A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (46 page)

DURING THE PARADE THAT WILL SOON DELIVER US TO THE American Airlines Arena, I reach over to bring the three boys I’m raising in closer to me. The truth is that I couldn’t have done it without them. These kids are so wise and such great human beings that I could not be any prouder.

Zaire, Zion, and Dada are happy and healthy, and see the world as rich with opportunity. Really, that’s the ultimate lesson of being a father first and coming to understand that life is bigger than basketball or any other such endeavor. Imagine how great our lives would be as parents if we all sought to raise fine, caring human beings. Love and the belief that they can do whatever is in their hearts is a winning recipe for their success.

Zaire ended his year with an amazing basketball season and his usual very good grades. He is so talented—from the way he watches the game, studying nuances and then incorporating them on his own, to his natural athleticism. He is a much better player than I was at this age. And he is so smart and hip. Here’s an exchange I couldn’t resist tweeting not long ago:

ths morning convo w/ my son goes alil lk ths Zaire: Dad y u cnt dunk lk blake Griffin Me: why u cnt dunk lk blake griffin Zaire: I cnt jump that high Me: Me either. We both laugh haha kids

That’s another reason I say Zaire’s one of my best teachers. He keeps me cool.

Dahveon played his first season of basketball with Zaire and did really well. He is one to watch. As the underdog who came in under the radar a lot in my own life, I can relate to Dada’s style. On top of that, he’s doing well in school, catching up very quickly, and he has such a good heart as he continues to be a steadying force for my sons. Sometimes I joke with him that he must be gaming the system because he does everything right!

Zion just turned five and has the busiest schedule of any of us. He is such a whiz in school that he wants to expand his horizons. The new list of extracurricular activities he gave me to add to his schedule included soccer, hip-hop dance, swimming, basketball, and tennis. Watch out, universe. We’re all going to say we knew him when.

Everyone else is doing fine on the homefront.

Pastor Jolinda Wade remains my favorite girl. She is thriving, traveling, and speaking, never ceasing to amaze. Dad is sticking with his program of sobriety and working on self-improvement and growth all the time.

Up here on top of the double-decker bus, I’m thinking about how many of the lessons first given to me by my parents and other family members have continued to serve me all this time, even as recently as the playoffs. The truth is that over the last two months of the postseason, I’ve needed to draw from guidance given to me by most of my mentors and coaches—in addition to that from Coach Erik Spoelstra, who opened my eyes to new lessons of what being a champion is all about.

Going back to the summer of 2010, when Bron and C.B. first came to the Heat, there had been this assumption that with the two of them playing with me—the Big Three—Coach Spo’s job would be easy. Not true. Some people think that having three “superstars” on a roster requires less coaching. The reality is that one of the hardest coaching challenges in basketball is figuring out how to mold and motivate a group of dominant players who are used to playing with the ball in their hands most of the time. Just like when you get a bunch of Alpha type leaders on a mission of any kind, someone has to be in charge to orchestrate the give-and-take.

Knowing how hard that is and remembering how we hadn’t figured it out in the previous season, I kept a wait-and-see attitude about whether Coach Spo could meet that challenge. Would he make the necessary adjustments with this particular group of talented players and bring about the needed changes that we weren’t able to make last year? Would he get us out of our individual comfort zones to be able to fight for a common goal and do what was needed to win a championship? And could he get us to buy in to his leadership and believe we could go all the way?

From the start of the playoffs in our first round against the New York Knicks, I knew the answer to those questions was
yes.
Spo had found a way to get us to mesh, even with all of the different personalities and egos. He had found the means of molding us to get the job done, to allow the right give-and-take, for each of us to be the Alpha at different points, even when it meant changing or hurting our individual game if that helped another player’s game. That’s what a coach has to do to lead a team to a championship. And, above all, the team has to trust their coach and believe that the mountaintop can be reached—even when it requires us to change the way we’ve played during all of our careers.

