“Certainly, I told him I had a good time talking with him, hanging out with him,'” she recalled her dad saying. Shirley recalled her dad telling her the story. And then we actually went back to the bar and just sit there and talked for another couple of hours. Let’s go to dinner.’ It turned into a two-hour dinner. Before we know it, we looked at each other, like, ‘Yo, man, I’m hungry. And we just sit down and started talking. “And me and your dad were the only two people in there. “I was just sitting at the bar,” Barkley told Shirley. It was also a story she wanted to tell because her dad was so proud of his friendship with the NBA legend. Shirley Wang, Lin’s daughter, shared the story on WBUR back in December of 2018 as a way of grieving over her dad’s death. The two were the only people at the hotel bar and that’s when the friendship developed. Lin Wang was also in Sacramento on a business trip.

NBA legend Charles Barkley was in Sacramento, California, in 2014, speaking at a charity event.

Charles Barkley and Lin Wang met by chance in California LAKE TAHOE, CA – JULY 15: NBA legend Charles Barkley stands with firefighters at the American Century Championship Golf Tournament at the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course in Lake Tahoe, Nevada on J(Photo by Michael Bezjian/WireImage) His untimely death in 2018 sparked several memories of that improbable friendship with one of the most recognized NBA players of all time. Lin was diagnosed with a rare form of heart cancer at 51 and died two years later. By fate, they met in a California hotel bar in 2014, and that chance meeting developed into an unlikely friendship. Barkley was a 6-foot-6 NBA legend, while Lin was a 5-foot-6 chemist from Iowa. It was just the two of them, Charles Barkley and Lin Wang.

Lin wangs daughter charles barkley