Look, there’s a chance you may not have heard of Bon Iver, aka Bonnie Bear, prior to this week, but there’s just no way you don’t know who Jeremy Lin is. The New York Knicks point guard has come out of no where to take the world by storm, a phenomenon that’s been coined “Linsanity.”
I, personally, have become totally enraptured by the Asian-American kid from Harvard who’s suddenly playing like a cross between Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan: I bit the bullet and shelled out $160 for NBA League Pass earlier in the week, largely so I can watch him play. So it was kind of refreshing to learn that Lin — whose vast potential only a couple of people apparently saw — may actually be a bigger web nerd than I am: Jeremy Lin had a Xanga photoblog way back in 2004 when he was a teenager still in high school. (Remember Xanga?) His profile alias: “ChiNkBaLLa88.”
In the shots, Lin imitates the headband-wearing styles of a number of NBA players including Derek Fisher of the Los Angeles Lakers, whom he torched for 38 points on Friday in his true breakout performance. He reportedly captioned each shot with an explanation of which player he was impersonating and why, according to quotes from his account posted to multiple sites and blogs.
Lin’s purported Xanga profile, ChiNkBaLLa88, is currently viewable only by friends, but a number of photos from that account are still floating around Google Images and have popped up on Reddit and other sites and message boards.
At the time he was apparently posting these photos to Xanga, Lin was an un-recruited high school basketball player in Palo Alto, Calif. He then played four years at traditional basketball backwater Harvard University before going un-drafted out of college. He was cut by two NBA teams before catching on in New York.
CAN YOU FEEL THE LINSANITY?!
(HT and pic: Money, Cash, Hos)