Evan Jackson Leong is set to revive Linsanity around the world with a documentary that adds depth and context to the young man behind 2012’s most sensational sports story.
An indication of the potential of Linsanity: the Movie is the rousing reception it got at its Sundance Film Festival screening Sunday.
“One of the most crowd-pleasing documentaries to play the festival this year,” was the assessment of the Los Angeles Times.
“Broadcast play for Linsanity is practically a lock,” declared the film industry trade journal Hollywood Reporter, “while basketball’s already notable popularity throughout much of Asia could assure the delivery of multiple territories for a variety of formats.”
Another indicator of the film’s potential is that its rights sales are being handled by CAA, one of the film industry’s top two talent agencies.
Leong began the project four years ago when few outside of Harvard and Palo Alto High had heard of a skinny student athlete named Jeremy Lin.
“I actually heard about him in Harvard, and at that point, to me, he was already a fascinating story because he already got farther than most any Asian American player I’ve ever seen,” said Leong of his decision to start filming a documentary about Lin.
“We had no money. Nobody cared about our project before February of last year. In a documentary like this you don’t know how it’s going to end.”
The project was initially fueled entirely by Leong’s personal enthusiasm for Lin’s abilities as a basketball player.
“Even him getting into the NBA was amazing to me. That’s already an inspirational story, it’s a fascinating story.”
Linsanity validated Lin’s struggles, but Leong says the movie is mostly about Lin’s journey to get to that stage of his career. Consequently, Leong devotes most of the film’s 88 minutes to detailing Lin’s story as the son of a Taiwanese immigrant couple. He also gets inside Lin’s head to reveal the intense psychological struggle he went through to overcome his own doubts about his game and with the racial taunts thrown at him on and off the court during his years at Harvard and as the NBA’s only Asian American starter.
“How am I supposed to play if everyone is looking at me expecting me to make a miraculous play every time I touch the basketball,” says Lin during the Linsanity phase of his career.
The film is made up of many thoughtful on-camera talks with Lin augmented by home-video footage from Lin’s childhood, clips of his career at Palo Alto High and Harvard, TV game commentary and interviews with various others who shared aspects of Lin’s rise to stardom. The result is a fresh retelling of an immigrant-family success story that evolves into a delirious sports cinderella story.
Taking advantage of the interest he was able to attract after Lisanity was born in February of 2012 Leong overlays the film with some polish and even starpower in the form of voiceovers by Hawaii Five-O-star Daniel Dae Kim.
Lin himself is grateful for Leong’s persistence in documenting his career, especially during its precarious early stages when the film wasn’t one of his priorities.
“Looking back, I’m really glad we got this, because it just really showed the dream,” Lin said.
Jeremy Lin’s father Gie-Ming had been nursing a passion for NBA basketball since even before he and his wife Shirley immigrated to the US in the late-1970s and settled in Virginia. Jeremy was born in Los Angeles in August of 1988, after Gie-Ming had earned his PhD in computer programming. He transferred his love of basketball to Jeremy with the help of Shirley, who became a ferocious basketball mom. She helped form a Junior Basketball League in Palo Alto so Jeremy could hone his moves.
Jeremy Lin led Palo Alto High to the Division II State Championships. By senior season he was considered the runaway favorite for player of the year by every California sports writer. But no Division I team offered him a scholarship. Many Asian Americans suspect Lin’s ethnicity was the stumbling block.
Lin led Palo Alto to an upset win over perennial CIF Division 2 champ Mater Dei but received no athletic scholarship offers. He sent resumes and highlight DVDs to Cal, Stanford, UCLA and all the Ivy League schools. The only ones that offered him a spot on their teams were Harvard and Brown, neither of whom could offer athletic scholarships under Ivy League rules.
Lin has said publicly that stereotyping was probably at work in his failure to get an athletic scholarship offer from a Division 1 university. He has also pretended at other times that he has never entertained such dark thoughts.
At Harvard Lin quickly established himself as the team leader. He also provided clear early indications that he could shine against the best by scoring 27 points in an upset win over 17th-ranked Boston College in his junior year and 30 points against illustrious University of Connecticut in his senior year. He ended his Harvard career as the first player in the history of the Ivy League to record at least 1,450 points (1,483), 450 rebounds (487), 400 assists (406) and 200 steals (225) — then went undrafted when he graduated in 2010.
A summer league invite from the Dallas Mavericks gave Lin a chance to mix it up with the NBA’s top rookies. In a game in Las Vegas he won over the crowd by outplaying John Wall, the season’s top overall NBA draft pick. That performance opened a few eyes. Lin received contract offers from the Mavericks, Lakers and another Eastern Division team. None were compelling enough to make him jump. A late offer from the Golden State Warriors, his sentimental favorite, was the one he took.
What looked to most like the reward at the end of a long road was really just the beginning of the toughest test of all — holding onto self-belief in the face of repeated assessments by the team he grew up idolizing that he wasn’t good enough for the NBA. He spent most of his first two seasons down in the development league playing for Reno. Then on December 9 of last year Lin got cut so the Warriors could clear his modest $800,000 salary to make a little more room under the NBA’s salary cap for a $43-million bid for center DeAndre Jordan.
If that didn’t dim Lin’s view of his NBA prospects, he must certainly have been shaken when he was picked up by the Rockets on December 12, then waived 12 days later. Only an injury to New York guard Iman Shumpert spared Lin from ending the year unemployed. On December 27 the Knicks picked Lin up off waivers. Lin expressed the grimness of his predicament, saying that he was “competing for a backup spot, and people see me as the 12th to 15th guy on the roster. It’s a numbers game.”
On January 17 Lin probably felt he was trapped in a nightmare deja vu loop when he was sent down to the D-League’s Erie BayHawks. In that dark night of the soul Lin shone once again by digging in and pulling out a triple-double against the Maine Red Claws with 28 points, 11 rebounds, and 12 assists in a 122–113 win on January 20. Three days later he was back with the Knicks, racking up a some nice late-game minutes.
Lin’s February 4 dream game was no fluke. It was his iron will sparking the opportunity of his NBA career. Knicks’ coach Mike D’Antoni desperately needed a point guard to take over a team entering the game near the very bottom of the NBA with an 8-15 record. He had nothing to lose by letting Lin have some early minutes. Knowing that he was only a long-shot bet by a gambler with few chips left, Lin stepped up as he has always done with an opportunity, sparking the recently moribund Knicks with his prescient feeds, wicked steals, blinding drives to the basket and all-around inspired court generalship.
By the time that game was over not only his teammates but the entire arena was eating out of Lin’s hands — Linsanity was born.
