Jeremy Lin says he experienced racism a lot more as a college player than in the NBA
As an Asian American basketball player, Jeremy Lin is well aware that racism still exists in America. But the former Laker and current member of the Brooklyn Nets says he experienced it much worse in college as compared with his seven seasons in the NBA.
“When I got to the NBA, I thought, man, this is gonna be way way worse,” he said Thursday on teammate Randy Foye’s podcast. “But it’s way better. Everybody’s way more under control.”
Lin spoke of the way he was treated on the road while playing for Harvard from 2006 to 2010.
“The NBA crowd is a lot better than the college crowd,” he said. “The college crowd goes crazy. Some of the stuff they say, it’s crazy. It’s all students and they’re all drunk, so they were saying all kinds of stuff. We were playing against Georgetown and there was this one dude courtside, and the whole game he kept looking over at me and he was like, ‘chicken fried rice,’ ‘beef lo-mein,’ ‘beef and broccoli,’ like the whole game.”
Lin went on to describe a time at Yale when fans said to him, “Hey, can you even see the scoreboard with those eyes?”
And once at Vermont, he said, “their coach was like, ‘Hey ref, you can’t let that Oriental do that!’”
Lin said the lowest point was hearing a racial slur directed at him throughout a game against Cornell. “That game I ended up playing terrible. I ended up getting a couple charges and just doing real out-of-character stuff.”
But he said a talk with an assistant coach during that game changed his outlook for good.
“He taught me that ‘when you go through that, you’ve got to internalize it and do it so that you motivate yourself to play better,” said Lin, who is the first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent in NBA history.
“So that was the last time I ever really allowed racism to affect me that much. To this day in the NBA, there’s still fans who’ll say smaller stuff and it’s not a big deal, but that motivates me now in a different way.”
Twitter: @chewkiii
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