As Linsanity Rages, This Is Harvard?

Before a recent Monday practice in Cambridge, Mass., reporters from national news outlets surrounded Harvard basketball coach Tommy Amaker. They were not there to gain insights into the weekend’s games against Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, but to ask questions about Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese-American economics major and point guard for the Crimson from 2006 to 2010. He’s posting All-Star numbers for the Knicks, reinvigorating a perennially inept franchise, and becoming a national obsession that can only be described as Tebowian.

“It’s pretty neat to see how he’s become a global figure,” Amaker says, referring to the global frenzy known as Linsanity. A former point guard at Duke University from 1983 to 1987, Amaker has enjoyed his own impressive run of success. While there is no media phenomenon bearing his name, he has led the Crimson to its greatest height in the program’s 101-year existence. This year the team cracked the Top 25 in a national poll, which never happened when Lin was playing. The Crimson stand atop the Ivy League and are poised to win it—another first—and could make their first appearance in the National College Athletic Association tournament since 1945.