BOXING’s biggest star meeting basketball’s rising pin-up boy.

Manny Pacquiao will be in New York next week as part of his coast-to-coast media tour to promote his June 9 welterweight title fight against Timothy Bradley, and while there in the ‘City That Never Sleeps’, the Filipino gets to meet newest NBA sensation Jeremy Lin of the hometown Knicks.

The two Asian star athletes engage in a meet and greet session at the Madison Square Garden when the Knicks host the Atlanta Hawks on Wednesday (Thursday, Manila time).

The New York visit is the last of a whirlwind, two-city media tour of Pacquiao and Bradley for their upcoming World Boxing Organization (WBO) welterweight championship match at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

The press conference of the two boxing champions won’t happen until Thursday when they’ll be presented to the public at the Chelsea Piers at Pier 60.

They begin the media tour with a luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Tuesday, after which both parties will proceed to New York later in the night.

On Wednesday, Pacquiao is set to shoot some pictorials with Nike until late in the afternoon, then it’s on to Madison Square Garden in the night for a chance meeting with the 23-year-old Lin, the first American-born NBA player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent who has been creating quite a stir with his spectacular plays that led the Knicks to seven straight wins.

Lin, the undrafted guard out of Harvard University, is the same player whom boxing villain Floyd Mayweather Jr. referred to as a `good player, but all the hype is because he’s Asian.’

“Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise,” Mayweather tweeted in his account, a remark that received a lot of flak for its racist tone.

Mayweather later added, “other countries get to support/cheer their athletes and everything is fine. As soon as I support Black American athletes, I get criticized.”

Pacquiao and Mayweather, two of boxing’s biggest attractions today, have been trying to put together for years, a mega-fight many sees could go down as the richest and biggest ever in the history of the sport.

But differences concerning several aspects of the bout – fight date, purse, drug testing – had repeatedly pushed the deferment of the fight, whose initial negotiations began as early as 2009.

After the media tour, the 33-year-old Pacquiao will return back to Manila, while Bradley proceeds to Bristol, Connecticut for an in-studio guesting on ESPN Friday Night Fights.

Pacquiao and Canadian adviser Michael Konz left for the U.S. Thursday night to attend the deposition in connection with the lawsuit he filed against Mayweather, his father Floyd Sr. and uncle/trainer Roger Mayweather for their earlier insinuations suggesting the Filipino has been under the influence of performance enhancing drugs.

After attending the law proceedings in Las Vegas together with promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank, Pacquiao will grace the Power of Love Gala celebrating the 70th birthday of boxing great Muhammad Ali.

Pacquiao is among the sports’ stars attending the affair together with other boxing luminaries such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Leon Spinks, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, among others.