A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball Read online

  A FATHER FIRST

  HOW MY LIFE

  BECAME BIGGER THAN

  BASKETBALL

  DWYANE WADE

  WITH MIM EICHLER RIVAS

  Dedication

  To my grandmother, Willie Mae Morris,

  my first teacher in life

  And to Zaire, Zion, and Dahveon,

  for teaching me what it truly means to be a father first

  Epigraph

  I’m stronger because I had to be. I’m smarter because of my mistakes. I’m happier because of sadness I’ve known and now wiser because I learned the lesson.

  —Author unknown, often cited by Pastor Jolinda Wade

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Homecoming

  PART I

  Chapter One: Go Get You a Game

  Chapter Two: Prayers, Promises, and Dreams

  Chapter Three: In the Backyard

  PART II

  Chapter Four: Sanctuary

  Chapter Five: Hoopin’

  Chapter Six: Marquette

  Chapter Seven: Miracles

  PART III

  Chapter Eight: Rookie Season

  Chapter Nine: Mount Everest

  Chapter Ten: Olympics

  Chapter Eleven: Keeping Promises, Keeping Faith

  Final Thoughts: Next Steps for Getting Involved

  Photographic Insert

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Homecoming

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  MARCH 11, 2011

  AT HOME IN MIAMI

  “WHAT?!”

  I’m alone in my bedroom just before dozing off to sleep when I sit bolt upright to stare at the BlackBerry in my hand. It looks like some alien object, blinking like crazy. I can’t stop staring back at it and the shocking e-mail that just came in.

  My heart is pounding as I inhale and exhale and try to catch my breath. I’m usually good at keeping my emotions in check—but not right now.

  I reread the eight words of Jim’s e-mail. Jim Pritikin is the attorney representing me in the very painful, very public, drawn-out custody battle for my sons, nine-year-old Zaire and almost four-year-old Zion. With no warning, no explanation, Jim’s message tells me the judge has made a final decision.

  It’s over.

  “What?!” I repeat, still talking to myself, now even louder than before.

  Still trying to grasp this moment, I take another deep breath and mentally rewind the tape, replaying recent events that might offer some clue as to what this really means.

  No more than ten minutes earlier, after a grueling practice, I’d headed upstairs to lie down for a quick rest. The previous night on the Heat’s home court, at the buzzer, we’d won a hard-earned victory against the Los Angeles Lakers, not only landing a playoff spot—and breaking out of our five-game losing slump—but also putting a stop to the Lakers’ eight-game winning streak. But there was no time to celebrate. By Friday morning at practice, my teammates and I were back on the grind. We had work to do. With LeBron James and Chris Bosh in their first season with the team, there was enormous pressure on us to prove the Heat’s naysayers wrong, on the one hand; and, on the other, live up to supersized expectations to win a championship.

  Of course, for me that pressure was nuthin’ compared to what had been going on with the ordeal of the custody case. Most of the time I’m a pro at blocking out all kinds of drama. Sometimes to a fault. But that just was not possible when the safety and well-being of my sons was at stake. Not when my ability to be there for them as their father was being threatened.

  You know, none of this ever made sense. When Siohvaughn and I first separated—a short time after baby Zion arrived, when Zaire was five years old—I just assumed we’d figure out a fair way for each of us to spend time with our sons. Was I naïve? Apparently. But I was following the example set by my mother and father, Jolinda and Dwyane Wade Sr., who divorced, coincidentally, after the same number of years being married. My sister, Tragil, and I—five years and a few months old, respectively—were the same ages as my sons at the time of the break-up with their mom and me. As tough as our circumstances were in those years, our parents sent a clear message that even when moms and dads aren’t married anymore, they can overcome their differences and make decisions together for whatever’s in the best interests of the children.

  If you love your kids, seems to me, you do everything in your power to make sure they aren’t robbed of their relationships with their father or their mother.

  Sitting there in my bedroom, it hits me that after everything my boys have lived through over the last three and a half years—not only the divorce proceedings but this past year’s custody dispute—everything in their lives is about to change dramatically. A mix of extreme emotions and questions bombard my thoughts. How do I explain to Zaire and Zion what these changes mean for them? How do I reassure them while they are dealing with all of these new uncertainties?

  Before I even begin to answer those questions, I’m taken back to the memory of something that happened to another boy, age eight and a half, who—twenty-one years earlier—felt he had also been left on the doorstep of uncertainty.

  The year was 1990, late in the summer before his third-grade year at school. Not too hot anymore but not cold yet, either. The place was the Southside of Chicago, on the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Prairie, not the projects but a place hard-hit by poverty and drugs, where the sound of gunfire was more or less constant and knowing someone who died young was a reality.

  The boy I’m remembering is me.

  “DWYANE!” TRAGIL CALLED FROM THE SIDEWALK, UP TO THE stoop of our three-story apartment house where I was sitting with our grandma—the two of us watching the street, as usual. My sister gestured for me like it was no big deal, getting me to come on down, as if she wanted to ask me something.

