Jeremy Lin says racist remarks were worse in college compared to the NBA
Racist comments are no foreign concept to Brooklyn Nets point guard Jeremy Lin.
As the first American-born NBA player of Chinese or Tawainese descent, Lin has been on the receiving end of numerous racial epithets during his time in the league. In 2012—the height of the “Linsanity” craze—an ESPN editor was fired over this offensive headline: “C—k In The Armor.”
However, Lin recently revealed that the worst of it actually came during his time at Harvard. He discussed some of more notable incidents in the latest episode of “Outside Shot with Randy Foye,” a podcast hosted by one of his teammates.
The worst was at Cornell, when I was being called a c—k. That’s when it happened. I don’t know … that game, I ended up playing terrible and getting a couple of charges and doing real out-of-character stuff. My teammate told my coaches [that] they were calling Jeremy a c—k the whole first half. I didn’t say anything, because when that stuff happens, I kind of just, I go and bottle up— where I go into turtle mode and don’t say anything and just internalize everything.
Cornell wasn’t the only Ivy League school to heckle the Harvard 2010 graduate. At Yale, Lin remembers a fan shouted at him: “Hey! Can you even see the scoreboard with those eyes?”
When he turned pro, Lin told Foye that he was expecting the racism and prejudice to be “way worse.” But in actuality, he’s found that the environment is a lot more controlled than he initially anticipated.
“To this day in the NBA, there are still some times where there are still some fans that will say smaller stuff, and that is not a big deal,” he said. “But that motivates me in a different way.”
