-Courtesy Pablo S. Torre, Sports Illustrated
Appeared in Feb. 1 print issue of SPorts Illustrated, Volume 112,
Issue 4; on newsstands Jan. 27
What's most surprising? The possibility that he
might become the first Asian-American draft pick in NBA history?
The bigoted jeers he regularly hears at games (everything from
"wonton soup" to "Open your eyes!")? The number of microphones and
cameras of Chinese and Taiwanese outlets—five covered
Harvard-Dartmouth on Jan. 9—that broadcast Crimson highlight
packages, including interviews with his coach, Tommy Amaker?
Or is it the hysterically proud new fans, the ones filling gyms
from Cambridge, Mass., to Santa Clara, Calif., toting signs and
wearing customized T-shirts (WE LOVE YOU JEREMY!) more befitting a
Jonas brother than a Taiwanese-American Ivy League point guard?
"The most surprising part," Jeremy Lin concludes, shaking his head
and exhaling, "is pretty much everything."
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."
Neither is Harvard (13--3, 2--0 in the Ivy League). An institution
whose academic prestige is in inverse proportion to its hoops
futility, the Crimson has never won even a conference title. But
now, 64 years after making its sole NCAA appearance, the oldest
university in America has a big-name coach, a player of the year
candidate and its best start since 1945. "I always wondered, Why
can't the basketball team be great?" says Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer, a booster who kept stats for the team as an undergrad in
the 1970s. "Finally, things are building."
So it is that when Harvard visits two-time defending Ivy champ
Cornell (16--3, 2--0) this Saturday, it will be the most
anticipated conference game in decades—the NCAA selection
committee's midseason bracket projects the Crimson as a No. 11 seed
and the Big Red as a 12, which would give the Ivies their first
at-large tournament bid—and the spotlight will fall not only
on high-scoring Cornell forward Ryan Wittman but also on two point
guards.
The first one is the curiously under-recruited Lin, a 6'3",
200-pound dynamo who was averaging 17.1 points, 4.8 assists, 4.5
rebounds, 2.9 steals and 1.3 blocks at week's end. "I've been
around a lot of good players in my life," says Amaker, the 1987
national defensive player of the year at Duke, "and Jeremy's up
there. He's sensational."
The other is Tommy Amaker.
Three years ago, in early April, Harvard's redbrick Murr athletics
building was the site of a rare process in college sports.
Following the bitter firing of longtime coach Frank Sullivan that
March, athletic director Bob Scalise convened a search committee
made up of administration officials and prominent alums to find the
man who might implement a wholesale, "private-equity-like"
turnaround of one of the worst programs in Division I. In an
unusual step the committee asked the team's nonseniors to interview
the finalists as well.
St. John's coach Mike Jarvis was among those brought in, as was
Longwood University coach Mike Gillian. Then came Amaker, the
biggest name—if only because the 41-year-old coach had been
unceremoniously canned by Michigan a few weeks earlier for failing
to reach the NCAA tournament in his six-year run.
It was no contest. "Coach Amaker's interview with us was
incredible," Lin recalls. "We clicked. Pretty much everybody said,
'We've got to get this guy.'"
A Mike Krzyzewski protégé as a Duke assistant from
1988 through '97, Amaker had led Seton Hall to the Sweet 16 in 2000
and won 109 games at Michigan. But most striking to the
interviewers, he brought a freshman's intense, starry-eyed ambition
for what he loves to call "the Harvard brand."
Amaker wanted a go-go offense that fed off a disciplined
half-court defense and sparked highlight-caliber plays in the open
court. The result has been efficient (Harvard ranked third in the
country in two-point field goal percentage, at 56.9%) and exciting
(see Lin's two-handed dunk in traffic against UConn in December).
As a recruiter, he wanted to be working the same living rooms as
Vanderbilt and Stanford.
But at first Amaker's grand vision attracted the wrong attention.
In March 2008 The New York Times reported that Harvard had lowered
admissions standards and "adopted aggressive recruiting tactics"
that may have violated NCAA rules (possible improper contacts with
recruits by Amaker and an assistant). Six months later the Ivy
League exonerated him, announcing that its investigation found "no
violations of NCAA or Ivy League rules" and that recruits' academic
profiles—as per the Academic Index, a league formula that
sets rules based on GPA and test scores—"complied with all
relevant Ivy League obligations." (Also, a particular recruit cited
by the Times as being academically unqualified to attend Harvard
ultimately signed with Davidson.)
Otherwise, Amaker has been successful in persuading players who
meet those Ivy League obligations to give the Crimson a close look.
Consider first-year forward Kyle Casey of Medway, Mass., one of 14
freshmen or sophomores on the team: A 6'7" poetry lover with a
42-inch vertical who picked the Crimson over Stanford, Casey
(averaging 17.2 points and 6.6 rebounds over the team's last five
games) didn't think "for a second" that he'd go to Harvard before
Amaker started showing interest in him. Neither, most likely, did
the 12 schoolboys among Rivals.com's Top 150 for the class of 2011
who are now considering Harvard—do not adjust your
monocle—along with such programs as Kansas and Kentucky.
"Harvard won't make sense for every kid," says Keith Easterwood,
the AAU coach of one of those recruits, guard Andre Hollins of
White Station High in Memphis. "But that staff has taken the
blinders off. They're selling basketball and a hell of an
education. With Andre, they're going to be in it with Memphis and
Tennessee."
