You could just like Lin from a merely human point of view: sports fan or not, his replays are things of beauty. But for Asian America, Lin is a stratospheric star because he is Taiwanese-American: one of their own. Sports in general are deeply racially coded. Both Tiger Woods’s rise and fall were recorded with racialised commentary that was often cringe-worthy. When he was still playing college basketball for Harvard, Lin himself said in 2008: “I hear everything: ‘Go back to China. Orchestra is on the other side of campus. Open up your eyes’ … I’m an easy target because I’m Asian. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, but it’s part of the game.” From Jack Johnson, Jackie Robinson and Yao Ming, athletes who stand out because of their ethnicity become inadvertent racial litmus tests: cultural reactions to them reveal a cross-section of attitudes around race and racism, at any given point in time. At the turn of the last century, white boxing champions refused to fight black boxer Jack Johnson until 1910. When [Johnson] finally fought and beat the white champion, a spate of lynchings broke out.

The good news is that things have improved vastly since [Johnson]’s time – though we haven’t hit that shadowy post-racial era yet, as evidenced by Twitter, that other cross-section of racial progress. On Monday, undefeated boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr tweeted: “Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.” On Friday, sportswriter Jason Whitlock took to Twitter to speculate on the size of Lin’s penis – invoking a long and ugly history of jokes that take Asian men’s sexuality as their punchline. Spike Lee, who might be Lin’s biggest celebrity fan, has been using Twitter to find nicknames for Lin. In response to possible contenders like “CHING-A-LIN CHING-A-LIN,” the ever-eloquent Lee said: “NO. NO. NO.”