By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
Even novelists are jumping on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon.
Lin, the Harvard grad who's become a National Basketball Association sensation with the New York Knicks, has special meaning for Lisa Yee.
Yee is the author of Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, a 2005 basketball novel aimed at kids 9 and up and dedicated to Yee's dad, now 80, who played high school basketball in Seattle.
The novel is narrated by a sixth-grade Chinese-American basketball star who flunks English, despite being named for his dad's alma mater, Stanford, the Harvard of the West.
In an illustrated post on her website - lisayee.livejournal.com -- Yee, 52, notes that, "If I wrote Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, today, Stanford would have had a Jeremy Lin poster in his room, and a basketball hero who looked like him to aspire to. Although, unlike Jeremy, Stanford was not headed to Harvard ."
She adds, "Stanford believed that basketball is life-transforming, just as (another character in the novel) girl genius, Millicent Min, believed that books are. They are both right."
Yee, who lives in South Pasadena, Calif., see a larger meaning, beyond basketball, in Lin's sudden success: "It doesn't matter if Jeremy never wins another game, though I hope he does. In these past months with irate Americans mad at this and that, and various factions of country at each other's throats, we all stopped, for just a bit, to watch basketball, an all-American game.
"We stopped to watch a young man who pursued his childhood dream to play for the NBA, and against all odds, he made it. He is an inspiration to not only to Chinese Americans, Harvard grads, basketball boys and girls, and New Yorkers, but to anyone who has ever had a dream. Heck, if Lakers fans could root for a Knicks player, then anything is possible."
