A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (31 page)

While I was happy to be going to the draft with players I hoped to know in the future, I sort of kept to myself in the time leading up to the actual event.

The wild range of emotions I was having caught me by surprise. Maybe because I am a different person, the way I’m assembled and the way I chose to be, I opted out of the typical partying that always takes place on the eve of the draft. The party makes sense when you think about it because it’s really like you’re about to get married to someone you barely know and they get to do all the choosing. So that night before is almost like a bachelor party; and so, like at a wedding, players notoriously show up hungover or wiped out for the big moment. But since I’m not a drinker or an excessive partier, that wasn’t for me.

Instead, Jack Fitzgerald, my high school coach, and I decided to go do something. Was I hungry? Well, yeah, we all know the answer to that. But what did I want to eat? I didn’t know. So Jack said, “C’mon, let’s just go out,” and we headed out into the cool summer night air and walked the streets of New York together. We just walked and talked and walked some more until we passed by a piano bar, windows open to let us hear the sound of someone performing jazz inside. Wow, when we went in, I stepped through the doors into another world. On a budget and spending most of my time in gyms, I couldn’t recall ever having been in a piano bar. We ordered something to drink, no alcohol for me, but beverages for both of us with lots of ice that we could clink as we toasted the future.

Being the tough Irish guy that Coach Fitzgerald is, he held it together well, but I can report that watching him sitting there that night was the closest I’d ever come to seeing someone almost literally bust with pride.

With everybody else out partying, we headed back to the hotel early because I knew the next day was going to be a long one. Besides the anticipation, I had agreed to have
USA Today
follow me around the whole day. Finally, the hour for the draft arrived and my group and I made our way into the Theater at Madison Square Garden, everybody decked out for the occasion and the room pulsing with excitement.

Strangely, any nerves that I might have had were gone. Other than that, the suspense was killing me!

Because the Cleveland Cavaliers had won the top pick in the May lottery, I knew as well as everyone else that LeBron James would be the first pick. The Detroit Pistons had the second pick and the Denver Nuggets had third. There had been talk that Darko Miličić could go to the Pistons but no one knew that for a fact. I knew that Carmelo Anthony would be the third pick. Other twists could happen but for me the draft most likely was going to start with the Toronto Raptors, who had fourth pick. The tea leaves said that Chris Bosh was going to go fourth. And if that happened, my gut told me that I’d go seventh to the Chicago Bulls. I’d worked out twice with the Bulls and all the talk kept circling back to that scenario—which I was happy about. Once that order of the top four was in my head, I realized that the draft really started for me at position five.

Like clockwork, meaning just how I’d called it, LeBron was 1, Darko 2, Melo 3, and Chris Bosh 4. As the handshaking and ceremony continued for Bosh, my agent Hank left his side and came over to my table, pulling up a chair to sit by me. Still relaxed, holding Zaire, who was taking all this pomp and circumstance in, I was thinking that my number was at least a couple of picks away if Chicago was going to take me. In mid-thought, I heard Hank’s voice as he leaned over and said, “Don’t change your facial expression, act calm, I just got a call from Randy Pfund at the Miami Heat. They are gonna pick you at five.”

Cameras were all around us and though I was trying not to tell anyone, I didn’t expect to be drafted so fast and something came over me—I had to tell somebody—so I turned first to Siohvaughn, and said under my breath without looking suspicious, “The Heat are about to pick me at five. Don’t change your facial expression.”

Then I turned to my other side to tell my sister. The point was to prepare us. Instead, not only did Siohvaughn and Tragil change their facial expressions but the two of them started crying with hysterical happiness. Just to make sure everyone was in the loop, I looked back into the crowd and nodded at the fellas, letting them know that I was about to get picked.

Just then, NBA commissioner David Stern appeared at the podium and announced, “With the fifth pick in the 2003 NBA draft, the Miami Heat select Dwyane Wade from Marquette University!”