  Whatever it was she wanted, I didn’t need any encouragement to hustle down the steps, taking them in twos and threes, so fast I almost lost my footing on the sidewalk and came close to falling down splat on my hands and knees. At the last minute, though, I regained my balance, and sprinted over to my sister, eager to hear what was up.

  If you had asked Tragil in those days what she thought about my future in the NBA, she would have laughed and said, “That boy?” She remembers me as being pretty uncoordinated, and even accident-prone. She and my two older sisters, born to our mother before she and our dad married, used to tease me and say, “How you fall when nothing there?”

  Tragil, thirteen years old, going into the eighth grade, just shook her head and laughed. “C’mon.” She nodded toward the direction of the bus stop. “You wanna go to the movies with me?”

  Not even bothering to ask what movie or how this turned out to be my lucky day, I immediately answered, “Yeah!” and took off down the sidewalk, not wanting to give her the chance to change her mind. There was no point trying to hide how happy I was about going somewhere, anywhere, with Tragil—who most of the time was running off someplace to hang out with her friends and didn’t want her kid brother tagging along.

  Tragil knew me well, maybe better than anyone. She knew that what most people saw in me as a shy person was actually someone with a lot of inner confidence and a strong sense of wanting to be different; but she also knew that at times I was unsure of myself in front of others. She later taught me the word introvert and explained that’s why I was quiet and seemed shy. But I grew up watching everything and payi
ng serious attention, with an active mind full of thoughts and dreams— even though I might not have said a lot. Tragil knew all that. She also knew that the other reason I tried to tag along with her and her friends was because our mother always used to tell me, “You go on now, you go follow your sister.”

  Mom wanted me to make sure Tragil wasn’t getting into any trouble, that she was safe, so that became my job, just as my sister was raised to protect and look out for me—Jolinda Wade’s only son, the youngest child and only boy in the household. Even when our mother’s own troubles took hold, getting her deeper into drugs and a relationship with an abusive boyfriend, she still did whatever she could do to keep us safe. There is no question I worried about my mother when she was out at night, and loved her so much I couldn’t sleep because I wanted her to come home and let me know she was okay. But there is also no question that Jolinda Morris Wade’s love for her children—and her desire to see us achieve our dreams—was the most important truth of my early years.

  Looking back, I can’t remember when various worries started to wear on me. I do know that by eight years old, the things that would shock most adults who weren’t exposed to what we were had started to become normal. Drugs were a major part of the culture, a way of life, and so were the gangs who controlled the corners—the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples, or GDs and BDs, as they were often called. In the Englewood area of Chicago’s Southside where we lived, you could get anything. Weed, crack, heroin, and any substances in between. Everything was in plain sight: people snorting, smoking, shooting, getting busted, being handcuffed by the police and carted off right out in the open for using and/or selling, many going to jail or winding up dead.

  Our dad—who lived in a somewhat better neighborhood, also on the Southside, but much farther south and west from where we were—visited us fairly often. He might just come by and check in or take us out to do something fun, or, on occasion, have us stay with him overnight. Whenever Dad was staying at his girlfriend’s house, her two sons who were around my age included us in whatever games they were playing or planning. And, yeah, basketball was at the top of that list!

  Dad was by no stretch of the imagination what you’d call well-off, as he now and then reminded us that he did pay child support. But compared to how we were living—no phone, sometimes no electricity, often hungry, yet too proud to tell anyone—Dwyane Wade Sr. had stability. Dad was employed for most of his working years by Anderson Printing Company, in their delivery business, getting up at five o’clock every morning, day in and day out. That meant he usually came to see us on weekends—or every other weekend, and sometimes it was a month or two months between visits. On the Saturdays when he was supposed to be coming, Tragil and I would wake up early and go wait by the door for hours to watch for the first sight of his old sky-blue Chevy chugging down the block. The minute we saw it, we raced each other to greet him.

  On some of those Saturdays, something would apparently come up, and Tragil and I would wait all day, with every sighting of a car down the street getting our hopes up until it finally drove up close enough for us to see that no, it wasn’t him. On those occasions when we’d wait at the door all day long for Dad to arrive and he never showed, there wasn’t much we could do to hide our hurt.

  Later, when I became a father, these experiences would stay with me as reminders to be careful about making promises to my children. This was something that was especially true during the prolonged divorce proceedings—when the boys and I couldn’t see each other for long periods. Whenever we did see each other, we’d part not knowing when we’d see each other again.

  Those days when Dad didn’t show up were among the few instances when I can remember Mom really getting mad at him. Otherwise, my parents were almost never critical of each other in front of us.

