Wat Misaka dribbles the ball in a gym at the University of Utah, where he helped the Utes win the NIT in 1947.
The victory drew the attention of the New York Knicks, who chose him in the draft.
Linsanity is buzzing through the sports world, as New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin has come off the bench to emerge as a star.
There aren't many players like Lin. But in Utah, there's a man who knows something about what he's experiencing. Like Lin, Wat (for Wataru) Misaka is an Asian-American who became an unlikely star and played basketball for the Knicks. But he did it in the 1940s.
"For some reason, the crowd was really rooting for me," Misaka, 88, tells Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep of that tournament. "New Yorkers are known to root for underdogs. I think that was the reason. Here was an underdog team, from out in the sticks in Utah."
"They liked the team, and they cheered for me, which was refreshing," he says. "Because it was right after the war. And there didn't seem to be people holding that against my ancestors."
But World War II had already had an effect on Misaka's teenage years. That was the era of internment camps, when many people of Japanese descent were forced to live in confined areas, some of them in desolate and remote parts of the western United States.
"That was the real strange part of it," Misaka says. "At the time that they were being taken from their homes, and being put into these camps in early 1942, I was playing basketball at Weber State, which is in my home town of Ogden."
Misaka's path to stardom was strikingly similar to Lin's. As a 2010 article in Sports Illustrated noted, Misaka "was thrust into the lineup when the Utes' center—their captain, best athlete and leading scorer—went down with a sprained ankle on the eve of the postseason."
But unlike Lin, Misaka never got a chance to start for the Knicks.
"I really didn't play many minutes," he says. He later added, "I never did think of myself as a pioneer."
Misaka returned to New York to visit Madison Square Garden in 2009, after a documentary about his playing days, and his status as the nation's first non-Caucasian player in the pros, came out. The film was titled Transcending.
