A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (14 page)

On one of those gloomy fall days when the daylight is shrinking back and colder winds are starting to whip down the streets, Dad announced after our Saturday chores and backyard basketball drills, “Dwyane, you need to go see your mom. Wash up, get Demetrius, and let’s go.”

My mother would later stress how much credit she gave Dad for honoring the bond that I had with her. But she would also admit to being angry at him for arranging this particular visit when and how it happened. Almost a year had passed since I’d seen her. That was partly because our visits had only made me worry more and I hadn’t pushed to go see her. But mainly it was because during this time she had gone from a series of shorter-term incarcerations to longer stays behind bars at Cook County Jail, where she would be kept a couple of months at a time as her various cases made their way through the court system and she awaited trial.

Until Dad pulled the car up in front of the main entrance to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, where scary guard towers could be seen above a series of so-called dormitories for prisoners, I didn’t know that Mom had been arrested again. Saying nothing, Dad parked and nodded for us to get out, soon leading me and Demetrius toward the entry point for visitors.

After going through metal detectors and passing a physical inspection, we were allowed into a waiting room. The smell of institutional cleaning solution came over me in a wave, triggering a sick feeling in my empty stomach. Dad checked in at the scheduling desk and we were told to go through the door, where a security window provided a glimpse into the holding area for inmates.

I caught the first sight of Mom coming down the stairs. Suddenly I didn’t care where we were or what any of the reasons were that she was here. All I knew was that she was my mother and she appeared to be healthy.

Strange as it sounds—she looked better. Clear. Tough.

Later Mom would say that the only way God could get her attention was to have her behind the walls where, once she dried out, they could have a conversation. Mom would also describe her memory of our meeting this day. When she saw the name Wade on the visitor log, she assumed that meant just Dad alone. Later I learned she was still unhappy with him about a previous visit that had taken place a short time before we moved to Robbins. At that time Dad had brought papers for her to sign that gave him legal custody of me. Apparently the bank that was helping him finance the purchase of the house required proof of custody for all the kids living with him. The paperwork was also important, he had explained, for getting me into the better schools in the neighboring districts. Mom was more heartbroken than mad. She knew he wasn’t doing it to hurt her on purpose or to take me away from her. Besides, by then she expected to be facing jail time. Mom recalled telling Dad that as much as she wanted to see me, “Don’t bring our son to me when I go in. Don’t.”

As an adult, I understood. But as a child, I hadn’t seen my mother in nearly a year, so it didn’t matter.

“No,” Mom would say, “you should have never had to see me behind the glass.” So that day when she came down the stairs and looked through the main window that separated her from the visitors, her first reaction at seeing Dad with my stepbrother and me was actually anger. I read it on her face as she shook her head, gesturing for my father to come up and talk to her. She basically asked him, “What are you doing?”

His answer? Her request must have slipped his mind.

Even though I didn’t know any of this, I could tell from how my mom was reacting to Dad that she was upset. But she shook it off, pulled herself together, and pointed me down to the last window, where we could sit across from one another, away from Dad and Demetrius, who went back out to the waiting room. Alone, I walked toward the last window, surprised that there was no one else in there to see another inmate at that particular moment on what should have been a busy Saturday afternoon.

Jolinda Wade told me later that God arranged it that way. “He didn’t have nobody in the visiting room that day except me and you,” she reminded me.

I sat down and leaned in, hurt not to be able to hug her or be held by her. I put my hands up on the glass, hands bigger than a scrawny ten-year-old boy would normally have.

Mom held strong. She didn’t cry when she asked, “Who’s your favorite girl?”

“You, Mom . . .” My voice cracked. But I held back the tears.

My mother raised her index finger, telling me, “I need you to do one thing for me, okay?” She didn’t wait for me to answer but continued: “Don’t ever think I don’t love you. You understand?”

I always understood that. What else we talked about, I don’t remember. Maybe we promised to see each other as soon as she got out and was back in a place of her own. I knew she was fighting. I never stopped believing that day was coming.

