jeremy Lin is probably one of the best players in the country you don’t know about.” (ESPN’s Rece Davis)
• “He is a joy to watch. He’s smooth, smart, unselfish, and sees the floor like no one else on it sees.”
(Boston Herald columnist Len Megliola)
• “Keep an eye on Harvard’s Jeremy Lin. The fact that he’s an Asian-American guard playing at Harvard has probably kept him off the NBA radar too long. But as scouts are hunting everywhere for point guards, more and more are coming back and acknowledging that Lin is a legit prospect.”
(ESPN NBA draft analyst Chad Ford)
Sports Illustrated did its first major feature on Jeremy in February 2010 in a piece titled “Harvard School of Basketball.” Writer Pablo Torre zipped off this description:
It’s a mid-January afternoon, and the senior econ major driving the unlikeliest revival in college basketball sits in his fourth-floor dorm room overlooking a frozen Charles River. He’s surrounded by photos of family and friends back in Palo Alto, Calif., a poster of Warriors-era Chris Webber and an Xbox in disrepair. Nothing suggests Lin’s status as the first finalist in more than a decade for the Wooden award and first for the Cousy award (nation’s top point guard) to come from the scholarship-devoid Ivies.
“I never could have predicted any of this,” says Lin. “To have people talk about you like that? I’m not really used to it.”10
Torre was referring to Jeremy’s standing as a finalist for the John Wooden Award, the nation’s most coveted college basketball honor. Thirty players were nominated and ten were selected for the All-American team, but Jeremy didn’t make the final cut after the end of the 2010 season. He had a better chance for winning the Bob Cousy Award as the nation’s top point guard (named after Hall of Famer and former Boston Celtics guard Bob Cousy), but Greivis Vásquez, who grew up playing street basketball in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, received the honor.
When Jeremy’s playing career at Harvard was over, and he had graduated on time with a degree in economics (he minored in sociology and carried a 3.1 grade point average), he had high hopes that an NBA team would draft him and give him a clean shot at making the roster. But there was a prevailing headwind he was fighting against — the fact that he didn’t play in a major conference against the biggest, tallest, and best college players in the land.
His ethnicity?
Let’s not go there, but the 800-pound gorilla in the draft room was that no Asian-American player with his background had ever worn an NBA uniform. If Jeremy was going to do it, he would have to be the first.
Many people don’t realize how difficult it is reach the highest level of professional basketball. Approximately 3,600 men have played in the NBA since its inception in 1949, but how many have tried to get there — or imagined themselves wearing an NBA uniform? The answer has to be in the tens of millions, if you count every boy who pretended he was Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson or Larry Bird or Jerry West or Wilt Chamberlain in the driveway, dribbling the ball and driving toward the basket to score the winning basket in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
Jeremy was one of those kids playing hoops for hours in the driveway. When he was in middle school, he and his brothers would stop playing and peer through the window when Dad had an NBA game on TV. Jeremy would see Michael Jordan make one of his patented fadeaway jumpers, and then he would return to their portable basketball standard to imitate the same move, over and over.
If you think about it, Jeremy was putting in his 10,000 hours of practice, the large round number that author Malcolm Gladwell (in his book Outliers: The Story of Success) claims is the key to success in any field — from playing a concert piano to becoming an ace computer programmer to becoming an elite athlete.
Jeremy had been practicing and playing basketball since he was five years old. By the time he graduated from Harvard, who knows how many hours he had toiled with a leather ball in his hand, working on all aspects of the game — shooting, passing, rebounding, and defense? It had to be way more than 10,000 hours.
Yet despite all the hard work he had put in to develop his God-given talent, the way Jeremy made it to the NBA came about in God’s economy.
In other words, it was a miracle.