  All of that was less in my thoughts than it was in Tragil’s on that day when she and I hopped on the bus to go to the movies. My sister might have realized that I was about to reach a dangerous time in my life. With Mom not around as much and Dad coming by less—as he got involved in doing more to take care of his girlfriend’s boys—Tragil had been making a lot of offhand comments lately. She’d say, “Sons need fathers!” and “Dads can teach things mommas can’t.” Maybe she knew I was getting closer to the age when hanging out on the corners would be an obvious next step, and had decided she’d better do something before it was too late.

  Many members of our extended family had gone in that direction, some gaining clout in the GDs, others in the BDs. For a while, that meant nobody messed with me, by virtue of who those relatives were. But that was about to end now that my turn was coming. Clearly.

  That’s what you did when you got to be ten, eleven, even eight or nine: you fell in line. If you had the maturity, you fell in line. You might come in as a watch-out kid, your job being to watch out for everyone in case there was any sign of the police. Then you’d graduate to holding the drugs and, from there, go on to selling them. And so on. I’d never actually said to my sister, “I know there is gonna come a time soon when I’m gonna be put in that position,” because that would be as unnecessary as saying the day after Sunday is Monday.

  Those were just the facts of our lives that I chose to ignore that day, especially once Tragil and I got to our seats on the bus on the way to the movies. Off on our end-of-summer adventure together, I wanted to enjoy the ride and block out the somber feeling that something else was coming to an end: childhood. So I did what was in my nature—to appreciate the present moment—and just paid attention to sights outside the bus window.

  The bus ride did seem to go on a lot longer than I’d expected. I knew that the movie multiplex my sister’s friend had told her about was not so far away. But I didn’t care how long it was taking. Tragil, usually much more talkative than me, didn’t say anything and seemed content to see me so happy. How far we had gone, I couldn’t tell, except we were still on the Southside. The neighborhoods seemed to be improving block by block. The farther from our house we rode, the safer and more family-friendly the streets began to look.

  At West Seventy-Ninth and Marshfield, I got my bearings and realized this was where my father’s girlfriend, Bessie, lived. At the bus stop, I looked over into the back lot of one of the three-story apartment houses and recognized it from Dad having brought me to play there. That was when, to my surprise, I spotted Donny, one of Bessie’s sons.

  Seven years old, Donny was in the back lot by himself, wielding this big toy sword like he was doing battle with a tree and then mixing in karate moves to defend against imaginary opponents. Looked fun to me. Real fun.

  Tragil didn’t waste any time before asking, “You wanna stop and go play with Donny?”

  “Yeah . . . ,” I began, hoping not to sound too excited since we were having our brother-sister day together. Probably, I thought, we were just stopping by for a short while and then going on to the movies later.

  “Let’s go, then.” Tragil jumped up and led the way so we could get off the bus before the doors closed.

  While my sister went up to Bessie’s apartment—where there were usually different people stopping by—I joined Donny in the back lot to get in on the sword battle. Before long, Donny’s older brother, Demetrius, showed up with a basketball, plus a couple of other kids he knew. Now the games could begin! The alley alongside the building became our makeshift court while we rigged up a crate that had no top or bottom to serve as the hoop. Demetrius was head and shoulders above all of us—in height and skills. But given the unstoppable competitive streak in my DNA, I was determined I’d catch up one day.

  The hours flew by. When Tragil finally came out to the alley to get me, we were still in the thick of the game, having so much fun I’d completely forgotten about our earlier plans.

  “You ready to go?” she asked with a little smile, like she knew the answer.

  “No.” Had to be honest.

  “Well, you could stay, if you want. You could stay the night.”

/>   “Cool.” I started over to Demetrius, who had the ball. Then I turned around to Tragil again to ask when she was coming back to get me.

  “I’ll come back, Dwyane. I’ll come back tomorrow.” She may have hesitated before leaving after that, maybe to stay and watch us play, maybe not wanting to go back home to her own uncertainties. She might have even known, before I’d figured it out, that she probably wasn’t returning there anytime soon.

  A day went by without Tragil returning to get me. The fun of hanging out, plus knowing I was going to be around my dad more often, must have distracted me from worrying. It took me about a week before I realized Tragil wasn’t coming for me at all. At first, I didn’t want to believe that. But then I counted the days in my head, one by one, how she hadn’t been back that following day, or the day after, and so on, and finally there was only one conclusion: she wasn’t coming back. Then it dawned on me that the plan was never to go the movies, that for some reason, she had decided to trick me.

  It took some time before I could grasp what my sister was doing. She was getting to be that age herself, close to high school, when she would have to figure out a plan for her security, how to make her way in the world. She had been taking care of me all these years and now she had to take care of herself.

  Years later, Tragil told me how hard it had been to walk away that day in the alley. She was proud that beforehand she had spoken her mind to Dad, telling him he needed to step up and take a more active role in looking after his son, and she was even prouder that he agreed. Her plan had worked, she said, mainly because one of the most important lessons Mom had taught Tragil was to be strong and to say how she felt but also to remember that there is a time, a place, and a way to do so. That’s how she had been successful in speaking to Dad. But Tragil couldn’t explain anything to me back then.