Almost numb, I kept my face stone cold all the way out into the dark afternoon, following Dad and Demetrius. But sitting next to my father in the front passenger seat, I lost it. He reached out his arm and pulled me closer. For most of the ride home, I stayed there, leaning on his shoulder, sobbing harder than I probably had ever cried.

Before or since.

OUR BACKYARD BASKETBALL COURT TAUGHT ONGOING LESSONS in toughness.

Even though Dad had started to lighten up and let some of his humor and fun personality shine through every now and then, he continued to coach us boys, as usual, like a drill sergeant getting his troops battle ready. No messing around.

As in: blasting a wake-up call early on a frosty morning just for drills. Left hand, right hand. Dribble with the right. Dribble with the left. We’d stay in the back for hours, until I would actually wonder if I wanted to play this game at all.

As in: just when you think you’ve impressed him or conquered a challenge—
bam!
—he’d raise the bar and set up another series of obstacles.

Thinking ambitiously, Dad used our backyard basketball court as his one-man campaign to keep us out of the gangs that we soon learned were as prevalent in the nearby projects as they had been in the city. His crazy vision was that the team of players he assembled from Robbins could actually be competitive with city kids. But to do that, his game plan was to train us to be able to take on older players—including adults. Like him.

Out on that court, I mean, he would beat us up. You had to become a man at a young age. Not just that. The thing with Dwyane Tyrone Wade Sr. that was most unnerving was his tear-your-ass-to-pieces mouth.

He was not, let me repeat
not,
abusive to us kids physically. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Let’s just say he could get abusive verbally. In certain situations he could become a verbal monster, a tyrant with words. When he was on the basketball court, that kind of set him apart. Or so I used to think (almost proudly) when I was young and we’d watch him slay his on-the-court opponents with an endless spew of cutting comments, all while slashing his way wildly to the basket. Once Dad started to coach us, however, that side of him became much less entertaining.

But maybe there was a method to the madness, on the court and elsewhere, to constantly being on us about our lack of discipline or determination, our lazy, slovenly ways, or whatever it was. My brothers and I bonded around that. Who knows? That may have been the point.

Otherwise, with the competition as fierce as it was, I couldn’t have put up with the relentless taunting from Demetrius, Donny, and eventually Kodhamus. Dad instituted a “no foul” zone for us in the backyard. If you went up for a shot and someone came out there and cleaned your clock, you had to take it. Body to body.

Whatever it took to get the ball away from anyone else was fair game. So I went quickly from those years of getting teased by all my sisters for tripping myself up to being teased by all my brothers for getting tripped up by them. Fortunately, I’d learned how to fall without seriously hurting myself. But Dad and my brothers were brutal. No matter how flagrant the push or shove, the slam or kick that put me on the ground, Dad wouldn’t call a foul. Complaining didn’t help, either.

Like I learned fast, ain’t no crying in basketball.

I got so used to smackdowns that I had to teach myself how to shoot the ball while falling.

Some of those shots may have earned the most admiration Dad ever showed me, especially when I’d shoot the ball over the head of my attackers from a position of being almost laid out on my butt—and then the ball would go in!

“Naw,” my father said one day after a series of such awkward but successful baskets, “nobody can do that on purpose. You just lucky.”

And so Lucky became my nickname.

I liked it. I liked being called Lucky even though it was Big Dwyane’s way of making me raise my sights, of telling me, in so many words, that I’d never really be any good—unless I was willing to work harder than anyone else. In other households, reality could wait. But in ours, even before middle school, we were taught that luck without a supersized will to excel, to continually sharpen your work ethic and surpass limitations, well, just being lucky was close to worthless.

Those lessons not only toughened me up, they came to define my battle with any forces that wanted to tell me I’d never be nuthin’. Dad was just giving me a taste of much more to come from others. So proving that assumption wrong became everything to me. Everything. Whether Dad did that on purpose or not, he would never admit. But clearly, it worked.

