How Lin and Edey intersect
Purdue star’s success resonates in Asian community
Julia Edey still remembers Linsanity with affection.
As the Toronto-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, and as a GTA high school basketball player in her youth, the mother of Purdue basketball star Zach Edey recalls being inspired by Jeremy Lin’s unlikely emergence as an NBA showstopper in the winter of 2012.
By the time Lin capped a 27-point masterpiece to lift the New York Knicks over the Raptors in Toronto with a memorable three-point buzzer beater for the win, he was on his way to an NBA career that would last 480 games, earn him an estimated $65 million (U.S.) in salary, and see him become the first Asian-American to win an NBA championship in Toronto in 2019.
Beyond all that, Julia Edey said Lin’s most significant achievement was more difficult to measure, but undeniable to those it affected. A basketball player became a cultur- al icon.
“(Lin) shifted not the perspective of Asians for the rest of the world, but for Asians of ourselves. He kind of made us say, ‘Wow, I never really thought of an Asian as an extraordinary basketball player,’ ” she said in an interview this week. “It was just kind of a neat opening up of our thinking.”
Fast forward a dozen years and the case can be made that Zach Edey is making an analogous impact in his own community. Zach will be centre stage in Saturday’s NCAA Final Four in Glendale, Ariz., where his Purdue Boilermakers will play the North Carolina State Wolfpack for a spot in Monday night’s national championship game. The sevenfoot-four centre is in the midst of an incredible run. He’s the favourite to be named the NCAA’s Naismith college player of the year for the second straight season; no other Canadian has won the award even once. On Friday, he added a second straight AP top player honour.
His stock appears to be rising in various NBA mock drafts. And no matter where his pro career takes him, there’s a good chance he’ll be a member of Canada’s Olympic team this summer, given how he was a part of Canada’s ground-breaking bronze-medal performance at last summer’s FIBA World Cup.
For the community of kids ages nine through 12 who participate in programs at Toronto’s Chinese Canadian Youth Athletic Association, Edey amounts to a Lin-like figure.
“I think that when young people see someone like Zach coming from their own community, it really helps them unlock the possibilities in their mind,” said Clement Chu, president of the association that has hosted camps at which
both Lin and Edey have held court.
The parallels between Lin and Edey aren’t exact. Lin, who played at Harvard, was never an NCAA megastar. But just as Lin was a second-generation Taiwanese-American kid who, despite being a California high school state championship-winning point guard received little interest from big-time college programs, Edey is a second-generation Chinese-Canadian who only a few years ago received a relative smattering of interest from Division I programs.
Last weekend, when Edey scored a career-best 40 points in a win over Tennessee that sent the Boilermakers to their first Final Four in more than 40 years, he made headlines by calling out the coaches who overlooked him along the way.
“That was a moment,” said Chu, “because that was not just about Zach overcoming stuff. For our community, which is traditionally very low key and not very outspoken, for him to express himself in that manner, it made everybody feel like, ‘Yeah, we’re all here. We’ve all kind of arrived.’”
Chu, who can recall Zach as a relatively shy teenager only a few years ago, chalked up the brash pressconference persona as a “neat evolution of Zach’s personality.”
“A lot of us in the Chinese community who kind of grew up very reserved, we kind of wish we could say something like that,” Chu said. “I wouldn’t even say it’s anything necessarily insulting. It’s just that Zach is expressing how he feels. And I think for us to see someone kind of step up and say what we feel has been a breath of fresh air.”
In the eyes of Julia Edey, a fixture at Purdue games who’ll be in Glendale Saturday, Zach’s post-victory comments were a display of confidence born from hard work and perseverance in the face of no shortage of doubters.
“It’s an incredible compliment to hear all these coaches say now, ‘Wow. You’re doing extraordinary.’ But we all have a memory of how things were,” she said. “I was proud of him for being able to speak his truth with grace and respect.”
Zach Edey’s rise hasn’t come without adversity. Like Lin, he has spoken of being the target of racism, particularly on social media.
“When we lost to Maryland (last season), someone called me a ‘stupid chink’ in my DMs,” Edey told the Ringer last year. “There’s a lot of insensitive stuff … all the coronavirus jokes.”
Last year, Edey weathered heavy criticism after No. 1-seeded Purdue was bounced from the NCAA Tournament in its first game by 16thseeded Fairleigh Dickinson.
As Julia Edey said: “The hard thing sometimes is when you go from the underdog to the top dog, you just have to be able to figure out how to keep hunting.”
A couple of summers back, Zach crossed paths with Lin at a Toronto basketball camp, wherein Lin offered to swap cell numbers in the same way Yao Ming once volunteered himself up as a sounding board to Lin. The Chinese-born Yao, of course, is the Basketball Hall of Famer drafted No. 1 in 2002, the year Edey was born. From generation to generation, a torch has been passed that has the potential to light a fire under the next in line.
“(Zach) was able to talk to a lot of kids in our CCYAA programs about how he does not see a lot of Asian kids playing at the NCAA level, and it is something that he wants to see more of,” Chu said. “And now the kids have been actually organizing watch parties (during the NCAA Tournament). There’s a small cohort of nine- to 12-year-olds, the group that Zach was working with, that now know him. And they can say, ‘He’s from our community. He’s one of us. Zach goes for dim sum in Markham, so let’s cheer him on.’ The kids are just so fired up. It’s awesome to see.”