Before there was Linsanity, there was, for a brief moment, Misakamania.

OK, that might be an exaggeration. But Wataru "Wat" Misaka, the first non-Caucasian and first Asian-American to play in the NBA was perhaps an even more unlikely star than Jeremy Lin. If you happened to be listening to NPR during your morning commute Wednesday, you might have caught his interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep.

The 5-foot-7-inch Japanese-American was born in Ogden, Utah, in 1923. He played basketball for the Utes in the 1940s, a time when being Japanese in the U.S. was anywhere from uncomfortable to terrifying. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II, many Americans of Japanese descent were forced to live in remote internment camps, where the conditions could be quite difficult.

It was a complicated time for Misaka personally, who took two years from his college basketball career to serve in the U.S. Army during the occupation of Japan. After witnessing the occupation, playing basketball at home just felt bizarre.full story >>

Last week, Jeremy Lin was a Knicks benchwarmer with a non-guaranteed contract who slept on his brother's couch.

Now Lin is named the NBA's Eastern Conference player of the week (27.3 points and 8.3 assists per game), has the league's No. 1-selling jersey and is the subject of a record-breaking number of headline puns.

But the "Linsanity" doesn't end with jerseys and newspaper headlines.

One savvy Ebay member -- and apparently a schoolmate of Lin's from their days at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School -- is auctioning his seventh- and eighth-grade yearbooks.

The seventh-grade edition features Lin's yearbook photo and a, shall we say, "Linscription," from Jeremy himself, and is available for the Buy It Now price of $4,800.full story >>

A beloved 1980s Major League Baseball star says he used cocaine not only a few times, but a majority of the time he was pitching.

The Boston Globe reports Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, who pitched eight seasons for the Boston Red Sox, admitted he was under the influence of cocaine two-thirds of the time he was on the mound.

Boyd has penned a tell-all book, "They Call Me Oil Can: My Life in Baseball," which will hit bookstore shelves in June.

"Some of the best games I've ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I'd say two-thirds of them," Boyd said to WBZ radio. "If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played. I feel like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons, but I wasn't doing anything that hundreds of ballplayers weren’t doing at the time; because that's how I learned it.

"It was something that I had to deal with personally and I succumbed. I lived through my life and I feel good about myself. I have no regrets about what I did or said about anything that I said or did. I'm a stand-up person and I came from a quality background of people."full story >>