Any sports fan out there now knows about Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks. He is the Chinese-American basketball player who graduated from Harvard and in his last five games, his first starts in the National Basketball Association (NBA), he averages 26.8 points per game along with 8.0 assists. On February 10, he poured in a career best 38 points in a terrific win over the Los Angeles Lakers.
This is a great story and one that the executives at the NBA should be thrilled with. Good kid, underdog, smart, unassuming…everything you want for a league that is often times, fairly or unfairly, categorized as being filled with not so great guys.
All that said … if Jeremy Lin played for the Portland Trailblazers or the Indiana Pacers, unless you are a diehard NBA fan, you would have never heard of him. But he plays for the Knicks in the city that never sleeps where all things, good and bad, are prone to hyperbole…big time.
As a result Jeremy, has over 415,000 “Likes” on Facebook, is a trending topic on Twitter, and in the last two days he was on the cover of the Wall Street Journal and features on him have appeared on ESPN, ESPN.com, the New York Times, the New York Post, Reuters, Forbes and every other influential news-gathering agency you can think of. Oh yeah, his 8th grade yearbook is on eBay!
Don’t get me wrong, I am trapped in Lin-sanity as well. It is great for the league and sports in general. I hope that he capitalizes on his fame quickly. Sports fans these days (myself included) tend to move onto the next flavor of the month pretty quickly and a few bad games can change everything.
John Maroon is President and Owner of Maroon PR. Contact him at John@MaroonPR.com.
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