PALO ALTO, Calif. — The basketball court at Palo Alto High School is unusual in that there are no floor-level seats for the fans. The grandstand is raised, like a balcony encircling the playing area, making it feel as if hundreds of people are simultaneously leaning forward to peer down at the players below. During games, the home fans sit together on one side, occasionally looking to their left to gaze at the state championship banners that hang on the wall next to the scoreboard.

This is where Shirley Lin would sit, usually in jeans and a team sweatshirt, cheering with the rest of the parents as her son, Jeremy, ran up and down the floor. At halftime, she would bounce around, talking to parents and teachers, checking in on the food and drink offerings she probably had a hand in organizing. Then, when the game resumed, she would return to her seat, peering intently at her son.

“She was not the loudest,” Mike Baskauskas, the father of one of Jeremy’s teammates, said. “But you knew she was there. She was probably the single most involved parent I’ve ever been around.”

Shirley’s husband, on the other hand, was always silent, and this was by design. Before every game, Gie-Ming Lin would traipse up the steps on the opposite side of the gym — to the point farthest from the rest of the home fans — with his video camera in hand. Sometimes, he would take along Jeremy’s younger brother, Joseph; sometimes, he would go alone. But he was always in the rafters instead of among the other parents, his camera trained on the floor.

“I guess you wouldn’t want to have your voice on the tape all the time, so that worked for him,” said Michael Lehman, who worked with Shirley at Sun Microsystems and whose son, Brad, was a teammate of Jeremy’s.

Lehman added: “But he was always there. You knew he cared and loved watching his son play.”

...“Jeremy’s life was formed by his parents,” Fu-Chang Lo, an elder at the Lin family church, said last week, and he and others who know the family maintain that in order to fully comprehend Lin’s rise from relative anonymity, his parents’ story must be understood.

...Mom in His Corner

If Gie-Ming planted the basketball seed in Jeremy and his brothers (through frequent trips to the local Y.M.C.A. and repeated viewings of old N.B.A. games he taped on his VCR), then Shirley, now 55, is the one who cultivated it. As the Lins settled in Palo Alto, she quickly became a sort of hybrid “tiger mom,” fiercely prodding her children to work tirelessly, but also advocating for them in whatever way she could.

Shirley made no illusion of her priorities; her e-mail address features, among other characters, three “J’s” — for her sons, Josh, Jeremy and Joseph — and the word “mom,” and other parents found her passion perpetual, if not infectious.

Shirley embraced the duality of her role. She was strict with Jeremy about academics, calling his coaches to warn them that a poor grade meant Jeremy would not be going to practice without improvement. But she was also willing to engage in playful bantering with Jeremy’s teammates when she drove them to practice. At the family’s church, the Chinese Church in Christ, she went with the children to the English-speaking service while Gie-Ming often worshiped at the service held in Chinese.

Shirley encouraged a balance for Jeremy, friends said; Friday nights would often involve youth gatherings at the church, and after studying with the pastor Stephen Chen, Jeremy and his brothers would frequently take Chen with them when they went to play basketball afterward.

“Sometimes, we would play until 1 a.m. and then go to Denny’s to eat,” Chen said. “Shirley would come and meet us.”

In an interview with a Taiwanese television station last summer, Shirley lamented that she did not fully understand the intricacies of the American youth basketball system when Josh began playing; choosing the right teams and finding the right opportunities for exposure can be challenging.

With Jeremy, however, Shirley was diligent; Baskauskas recalled that when Jeremy was nearing the end of elementary school, there was no elite-level program for youngsters that age to join.

“So we started one,” Baskauskas said.

With Shirley squarely in the middle of the group, a National Junior Basketball program was built in Palo Alto, which included a top-tier regional team that featured Jeremy and many other youngsters who went to play with him on Amateur Athletic Union teams and in high school.

“It filled a hole,” Baskauskas said.

While Gie-Ming’s general fascination with basketball is well known — he has an abiding love for the hook shot, and one of Jeremy’s former teammates, Brad Lehman, said, “I think that’s the only shot I’ve ever seen him take” — Shirley’s devotion to the game was driven by her children.

Her commitment to it, though, was unusual among Asian parents and, in the Taiwanese television interview, Jeremy acknowledged his appreciation for his mother’s willingness to break from the norm.

“Growing up, some of my mom’s friends would tell her that she was wasting everyone’s time by letting me play so much basketball,” he said. “And so she would get criticized, but she let me play because she saw that basketball made me happy.”

He added: “It’s funny because once I got into Harvard, the same moms that were criticizing her were asking her questions about which sports their kids could play to go to Harvard. It was a funny reversal for me to see them support me in basketball, even though not many other Asian parents would have done the same.”

‘He Takes Care of Me’

Shirley’s involvement in Jeremy’s basketball life was often as an organizer — of travel schedules or practice times or who would be driving the players’ vans to a road game — but she did not stop there. She would often talk animatedly with Jeremy in Chinese after games — “I always wished I knew what she was saying to him because he was so good,” Brad Lehman said — and Michael Lehman, Brad’s father, recalled her once helping recruit a talented player to join their sons’ A.A.U. team. Shirley did not coach, but she also did not hesitate to question those who did about Jeremy’s playing time or strategy.

After working with Shirley to start the N.J.B. program, for example, Baskauskas was pressed into coaching duty for the team.

“Our conversations then were a little different,” he said, smiling. “She had her son’s interest at heart. Who can blame her for that?”

...

Still, humbleness remained an obvious family trait. Gie-Ming and Shirley embraced their lives at the church, with Gie-Ming occasionally teaching a Sunday school class in Chinese and Shirley acting as a formal teacher and an informal counselor. Chen said he would often see Shirley slip her arm around the shoulders of the young girls in the congregation and say, “How are you?” with a wide smile. Most of the children, Chen said, called her Aunt Shirley.

Even during a rare splurge, Jeremy’s modesty showed through. Nathan Lui, a high school friend of Jeremy’s, recalled going to an Audi dealership with Jeremy and Shirley shortly after Jeremy had signed with his hometown Golden State Warriors. After years of riding around in a Taurus, he was ready for an upgrade.

While out on a test drive, Lui said, the salesman asked Jeremy if he was a basketball player. Jeremy said, “Yes.” The salesman pressed on. “Did you play in high school? College?” he said, and Lui remembered smiling from the back seat.

“Jeremy had just been signed by an N.B.A. team that played like 10 minutes away from there,” he said. “Anyone else would have been shouting it out, telling everyone.”

But that was not how Shirley and Gie-Ming had raised their son.

“Well,” Jeremy told the salesman, “I used to play in college.”