From the Japanese American basketball leagues of the 1920s and 30s to the Chinatown leagues of the 30s and 40s, Asian Americans began playing basketball long before Jeremy Lin.
KCET reports “the Asian American basketball leagues of Northern and Southern California provided cultural capital, community, and in the case of Filipino Americans, transnational ties to their homelands.”
In fact according to Kathleen Yep’s book Outside the Paint: When Basketball Ruled at the Chinese Playground , the first Asian American to play at Madison Square Garden was not Jeremy Lin, but Willie Woo Woo Wong (pictured) who played in the NIT Championship game with the University of San Francisco team of 1949-1950.
“Today, we also have Chinese, Koreans, [Filipino], and more,” said Russ Hiroto, commissioner of San Jose’s Japanese Community Youth Services (CYS) and former SoCal basketball participant himself. “In fact, it’s more realistic to describe the JB (Japanese Basketball) program today as AB ‘Asian Basketball.”
You can read more about these early basketball league’s and their impact on the feminization of Asian American men in KCET.
RE: Long before Jeremy Lin, Asian Americans were playing basketball: It’s Lin who brought AsAm’s attention to basketball to another level, though. Oh, and thanks for the trivia about the first Asian American to play at Madison Square Garden.