I wanted to be more than Lucky. For quite a while, there was no secret about it: I wanted to be Michael Jordan. That meant catching every free moment out in the back to practice the latest Jordan play. I watched him so closely, before long I couldn’t help but start to imitate him off the court, too—his mannerisms, his quiet power, his smooth, gliding way of moving across the floor.

During one of the few times Tragil was able to come visit me during these years, the first thing she said as I sauntered up to give her a hug was “Why you walkin’ like that? That’s not how you walk!”

Proud, I’m like—“Hey, that’s my Jordan stroll.”

My sister cracked up. As she always did, Tragil came bearing gifts—clothes, doughnuts, a little money for anything I needed. When I asked how Mom was doing, she didn’t know the latest. And when I asked if everything was cool with her, Tragil only shrugged. Something was wrong, I could tell, but she didn’t want me to worry. Instead, my sister focused on how well I was doing and urged me to continue to make her proud.

“So Michael Jordan, huh?”

“Or Scotty Pippen.” In the backyard, I’d been practicing both of their moves. Sometimes at the same time!

“You just be you, Dwyane,” she said, starting to leave. When I asked her if she wanted to come to a game, she promised to try. In the meantime, she urged me to mind Dad and not let his militant style get to me too much.

We both said “See ya’ soon,” when Tragil left that day. Like déjà vu all over again, I had this feeling like she was going somewhere and I wouldn’t see her again for a while. Or maybe that was my guilt talking, I silently wondered.

In any case, I forgot my worry about her and focused on the day-to-day in front of me. The fact that Dad was never satisfied did get old. Naturally, some of his criticism was justified. After all, we were rowdy boys and we wanted to have fun. We were normal. We didn’t want to have to come in from playing outside all day with our “stanking feet,” as Dad called them—and, ooh, trust me, they were—and have to shower or do more chores. We wanted to kick back for a little while. At least. You know, catch our breath.

No. Unh-unh. Not in Dad and Bessie’s house. Dad didn’t play no body odor, no hint of the house not being clean. That was his drill sergeant boot-camp approach and we were not ever going to go against him and have to face his verbal wrath. In the army, when he was stationed out in the field in Panama, my father’s job had been supervising the cleanliness of latrines, basically the portable toilets used away from the base. He was tasked with making sure soldiers weren’t exposed to any diseases from lack of hygiene. That was the mentality he used when insisting that we followed protocol. An equal-opportunity enforcer, Dad’s rule was that if one guy got in trouble, we all got in trouble.

There was the time, for example, when an issue came up about taking the trash out to the backyard at night. My brothers and I hated this particular chore because the garbage cans were all the way at the far, dark end of the yard. In my imagination, hauling trash bags after dinner could turn into some Robbins horror movie with us being attacked by rabid raccoons, wild coyotes, or demonic werewolves. Or worse, birds. (Seriously. To this day, birds freak me out and so do horror movies.) And Donny was as scared as me.

Donny and I came up with what seemed to be a reasonable solution. After dinner, we walked out the side doors with the trash, then snuck across the well-lit street and left the bags in a ditch. Then, in the morning, once Dad went to work, we’d move it to the backyard. There was not a damn thing wrong with this strategy. Well, except for that day when Donny and I either got lazy or forgot to move the garbage in the morning.

Wouldn’t you know it. That was the same day that Dad happened to go across the street after work and happened to see all our garbage in the ditch where we’d left it. We didn’t know this until he marched into the house and blasted all of us with an order: “Get naked.”

That was all he said. “Get naked.”

If Dad didn’t kill us, I was sure that Demetrius would. There was nothing I could do but start to cry immediately.

To prolong the fear, Dad said, “Wait.” Then he escorted the four of us boys across the street and pointed to the garbage in the ditch and asked, “Who did this?”

Donny and I raised our hands instantly, saying, “We did it, yep, that was us.”

Breathing fire, Dad went on to explain why it was wrong and disrespectful of the community and the family and made us all look like worthless riffraff. Or something to that effect.

With that, he nodded in the direction of the house and when we got back inside, he hissed, “
Now
get naked.”