His job description is technically a professional basketball player, but Jeremy Lin is so much more than that. He is simply omnipresent. Regardless of locale, it's hard to conceive of anyone with electricity in their home who has not heard of him. The story is already well known. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Lin grew up in Palo Alto, California, with a serious case of hoop dreams. Despite a stellar high school career, he could not secure a division one scholarship anywhere so he chose to attend Harvard. Any time Harvard is a secondary option for someone, that would constitute a major story. But this tale gets better, much better. Armed with a an economics degree, Lin still had visions of the NBA bouncing around his cranium, despite being unheralded and undrafted. He got a shot with his hometown team when the Golden State Warriors signed him, but he was cut, signed with the Houston Rockets and was cut again, before ending up buried on the bench with the New York Knicks.
Three weeks ago desperate Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni, his underachieving squad trailing the New Jersey Nets at half-time, brings in Lin at point guard. Lin proceeds to score 25 points and engineer a come-from-behind victory. He starts the next six games and the Knicks win them all. World goes crazy, Lin goes viral and then he prays. 'Linsanity' is now an accepted part of the vernacular. There are two distinctive parts to Lin: the basketball player and the cultural phenomenon. The basketball player shows up a few times a week for about 40 minutes. But the cultural phenomenon is trapped in a nonstop inter-continental frenzy.
This week Lin is on the cover of the Asian edition of Time. The US version features North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with the caption: 'Li'l Kim - the untested leader of a nuclear nation'. While few can debate the newsworthiness of an erratic nuclear regime, the magazine's Asian version tells you all you need to know about the attitudes of folks here right now. Please don't push that button junior and could you also get off the front page because, while Linsanity resides in New York, it lives in Asia.
Lin, 23, is engaging the most disparate elements of Asia. Koreans have adopted him as one of their own, Filipinos as well. In Japan, his image is splashed all over the newsstands and in Hong Kong fans are streaming the Knicks game on the their mobile phones. While Yao Ming was a source of pride for many Asians, his success was predicated as much on his size as his talent. Lin is far more accessible - an athletic, intelligent Asian who is destroying age-old stereotypes.
But the often prickly China-Taiwan relations could soon be the ultimate litmus test of Lin's appeal. And don't laugh, if anybody can bring them closer it's Lin. According to a long-time Asian-based basketball source, when Lin graduated from Harvard there was a plan afoot between a huge sporting apparel company and mainland basketball authorities to naturalise Lin so he could play for the Chinese national team. You could certainly see why China would want Lin the basketball player. If he had grown up in Guangzhou instead of California, his game would be totally different. For years, the rote learning method in China has tended to discourage improvisation, the soul of sports. As a creative, ball-moving point guard, Lin makes split-second decisions and is everything China basketball, in fact China sports, lacks.
In Palo Alto, Lin could look across the road to see how visionaries like Steve Jobs affected the way the world lives. In Lin's neighbourhood, they create technology. In China, they copy it. China has loads of tall rebounders and great shooters and always has. But they lack imagination and the results confirm it. It's not a stretch to say Lin's success could have a profound influence on how children learn and play in modern China.