But for all of Amaker's moves to make the Harvard brand more
enticing to recruits—switching team sponsors, from New
Balance to Nike, bringing old pros Doc Rivers and Grant Hill to
clinics ("Now they say they lectured at Harvard," Amaker jokes),
highlighting the school's new financial-aid packages, revising the
media guide to feature alums from John Adams to Barack
Obama—the coach would discover that the key to his
turnaround, not to mention his best athlete, was an unassuming
holdover who had interviewed him for the job.
Jeremy Shu-How Lin was the only player in the
nation last season ranked in the top 10 of every major statistical
category in his conference, but this stat might be the most
striking: According to the most recent NCAA Race and Ethnicity
Report (released in 2009), there are only 18 Asian-American men's
basketball players in Division I (0.4%). By contrast, there are 23
students at Harvard with the last name of Lin.
Which is to say that Jeremy's college choice, as stereotypes go,
was not terribly novel. Lin's parents, Gie-Ming and Shirley, are
5'6" Taiwanese immigrants who came to the U.S. in the mid-1970s and
studied computer engineering (dad) and computer science (mom) at
Purdue. Neither ever played a second of organized hoops, but they
did watch the NBA. Shirley adored Dr. J; three times a week
Gie-Ming took their sons, Joshua, Jeremy and Joseph, to the YMCA
and tried to help them mimic the skills they had seen on TV.
All three played high school basketball, but the middle child
stood out. "Even as a 5'3", 125-pound freshman, Jeremy lived and
breathed basketball," says Peter Diepenbrock, Lin's coach at Palo
Alto High. "And more than that, he knew he was the best on any
court we stepped on." As a 6'1" senior, Lin led Palo Alto to the
state Division II championship, shocking nationally ranked Mater
Dei and showing flashes of the primary strengths of his game:
fearlessness in the paint, unselfishness in the open floor (he
takes only 19.7% of Harvard's shots) and an overhead, catapultlike
jumper that is lethal from inside the arc (61.3% this season).
The Kansases and Kentuckys, however, didn't exactly knock down
Lin's door. He sent his CV (4.2 GPA, perfect score on his SAT II
Math 2C in the ninth grade) and a DVD of highlights—edited by
a friend of a friend from church—to all eight Ivies,
Stanford, Cal and his dream school, UCLA. Only four schools
responded. Out of the Pac-10, Lin recalls, UCLA "wasn't
interested," Stanford was "fake interested," and during a visit to
Cal a staffer "called me 'Ron.'"
"In hindsight," Santa Clara coach and former Bruins assistant
Kerry Keating told the San Francisco Chronicle, "he'd probably be
starting for UCLA at point guard."
He hit a 40-footer at the buzzer to beat William & Mary in
triple-overtime in November, scored a total of 52 points in two
wins over Boston College in the last two years and had 30 points,
nine rebounds and two nasty slams in a six-point loss to then No.
14--ranked UConn. Said Huskies coach Jim Calhoun, "I can't think of
a team that he wouldn't play for." (There might be one,
technically: the Chinese Olympic team. Lin says he would decline a
tryout invitation if renouncing his U.S. citizenship would be a
requirement for making the team.)
And yet Lin, whose demeanor on the court matches his role as
coleader of a campus Bible study group, encounters racism at
virtually every game on the road, whether it's fans yelling
"Chinese" gibberish (Lin is not fluent in Mandarin, for the record)
or opponents using the most vile epithets that can be directed at
Asians.
"I really saw it affect Jeremy last year," Harvard guard Oliver
McNally says of how Lin would stew in private. "But now? He lets
his game speak for itself. They can call him whatever they
want."
Once a month, at the Cambridge restaurant Henrietta's Table,
Amaker has breakfast with a group of noted African-American
scholars and businessmen led by Harvard Law School professor
Charles J. Ogletree. Lately they have discussed politics, the
dueling philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois,
and, in Ogletree's words, "the whole new world" that has enveloped
Harvard basketball.
And at 84-year-old Lavietes Pavilion, the Crimson's home crowd has
become a blend of screaming academics, new fans from poor black
neighborhoods in East Cambridge, well-heeled alums and a small army
of Asian-American diehards. "There's a real sense of optimism,
excitement, even a sense of family," says Arne Duncan, the U.S.
Secretary of Education and a Harvard forward in the mid-1980s. "All
that's been missing for a while."
Notably, one fan was on the bandwagon before any signs or
microphones or pro scouts appeared. "I think this team is going to
surprise everyone," Gie-Ming Lin wrote in an e-mail to Amaker early
last fall. "I know it is not easy. But in high school they called
my son 'Mr. Improbable.'"
Cue the usual shaking of Jeremy's head, that sheepish exhale of
disbelief. For Mr. Improbable, of course, the best part about this
surprising season is that nothing seems improbable anymore.
Ivy Pros
If he goes on to play in the NBA, Harvard senior guard Jeremy Lin
(right) would become the first Ivy Leaguer in the pros since Yale's
Chris Dudley retired after the 2002--03 season. Lin would also be
the first Crimson athlete to play in the league since Ed Smith
scored 28 points in 11 games for the Knicks in 1953--54. Of the
eight Ivy schools, Harvard has accounted for the fewest NBA games
played by alumni.
