Former NBA player Jeremy Lin appeared on the latest episode of the Above the Rim with DH 12 podcast, where host Dwight Howard posed an interesting question to him. Howard asked Lin, an Asian-American, about the greatest lesson basketball has taught him, and he explained how it can be a great unifying force.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Lin said. “… The biggest thing is don’t come to a conclusion too fast. There’s always another side of the story. And this is something where, for example, my parents had never met an African-American in their life. It was kind of like fast forward, that’s where they started. Then she started picking up all my teammates, spending time with them, spending time with their parents.
“Fast forward 15 years, when we’re on the same team, and my mom is eating breakfast for fun,” Lin continued. “They’re arranging for fun with James Harden and Patrick Beverley’s mom. So, it’s like the three moms: my mom, James Harden’s mom, and Patrick Beverley’s mom. And they’re going to eat breakfast together… Voluntarily, they’re hitting each other up like, ‘Yo, let’s go here,’ and it’s like, what happened?
“And so I think it’s all through basketball,” Lin added. “It’s like learning that we may not look the same or come from the same place, but actually, the struggles that we have are the same. We have the struggles of mankind, and those are very parallel.”
Lin’s parents, Gie-ming Lin and Shirley Lin, had emigrated from Taiwan to the United States in the 1970s. Their son’s basketball career ended up being a way for them to mingle with people they otherwise rarely would have gotten the opportunity to.
“Basketball unites people,” Lin stated. “… We come from different places, but because of basketball, we are one… If it wasn’t for basketball, we would never have crossed paths. And so that’s kind of the beautiful thing about it all.”
Sports can bring together people like nothing else. While Lin did encounter issues of the racial kind due to his being a rare Asian American in basketball, the positives far outweigh the negatives.
Lin had gone undrafted out of Stanford in 2010, but then rose to prominence with his sensational “Linsanity” run with the New York Knicks in 2012. The 37-year-old would end up playing nine seasons in the NBA and averaged 11.6 points, 2.8 rebounds, 4.3 assists, 1.1 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game.
Lin wishes his NBA career had lasted longer, but it wasn’t to be. He spent the final years of his professional career in Taiwan and retired in 2025.
