A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball
Read A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball Online
Authors: Dwyane Wade
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Family & Relationships, #Personal Memoirs, #Marriage, #Sports
A FATHER FIRST
HOW
MY
LIFE
BECAME
BIGGER
THAN
BASKETBALL
DWYANE WADE
WITH
MIM
EICHLER
RIVAS
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
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
Chapter One:
Go Get You a Game
Chapter Two:
Prayers, Promises, and Dreams
Chapter Three:
In the Backyard
Chapter Eleven:
Keeping Promises, Keeping Faith
Final Thoughts: Next Steps for Getting Involved
Homecoming
F
RIDAY
AFTERNOON
M
ARCH
11, 2011
A
T
HOME
IN
M
IAMI
“W
HAT?!”
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 paying 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.