Well, that was what he might have said, but the excitement was already such that I couldn’t hear at all. Hank nudged me and smiled. This was happening.

My wife and I hugged, Zaire started cheering with everybody else, and I made my way around the table, embracing everyone. Hank had said before that with a young team in the process of rebuilding, I was going to have a better chance of getting to start. The full impact of how perfect my selection was hadn’t even hit me as I ran to the podium—euphoric!

All of what followed was an out-of-body experience to the umpteenth degree. So many dreams had led to this moment to get up there, finally, to take the hat welcoming me to the NBA and Miami, shake hands with my future employers and go in front of the microphones. All the struggle, all the years, now felt like they’d flown by and at long last I had found a way out, could prove myself and quiet the doubters.

Everything felt new. An amazing story, without hardship and obstacle, could now be written.

At home in the Southside of Chicago, Jolinda Wade, Willie Mae Morris, my older sisters, and nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, cousins, and longtime friends from our church were somewhere gathered together singing praises about one of their own having got himself a game. And not too far from there, in downtown Chicago, Dwyane Wade Sr. used an accident settlement he had won to throw a draft-watching party at the ESPN Zone for everyone in his family and Bessie’s family. His prediction that I would go fifth actually made the local papers. At the time, Dad wasn’t able to put into words how he felt, but later he would say that he couldn’t have asked for a better scenario as far as Miami being a place for me to grow and mature.

Tragil was the one person without whom none of this would have been possible. I knew that her hope was that I would have had that diploma—and it’s something she’s still hoping that I can complete one of these days. She is the first to say that at the time, her knowledge of basketball wasn’t deep enough to evaluate my abilities. But there was no way she ever would have thought that I was going to go in the first round, forget whatever was to come next. Still, when I asked her how she felt after the end of draft night, she looked at me and just shook her head, asking, “What more could a sister want?”

ROOKIE SEASON WITH THE MIAMI HEAT WAS AN EXTENSION of the major lesson that I had learned during halftime in the locker room after my miserable first half against Pittsburgh in March Madness.

Oh, but I didn’t know that until the middle of the Heat’s season.

The NBA team that I had joined in preseason that summer of 2003 had fallen the year before to subbasement levels. The record for 2002–2003 was something awful like 25 wins and 57 losses. The Miami Heat, founded in 1988, had risen to heyday levels by the late 1990s with Pat Riley as coach and legendary players like Alonzo Mourning drawing in the crowds. But those days seemed long gone.

Now in this rebuilding, reinvention period, Pat Riley was looking for a way to retrieve the winning DNA that was lying dormant in the Heat all along. As a new kid trying to find my place in this new world of the NBA, I can now report that being coached by the iconic Pat Riley was scary. The respect I held for him was immeasurable—both as a basketball genius and as a person. All I knew was I didn’t want to screw up! And he was very hard. His game was
game.

Coach Riley did something that put me right at ease. He wanted to just let me play and didn’t mind the usual mistakes that happen in the early going. I found that very refreshing.

But then, just as I was settling in on the eve of the season, Pat stepped down to focus on general management duties and Stan Van Gundy became our coach. To have two coaches right before a first season was challenging. And these were two very different guys with two very different approaches.

Coach Van Gundy has a voice that rings in your ears and gets underneath your skin. Always on edge, he coached from a state of high alert. From practice to games and in-between. Also always in tune to the momentum of a game, he let me go on the court similar to the way Pat did. That was going to be good for me in the long run since I was given the opportunity to be a contributor and to find my stride.

Because of Stan, my toughness and drive showed up early on, thankfully. In what could have been a great omen, I was actually the scoring leader for our first game of the season. Even though we lost, I wasn’t worried. Then we lost the next game and the one after that. We went 0–7 for the start of the season. Time to worry? I felt sick. After that we continued to struggle, winning here and there but mostly losing for a solid couple of months. Some of those games I had to miss on account of a broken wrist.

