From zero to hero and back to zero. Playing in New York can do that to you.

Jeremy Lin, who set off a craze so intense that it needed its own name, has seen himself go from a Times Square hero to a “don’t let the door hit ya on the way out” guy by the New York Knicks and some of their fans.

The now $25 million point guard of the Houston Rockets tells Will Leitch in a GQ interview that he holds no grudges.

“You can’t ask for a city or a fan base to embrace somebody more than they embraced me,” Lin says. “I know it’s kind of silly to talk about it with only two years under my belt in the league, but going in before free agency, I was like, ‘I want to play in front of these fans for the rest of my career.’ I really did. I really wanted to play in front of the Madison Square Garden fans for the rest of my career, because they’re just unbelievable.”

In the magazine piece that hits the streets on Oct. 23, Lin also talks about racism, meeting Hillary Clinton, playing overseas, whether he sandbagged the Knicks — “there was no other way to handle the situation” — and says the future is a mystery even to him.

“…The things that I struggled with before last year, I’m going to struggle with next year—there’s that learning process. Just because you have x amount of good games doesn’t mean that you have drastically improved as a player. It just means that what you could do is finally being shown. But I have to get better.”

… [For more on GQ cover guy Jeremy Lin talks Knicks, Houston, Obama, click here.]