How did Spo do it? By being willing to get out of his own way and by getting out of his own comfort zone. In setting that example, he made it easier for each of us to do the same, without falling back on playing the way we had in the past.

Of course, there were so many dramatic twists and turns throughout the four rounds that I could probably write a whole chapter on each of the series. But what I can say is that each round brought different opportunities and distinct challenges. I loved getting to play against the Knicks in the first round of the Eastern Conference. Aside from the long-standing Miami Heat/New York Knicks rivalry that intensified in the late 1990s—meeting in the playoffs for four consecutive years, each time in a seven-game series— I love playing at Madison Square Garden. As the first game approached, my excitement grew as our whole city became pumped for the matchup. We also had reason to be nervous. In the past, the Knicks, even with a weaker record, had found ways to beat the Heat—both with their strong three-point shooting and with the firepower of a superstar player like Carmelo Anthony. Though we were confident, we knew there was a possibility of the Knicks turning up the dial on their play and catching us unprepared. In some ways they did, but we made the adjustments and started to find our playoff rhythm, winning the series 4–1. For both teams, the games were fun and social. There was ballin’ and playing for the love of the sport. It was pride going against pride from our two teams and our two cities.

Going into the next series against the Indiana Pacers, my main concern was a swollen left knee that had been bothering me. In finishing off the first round in five games, I assumed that a couple days of rest would take care of the problem. And guess what? In game one (which we won decisively at home against the very physical play of the Pacers), I felt much better and even thought the knee issue was resolved. Well, I was wrong, as I found out in game two.

Not only was the knee that I used for elevation more swollen, but the game plan had been seriously complicated by the fact that Chris Bosh had gone down with a series-ending (potentially playoff-ending) abdominal injury in game one. As a team, we now had to figure out how to play and how to win without C.B. My job became harder as well because my minutes went up from thirty-three to thirty-eight a game. Knee swelling and all, I still managed to score 24 points. But then, in a shocker at the buzzer, the Pacers won the game by 3 points on our home court.

So on the morning before game three, on Thursday, May 17, after we had traveled to Indianapolis, I had to decide whether to have my knee drained and get some relief sooner rather than later, or delay having it drained and hope that the swelling would improve. Choosing to have it drained that morning, I expected to get the relief by game time, but instead my knee felt very sore and I was having trouble jumping. In what was one of my worst postseason games ever, after being scoreless in the first half, I scored only five points in the entire game. Worse, we lost by an embarrassing nineteen points, allowing the series to go 2–1 to the Pacers. The overreaction by the sports media, however, was pretty ridiculous. The next thing I knew they were writing my basketball obituary.

What? They were writing about me as if I was over the hill, not a thirty-year-old player in the prime of his career. Ironically, some of the same analysts who had criticized me for being too dominant in the past were now complaining that I wasn’t taking over games the way they used to count on me to do.

The challenge, as always, was to tune out the noise and the doubt and clear my head. After all, going back to my rookie year, I knew how to fight for mental toughness and push through injuries. You just do it and deal with the consequences. But in that game three, when Coach Spo and I got into a spat in a third-quarter huddle, I gave in to my own frustration and his. I was playing with everything I had in me, whatever it took to get the ball into someone else’s hands if I couldn’t score with it, and just having an off night. Some games, hopefully most of them, you overcome the odds. Some games you can’t. Our mutual frustration escalated. He might have been trying to see what would happen if he could get me to play mad, which is when I usually play well. But this was me playing frustrated, very different from playing mad. I was bothered by the knee and regretted my decision to have it drained only to feel the opposite of relief.

Coming out of the huddle, the frustration Coach and I were both feeling collided. As unfortunate as it was, sometimes you have to have those lows to reach up for your highs. Afterward, when I heard the press starting to question whether I had the ability to still play the game, I was thrown. I mean, my average of 26 to 27 points a game was down to 23—but on purpose. The objective was to make plays to score as a team and I was delivering. Though the piling on was frustrating and unexpected, it was funny, too.