But lo and behold, as the holidays approached it was like we had all gone in the locker room and realized that for the second half of the season we needed to put it out there on the line. And we started to win. By March 2004, we were on a tear, winning seventeen of our last twenty-one games for the season. Being able to help make the difference in going from the subbasement to a winning record of 42–40 for the season was incredible.

The learning curve for me over the course of the season had been steep. Everything that had powered me in the past became intensified. The stakes were much higher—especially with the pressure I put on myself—as were the risks, rewards, and opportunities. All of that crystallized for me when we went into the first round of playoffs against New Orleans.

By now I knew that once the story of the postseason begins, all that has come before is backstory and playoffs are really where the world pays attention. The chance to prove myself on that mega-stage was energizing. In the past, I’d done well in crunch time. But I’d never had the pressure of an NBA playoff moment with a game on the line. That moment was given to me at the end of the first game of the series. Final possession was ours and we went into the huddle. The play was called and Stan Van Gundy surprised us all by going to me to make the basket. The rookie in me was nervous and scared but the competitor in me was up to the challenge.

On the playback, I can hear the shock of the announcer’s voice as he describes the play, the inbounding of the ball to me and “Wade puts it up, it’s good! Stan Van Gundy went to the rookie and he did it!”

In that moment, I arrived. From then on, I was seen as a player to watch and, eventually, a force to be reckoned with. We went on to win the dramatic series against New Orleans, four games to three. That was the first time that the Miami Heat had won a playoff series in four years. In the second round, we battled the dominant Indiana Pacers in a six-game series, including two phenomenal Miami wins, but in the end we couldn’t overcome all that they had in their arsenal.

Disappointed not to have gone even further, I had also gotten a taste of rarefied air and hungered for more. A year earlier anyone who had suggested that the Heat had any chance of winning a championship in the near future would have been thought crazy.

But you have to be a little crazy sometimes to believe.

Hank Thomas came to me about planning for the future, on the court and for opportunities starting to come with that. After the playoffs, he felt that I was finally starting to get the recognition I should have had from the start. The fact that I still wasn’t being given headlines that LeBron and Carmelo were getting annoyed him as much as it did my teammates and me. After all, Hank noted, most of the teams with picks that had gone ahead of the Heat hadn’t made the playoffs. Cleveland, Denver, and Toronto had all failed to make the playoffs. But Miami had gone to the second round.

He was right. By any standard, I had enjoyed a monster rookie season. And if the lack of attention to me could lend some motivation to my game, so be it. Not like I hadn’t used naysaying as fuel in the past.

At one point I had complained to Lamar Odom, a.k.a. L.O., one of my best friends in the sport and a mentor on and off the court as well, about how the team as a whole and myself in the process weren’t getting our due. We were on an airplane together as this conversation came up and we had a long ride ahead of us to talk about my complaints.

Lamar predicted that the tables would turn eventually and then the expectations would be so stratospheric that not living up to them would seem catastrophic.

“Highs and lows,” L.O. explained. “The NBA is all about highs and lows.” He charted his own ups and downs with a lengthy story that went along with his point. The idea was simple though: One minute you can be on top of the world and the next minute on the bottom. Or vice versa. Part of what he was saying was not to become thrown by the adoration or the hating. The other part of his point was that whatever it is that you think you’ve attained as a high could be taken away at any minute. The solution he had found was to try to stay on the middle ground, between the highs and the lows.

L.O.’s talk with me on that flight was like handing me the keys to the kingdom in terms of physical and emotional endurance over the long haul. I don’t know how much he remembers of that talk or if he realizes how much he influenced me—even to this day.

In fact, I credit much of my development as a player to L.O. and teammate Caron Butler, who were true mentors to me my first year. I would stay in touch with both of them but I don’t think either are aware of the extent to which they empowered me and gave me so much confidence and knowledge. Caron Butler was the big brother I needed and, as I had learned, had paved the way for me to go to Miami. Both saw the big picture—that you have to love the game but also know that one day you won’t be the gold and shining star you might have been, and to make plans for what’s to come after basketball.