Out of nowhere – it’s Lin-credible!

New York has been humbled in recent days. The city that never sleeps – the home of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, the Algonquin Round Table and the Grill Room at the Four Seasons – has been caught by surprise and left dumbfounded.

This state of general stupefaction has taken hold despite all our Facebook friends, Twitter updates, BlackBerry email alerts, bookmarked websites, 24/7 cable news, sports and weather channels and sophisticated broadsheet newspapers.And speaking as a New Yorker, I would describe the resulting experience as being so pleasurable, and so liberating, that only a phrase coined by one of our local tabloids could do it justice. It’s Lin-credible!The term pays tribute to a 23-year-old professional-basketball neophyte named Jeremy Lin, who this month has come out of “nowhere” – the word that nearly everyone in town uses – to rescue our New York Knicks from disaster and captivate the sports world in the process.Lin comes from “nowhere”, of course, in the basketball sense of the term.

A child of Taiwanese immigrants, Lin grew up in the Silicon Valley boom town of Palo Alto, California, then earned a degree in economics and served as co-captain of the basketball team at Harvard – meaning his circumstances have been both known and relatively comfortable.But Lin just doesn’t look like a basketball player; before his arrival on the scene, the number of Harvard-educated Asian-Americans playing in the National Basketball Association was exactly zero.

And as recently as the start of this month, it wasn’t clear he was anything more than a marginal pro prospect; the Knicks, his third NBA team in two years, only signed him as a stopgap after one of their players got hurt.If the Knicks had been any good at the start of the season, Lin would probably be looking for his fourth NBA club. But they stumbled to a losing record in the early going and the booing at their Madison Square Garden home grew so loud that their coach, Mike D’Antoni, joked that even his relatives must have been jeering.

When D’Antoni elevated the Asian-American kid at the end of the bench to the starting line-up this month, cynics suspected the coach was throwing in the towel before getting fired. Instead, Lin steadied the ship. He was just what the Knicks needed – a true “point guard”, who could direct the offense, like a coach on the court – and the team has won all seven games it has played so far with Lin at the helm. Fans in New York and around the world have responded with a display of emotion that the tabloids labelled “Lin-sanity”, and the greats of the game have given Lin their blessing. Former Los Angeles Laker Magic Johnson, perhaps the best point guard ever, proclaimed before a national television audience: “This guy is for real.

“But one of the intriguing aspects of Lin’s arrival is that it hasn’t felt entirely “real”. Even to people who follow the game of basketball religiously – and there are more than a few of them in the New York area – he seems to have materialised out of thin air. In a city full of self-promoters and self-appointed experts, no one has been able to claim credit for Lin. There has been no smart money in this case, no people in the know. As Cal Ramsey, a former Knicks player and broadcaster who by his own reckoning has been hanging out at Madison Square Garden since 1955, told The New York Times: “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, just out of nowhere.

“This sense of astonishment, I would argue, is one of the more satisfying parts of the Lin-sanity phenomenon. In a media and financial nerve centre like New York, it’s easy for people to start thinking they have seen it all, to believe that news has become a commodity and there are no longer such things as secrets. It’s refreshing in this context to find out what you don’t know about a Jeremy Lin. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing,” said D’Antoni.

“For Lin to go unnoticed for this long – hard to do.” The implications are decidedly heartwarming. Having found one Jeremy Lin, the basketball Jeremy Lin, it’s hard to resist the notion that there are other undiscovered talents out there, waiting for their chance. Like many New York Knicks fans, I have developed a tendency toward pessimism during recent seasons, but watching this kid from Silicon Valley drive to the basket at the world’s most famous arena as the crowd explodes has been giving me a morning-in-America feeling.

gary.silverman@ft.com