And I also had to be thankful for everything that went wrong in that game three, even after a public tiff with my coach. It provided the turning point that drove me to look within, dig deep, and find the stuff that I needed to be able to make the greatest contribution I could on the court. As luck would have it, Coach Tom Crean, now head coach of men’s basketball at the University of Indiana in Bloomington—where he has been for the last four years—invited me to drive up and visit him on campus. Coach C., recently named National Coach of 2012 by ESPN, was just what the doctor ordered. One of my first and best teachers, he knew that what I most needed was to step outside of the frustration and get into a different, positive environment. Just like in the past, because he knows me better than any basketball mentor, he was able to work with me to help me feel good about myself so I could flip that mental competitive switch. Coach C. combines the knowledge of being able to show me what I need to do physically with the gift of communication that gets to me to listen.

That visit with my college coach was critical. It recharged me and reset my mental focus about what I needed to do for the rest of the Indiana series and, really, for the rest of the playoffs. I went on to score 30 points in game four, 28 points in game five, and 41 points in game six, which the Heat won, to close out the series and move on to the Eastern Conference finals. Coach Spoelstra was quoted as saying, “The one thing I know about the fabric of Dwyane Wade is that when he doesn’t have the game he’s capable of, he’s very introspective. He owns it. He has shown an ability year after year to bounce back.”

After the six games it took to get us out of the Indiana series, we were off to face the Boston Celtics. That series was extremely challenging and we’d had no reason to expect anything different. Yep, we were confident but not so much so that we let ourselves forget just how tough the Celtics had proven to be time and again. Very well coached by Hall of Famer Doc Rivers, the team was made up of Hall of Famers who already had championship DNA in their ranks. But we came in with the belief that we could win, determined to make use of our athleticism. Over seven tough games, we found our edge in being able to wear them down, just by putting enough added pressure on them offensively and defensively. We took advantage of those moments when they were becoming a little tired, especially in the fourth quarters, when we had enough left in the tank to play full-out all the way until the final decisive seconds.

While we were slugging it out against the Celtics, the drama in the Western Conference that pitted the San Antonio Spurs against the Oklahoma City Thunder was taking surprising turns. Of course, we were planning for either team, feeling good to be rejoined by Chris Bosh in time to help us out of the Celtics series and to be able to make a difference in the finals. If not for his return, I might be telling another story today. The Spurs, with home-court advantage won both of the first two games to lead the series 2–0, and many, including me, thought they were going to be unstoppable by the Thunder. The Spurs, by most measures, were the best team in the West and were playing phenomenal basketball. Could the Thunder tie the series at home? Maybe. I was looking at this young, athletic team of unbelievable scorers—Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, James Harden—and predicted that they could give the Spurs a run for their money. In my crystal ball, however, I thought it was going to be a seven-game series that would go to the Spurs. The fact that the Thunder won it in six games told us to get ready.

Whether it had been the Thunder or the Spurs in the finals, I believed we would be able to respond and win. Not thinking about my knee (which would require surgery after the finals), I felt that in our arsenal we had the strengths to take on the Thunder and exploit their weaknesses in ways that hadn’t been tested before. The schedule for the finals started with two games in Oklahoma City, since they had home-court advantage, continuing to three games in Miami, followed by two games back in Oklahoma. Our thinking at the start was to go to their house and win one of the first two games. In game one, we battled and played well. But we hadn’t seen their game yet. Sure, we’d played them in the regular season. But that’s different. The game changes and is honed in the playoffs. We hadn’t played against
that
Thunder yet. And so in that first game, even though we were ahead in the third quarter, they were able to crank up the energy enough to take us by surprise. They went fast and were very athletic. We hadn’t seen that gear from them before. By game two, we were ready to take what they could dish out and kept adjusting with changes they hadn’t seen from us. We got the job done in that second game and took the series back home to Miami tied 1–1.