Former NBA guard Jeremy Lin, the first Asian-American to win an NBA title, pledged up to $1 million to coronavirus relief efforts on Monday.

The 31-year-old, whose 2012 heroics for the New York Knicks were dubbed “Linsanity”, will donate $500,000 and said he would also match all donations up to an additional $500,000.

Lin, who now plays for Beijing Ducks in the Chinese Basketball Association (CBA) after winning the 2019 NBA championship with the Toronto Raptors, last month tore into US President Donald Trump for “empowering” racism by calling coronavirus a Chinese disease.

Coronavirus emerged in central China in December before spreading across the world as a pandemic, with the United States increasingly hard hit.

Lin on Monday returned to the same theme on The Players’ Tribune website in a first-person piece titled “The Darkness Has Not Overcome It”.