Houston Rockets guard Jeremy Lin was not exactly a highly-touted recruit coming out of high school, and as we know that lack of respect carried over into the NBA. Teams like Duke, UNC and Michigan State may not have been banging down the doors to offer Lin a full scholarship, but that doesn’t mean he was afraid to turn down offers from schools in major conferences — especially ones with coaches who didn’t know his name.
During a recent joint interview with ESPN the Magazine, Lin and James Harden played a game where they had to answer true and false questions about one another. One question for Harden was whether or not a Pac-10 coach once called Lin by the wrong name.
“True,” Harden correctly responded.
“A coach called me … uh, he called me Ron Jeremy,” Lin added. “I kid you not. I said, I am not coming to this school …”
As Andrew Greif of Dime Magazine pointed out, Stanford was the only Pac-10 school Lin had an official visit with when he was in high school. A New York Times feature about Lin last year talked about how he considered walking on at UCLA and Cal. The question asked if Lin was called “Ron Jeremy” during a recruiting visit, but Lin responded that a coach said it over the phone. That doesn’t really help us hone in on a suspect.
Nevertheless, I doubt the coach who mixed Jeremy up with a pornstar ever thought he would have a strand of marijuana and an ice cream named after him.
Here is the video of ESPN the Magazine’s entertaining interview with Lin and Harden:
