That kind of harassment has largely subsided for Jeremy since he entered the NBA in 2010, though it hasn’t vanished entirely.

“College games, you have a lot of student sections where everyone gets drunk and saying whatever,” he says, “versus pro games, you get a little bit more of a refined crowd.”

In 2013, months after “Linsanity” took the world by storm, he established the Jeremy Lin Foundation, which has since come up with an anti-bullying curriculum for young students through EverFi’s online education. His foundation has also offered scholarships and basketball camps to kids in need, while Jeremy has personally written letters and autographed photos for those who have shared their stories with him.

“The thing I always say is if you allow them to throw you off your track and get distracted and get overly angry or upset, then they've won,” Jeremy says. “That's their goal. So make sure that you don't compound their mistake by adding your mistake onto it. If you learn how to deal with it the right way, you can use it as a positive for yourself and you can actually better yourself and motivate yourself, and inspire yourself through something that they've meant to be harmful for you.”

So when Jeremy’s business team approached him with the chance to help Nathan and Bobby, he didn’t hesitate.

“They shared it with me and they were, like, ‘Do you want to do something about it? This is a cool opportunity,’” Jeremy recalls. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, we should definitely do something and get involved.’”

Within 24 hours, word got back to Mike and his colleagues at P.F. Chang’s that Jeremy was in. All they had to do was figure out a date that would work for everyone.

Meanwhile, Nathan’s mom kept him in the dark.

“My whole family hid it from me,” he says. “They never told me I was going anywhere. They just said, we might go on a work trip somewhere, and every time I asked where, they said we're still deciding.”

It wasn’t until a few weeks before the actual trip that Nathan’s mom started sharing details with him.

“I didn't really know how to respond to it because I was like, I can't believe this is going that far,” he says. “This is going to be just unbelievable.”