Jeremy Lin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (edited and abbreviated)
 
This article is about the professional basketball player.
For the Olympic swimmer, see Jeremy Linn.

Lin's Chinese name "林書豪" spoken in Mandarin, Taiwanese
compared with his English "Jeremy Shu-How Lin"
 
Jeremy Shu-How Lin (born August 23, 1988) is an American professional basketball player with the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association (NBA). After receiving no athletic scholarship offers out of high school and being undrafted out of college, the 2010 Harvard University graduate reached a partially guaranteed contract deal later that year with his hometown Golden State Warriors. After his first year, he was waived by the Warriors and the Houston Rockets in the preseason before joining the Knicks early in the 2011–12 season. Lin is one of the few Asian Americans in NBA history, and the first American player in the league to be of Chinese or Taiwanese descent.

Early Life

Lin was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Palo Alto,[3][4][note 1] in a Christian family.[6] His parents, Gie-Ming and Shirley, emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the mid-1970s.[7][8] They are dual nationals of both Taiwan and the U.S.[9] Lin's paternal family comes from Beidou, Changhua in Taiwan (his father's distant ancestors immigrated to Taiwan from Zhangpu County, Fujian, in mainland China, in 1707),[9][10][11] while his maternal grandmother immigrated to Southern Taiwan in the late 1940s from Pinghu, Zhejiang in mainland China.

Racial issues

Sean Gregory of Time wrote of Lin's zero Division I scholarship offers: "Lin was scrawny, but don't doubt that a little racial profiling, intentional or otherwise, contributed to his underrecruitment."  Diepenbrock stated, "If Lin was African American or Caucasian, it might have been a different deal."  Lin said: "I'm not saying top-5 state automatically gets you offers, but I do think (my ethnicity) did affect the way coaches recruited me. I think if I were a different race, I would've been treated differently."  Walters added, "People who don't think stereotypes exist are crazy. If Lin's white, he's either a good shooter or heady. If he's Asian, he's good at math. We're not taking him."
 
Diepenbrock said that people without meaning any harm assume since Lin is Asian that he is not a basketball player. The first time Lin went to a Pro-Am game in Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco someone there informed him: "Sorry, sir, there's no volleyball here tonight. It's basketball."  During Lin's college career, fewer than 0.5% of men's Division 1 basketball players were Asian-American. Lin has regularly heard bigoted jeers at games such as "Wonton soup", "Sweet and sour pork", "Open your eyes!", "Go back to China", "Orchestra is on the other side of campus", or pseudo-Chinese gibberish.  Lin says this occurred at most if not all Ivy League gyms. He does not react to it. "I expect it, I'm used to it, it is what it is," says Lin. The heckling came mostly from opposing fans and not as much from players. According to Harvard teammate Oliver McNally, a fellow Ivy League player did once call Lin a "chink". In January 2010, Harvard played against Santa Clara University at the Leavey Center, just 15 miles from his hometown of Palo Alto, California. Playing to a capacity crowd that included droves of Asian Americans wanting to see his homecoming, his teammates told him, "It was like Hong Kong."
 
Lin considers himself a basketball player more than just an Asian American. He understands that there have not been many Asians in the NBA. "Maybe I can help break the stereotype," said Lin. "I feel like Asians in general don't get the respect that we may deserve whether it comes to sports, basketball, or whatever it might be."