He’s been called “Lincredible,” a balm of “Liniment” for the National Basketball Association, and the architect of “Linsanity.” He is one of the most popular athletes on the planet right now.
We’re talking about, of course, Jeremy Lin, the twenty-three-year-old Asian-American point guard for the New York Knicks, who has moved from anonymity to stardom — even pop-icon status — faster than an outlet pass off a clean rebound.
In early February 2012, Jeremy was the last man coming off the Knicks’ bench during garbage time; by Valentine’s Day, his dribble drive through five Los Angeles Lakers graced the cover of Sports Illustrated; basketball pundits on ESPN SportsCenter had run out of superlatives to describe him; and his No. 17 Knicks’ jersey was the NBA’s top seller — telling touch points of stardom reminiscent of another professional athlete who had recently seized the public’s imagination, a quarterback named Tim Tebow.
Think about it: the professional version of Tebowmania dominated the national conversation in the late fall and early winter months of 2011, continuing into the National Football League playoffs. Everyone talked about Tebow’s quick slant pass to Demaryius Thomas on the first play of overtime and the thrilling footrace to the end zone. The mighty Pittsburgh Steelers were slain, and the legend of Tim Tebow was writ even larger.
And then, barely a month later, Jeremy Lin leaped into our living rooms. In one short week — just a handful of games into a consolidated, lockout-shortened season — Jeremy progressed from anonymous benchwarmer to the toast of the Big Apple as the Knicks’ leading scorer, playmaker, and spiritual leader.
West of the Hudson River, he galvanized our attention in a fragmented media universe and set the 24/7 social networking world on fire. It was breathtaking to consider the way that smartphones, laptops, and computers converged to create a tidal wave of tweets, touts, and online chatter about Jeremy’s spin move from third-stringer to instant phenom.
The reason that Jeremy went viral is simple: everyone loves an underdog story, and his improbable journey has all the ingredients of a Hollywood fairy tale.
Trailblazing Asian-American in the NBA.
Harvard grad.
Cut by two teams and riding the pine in New York City.
Even the fact that he had been sleeping on his brother’s couch on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was part of the lore. People imagined the poor guy sacking out in Josh’s living room because there was no room in the inn.
I (Mike Yorkey) watched all this develop with great interest since I had been following Jeremy Lin for more than a year. I had interviewed him twice after he finished his rookie season with the Golden State Warriors and was captivated by how this son of Taiwanese immigrants overcame preconceived ideas of who can and can’t play basketball at the highest echelons of the game. He also impressed me with his levelheaded maturity and his willingness to talk about what his faith in Christ meant to him.
I shared those thoughts in a book called Playing with Purpose: Inside the Lives and Faith of Top NBA Stars, which was published in November 2011. We chose to put Jeremy’s picture on the cover — along with two-time NBA scoring champion Kevin Durant and 3-point shooting ace Kyle Korver — because of his “upside,” as they like to say in sports-speak. Quite frankly, though, we were taking a chance with Jeremy. Nobody knew what the future portended. The jury was still out on whether he would stick in the NBA.
Jeremy didn’t make much of an impression during his rookie season with the Golden State Warriors. He played in nearly as many games (twenty) for the club’s D-League team, the Reno Bighorns, as he did with the Warriors (twenty-nine). When he was part of the parent club, he sat a lot. Many nights, the acronym DNP (Did Not Play) appeared next to his name in the box score. When he did see action, he averaged 9.8 minutes and scored only 2.6 points per game for a sub-.500 team that failed to make the playoffs.
Nobody was saying that Jeremy was the next Jerry West, but I was fine with that. The fact that Jeremy even made it onto an NBA roster was noteworthy for several reasons:
1. At six foot three, he wasn’t tall for a game dominated by humongous athletes who could have played on Goliath’s team back in the day.
2. He came from an Ivy League school, Harvard University, which last sent a player to the NBA in 1953 — the year before the league adopted the 24-second shot clock.
3. He was the first American-born player of Chinese/Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA.
The uniqueness of his story — his racial background, his Ivy League pedigree, and his undrafted status — were compelling reasons to feature Jeremy in a book about Christian ballplayers in the NBA, but those were surface explanations. What interested me more about Jeremy —after having spoken with him — was his deep reservoir of faith, his commitment to seeing himself as a Christian first and a basketball player second. Here was a polite, humble, and hardworking young man who understood that God had a purpose for his life, whatever that might be. He was in the midst of a wild, implausible journey with a leather basketball in his hands — and who knew which direction the ball would bounce?
“What kind of plan do you think God has for you at this moment?” I asked Jeremy, fresh after his rookie season in the late spring of 2011.
“I’m not exactly sure how it is all going to turn out,” he replied, “but I know for a fact that God has called me to be here now in the NBA. And this is the assignment that he has given me. I know I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case. Just looking back, though, it’s been a huge miracle [that I’m in the NBA]. I can see God’s fingerprints everywhere. I just know that this is where he wants me right now. This past year, though, I have gone through a lot of different struggles and learned things that he wanted me to learn, to draw me closer to him, humble me, and make me more dependent on him.”
When he uttered those words, no one knew about the mind-boggling odyssey awaiting him in 2012. We’ll get to that, but first you need to read about his remarkable backstory: where Jeremy came from, how he was raised, and how this unheralded and lightly regarded prospect beat Lincredible — ah, incredible — odds to play in the NBA.