Former NBA guard Jeremy Lin, the first Asian-American to win an NBA title, on Monday pledged up to US$1 million to COVID-19 relief efforts.
The 31-year-old Taiwanese-American, whose 2012 heroics for the New York Knicks were dubbed “Linsanity,” is to donate US$500,000, and said he would also match all donations up to an additional US$500,000.
Lin, who now plays for the Beijing Ducks in the Chinese Basketball Association after winning last year’s NBA championship with the Toronto Raptors, last month tore into US President Donald Trump for “empowering” racism by calling the coronavirus a “Chinese” disease.
Photo: AFP
COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, late last year, before spreading across the world as a pandemic, with the US increasingly hard hit.
Lin on Monday returned to the same theme on The Players’ Tribune Web site in a first-person piece titled “The Darkness Has Not Overcome It.”
“One simple way to be the light is to support organisations doing crucial work during the crisis,” Lin wrote in making his pledge. “You know, my whole life, I’ve been treated a certain way because I’m Asian. I’ve even been asked if I can see. I’ve been told to go back to where I came from.”
“During the height of ‘Linsanity’ I was still the butt of many Asian jokes,” he wrote.
Lin, in Beijing awaiting the restart of the season after the COVID-19 outbreak has eased in China, urged people all over the world, irrespective of race or nationality, to pull together.
“No one knows how devastating the impact of this crisis will be, but the projections aren’t good,” Lin wrote. “We’re going to be recovering from this for a long time. But in the process, there will be so, so many opportunities to choose light.”
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