It’s been over 10 years since Jeremy Lin shot to fame during a stint with the New York Knicks that saw the player become the face of Asian Americans in the NBA.
Drafted from the D-League to replace the injured Iman Shumpert, Lin led the Knicks to a run of victories and saw himself become the first player in NBA history to score at least 20 points and register seven assists in his first five starts, a run that included a 13-assist game.
Lin has now shared the mental and emotional toll his sudden rise to fame took on him with the player stating he almost lost his humanity.
“I think for me as a person, it’s been an evolution from trying to run away from it because I felt like I didn’t like a lot of the side effects of Linsanity,” Lin told Sky Sports.
“Some family issues that it caused, all the privacy that was taken away from me overnight, and the paparazzi chasing down me and my family and my friends… just a lot of scary things that happened.
“There were also just the expectations of the world, almost turning me into some type of superhero. I became this phenomenon and I felt like I lost my humanity in the middle of it.
“Then eventually, I started to understand racism at a better level, at a deeper level. For so long, I tried to run from being ‘the Asian basketball player’, I just wanted to be a great basketball player – because my whole life, everyone was just talking about [my ethnicity].
“I just wanted people to talk about my basketball skills for once, so as I started to run from that, I started to really open my perspective, seeing what racism really does and how embedded it is and how deep it is.
“Culturally, I realised, this period was much more than basketball, it’s much more than that season, it is much more than just the New York Knicks and Jeremy Lin – this is a story that will be told for years and years and years and that has shattered so many stereotypes, and so many boxes that society has tried to put on minorities.”
Lin currently plays for the Beijing Ducks.
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