A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (20 page)

Here comes the refrain: “We can’t always do everything we want to do.”

“I understand,” he says, shaking off the disappointment that he’ll have to wait until the fall to join the local basketball team.

“But I can compromise,” I say, proposing that if he wants to work out with a trainer and improve his fundamentals, that can be arranged.

That changes everything. All of a sudden the boy who can’t sit still anyway starts running happy victory laps around the room. Zion soon joins in, racing at top speed to keep up with his brother.

I’m glad, as well, that we have a plan in place. All of this requires patience and paying attention as we move forward. Whether or not it’s all we’ll need, I’m not so sure. But one thing I know absolutely is that Zaire and Zion want more than anything to please me and make me proud. That goes for their desire to make their mother proud, too.

I know the power of the desire that most kids have to make their parents, teachers, coaches, and communities proud of them. I know it well.

COACHES MADE A TREMENDOUS DIFFERENCE IN MY LIFE ON and off the court. I give lasting credit to all my coaches—starting with Dad, and stretching to my high school and college coaches and beyond—for helping me become the man I am today. Though I had the will to grow as a player and person, I certainly didn’t have all the answers. That made me coachable. And as a result, these mentors helped to mold me, influencing my beliefs and values—though not without high expectations and demands.

At Harold L. Richards High School, our assistant varsity coach, Gary Adams, raised the stakes for my game without drama or hype. Basketball through and through, Gary stood at about six foot four or five and wasn’t a yeller or a whip-cracker. He knew the X’s and O’s of the sport and believed that the young Jedi in training had to pass through many tests to attain mastery. To do that, Coach Adams was all about having a work ethic. He picked up where Coach Wade Sr. had left off. Hard work by itself was no longer enough. Now what mattered was also the important element of focus.

Around the beginning of our junior season, Coach Adams approached me after practice and asked if I wanted to get in extra workouts.

“Yeah,” I shrugged. As in: who wouldn’t?

“Fine,” he said, before asking for the address of our house in Robbins. Then he told me, “I’ll be at your house at eight
A
.
M
. this Saturday. I’ll hit the horn one time. That’s it. It’s your responsibility to come out, ready to go.” He went on to say that after he picked me up in the car, the two of us would go to the gym and practice for two hours. If I wasn’t ready or didn’t show, the offer was off the table.

Excited, I was outside waiting for him that next Saturday. Besides the workout—at a Chicago gym that was nicer than what our high school had at the time—Gary talked to me during the ride there and back about how far I saw myself going in the sport.

Not used to that question, I laughed and sort of mumbled, “As far as I can, I guess.”

“Good,” Gary told me. “Good that you want that. Because if you do, if you want to play after you leave high school, you will have to become so much better than the players who are already in front of you. You will have to work five times as hard as them. You’ll have to work when they’re not working. When they’re sleeping, you’ll have to be working. If you think you’ve got that drive in you and you’re willing to work that hard, I can help. But you need to show me that’s what you want.”

His version of “help me help you” was for me to take the initiative and he’d be there to egg me on. This work ethic brought with it the lesson that if you really want to do something you have to invest yourself in it 100 percent.

Almost every weekend for the rest of the school year, then every day over the course of the summer between junior and senior year, and back on the weekends during my last year at Richards, Coach Adams continued our practices. He also took me to watch games at the college level and would point out specific players whose style was similar to mine. Part of his coaching approach was to emphasize the visual component of player development. As someone who grew up watching basketball long before I played, I was a visual learner and athlete anyway.

One of the first games we attended was at DePaul University, where Gary wanted me to observe the technique of Quentin Richardson. Today Quentin plays for the Orlando Magic and is one of my best friends. In those days, I knew him only as the star of Chicago’s Whitney Young High School team, which he led to a state championship; as a freshman at DePaul he was already a phenom, too.

Coach Adams kept leaning over to me as we watched Q give a master class. “Look at that, see the dribble, you can do that.” Gary nodded to emphasize the point. See it and do it were all part of his coaching style. Show, not tell. He wanted to show me things that others did well and that I could choose to add to my own game.

This wasn’t so much scouting the opposition. I wasn’t going to be playing against that team. Instead Gary was taking me to another world, to see how the game was being played at that level and learn it. Learn their moves? Why the hell not? At DePaul, Q was doing things that big guys do, putting up 20 points and pulling down 12 rebounds a game. His technique was about precision, not just combat. So I watched and refined what he did and brought over some of his stuff to my high school game.

In fact, the next varsity match I played for Richards, I tried my version of that precision technique and scored 27 points and 12 rebounds—because I saw how effective small adjustments and improvements could be. Not long ago one of my high school teammates reminded me of how I’d played after that visit to DePaul. “D,” he said, “do you remember how you won that game? You did a tip dunk off the free-throw line! I knew then you were going to the NBA.” He said his dad had told him the same thing after the game.

Well, that made me proud. Because it wasn’t by accident. Coach Adams worked on it with me after watching Q. We worked on how to get to the ball before an opponent as it came off the rim, something as simple as a quick move then a quicker reverse. Technique. Finesse. And very effective. Just from going to games. The power of the visual.

Another layer to these lessons was not to be so cool that you couldn’t borrow and adapt from the best. For me to play smart, I couldn’t expect to develop my own game just from imagination and originality. And I do like to think of myself as being creative and resourceful. Many of my moves over time I’ve borrowed from others and then put my own spin on them. That means I always watch players. Oh, if I’m guarding someone and they do something that worked on me, of course I’m gonna go work on it! If it worked on me, it should still work with me doing it.

Later, when we were training for the Olympics in 2008, I saw Kobe Bryant make a move I thought was amazing. Not too proud to ask, on the next break, I turned to Kobe and said, “Show me how you just did that.” He didn’t mind showing me, any more than I mind when someone asks me to show them one of my moves.

In the middle of junior year, as the recruitment wave began to be felt, Gary Adams took me to my first ever Marquette game, across the river in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Up until now, I’d barely heard of Marquette University. But with my name starting to get out there, he thought I should watch their team play, check out what was distinctive about them, and just generally get the environment of college basketball—again, to show me what it takes to be successful at that level. The player at Marquette he wanted me to know about was Cordell Henry, a point guard who at five foot seven compensated for his height disadvantage with grit and speed. He was something—fast as shit and tough as shit. Cordell had played with Quentin Richardson at Whitney Young—one of the best basketball high schools in Illinois.

Gary Adams was strategic in showing me that players not too different from me had made it to college and were thriving there. These excursions prepared me in a practical sense by showing what was going to be expected of any contender at the next level, but they also gave me something just as important, hope and belief.

I feasted on that hope. Soon I convinced myself maybe I could be out on that floor. Maybe I could do what they were doing.

And finally, I was pumped and ready: C’mon, recruit me!

THESE LAST BASKETBALL SEASONS IN HIGH SCHOOL GAVE me a small taste of glory. As far as the eye could see—that being
my
eye, of course—the future looked golden.

My athletic identity was now being forged from a focus on putting team first and hard work, the dual mantras from Coach Fitzgerald and Coach Adams. In making a name for myself—“D-Wade” was out there early and fit the bill—I was aware of not initially being on many colleges’ radar. I wasn’t the kid necessarily being groomed with all-expense-paid trips to big sponsors’ training camps or any of the other special perks given to the more obvious college-bound candidates.

Much of that at first had to do with my height and the reality that I was what recruiters would later label a “ ’tweener.” Was I a point guard or a shooting guard? What was that one thing I did so well that college coaches would spot and need me to deliver for their team?

Those were questions I couldn’t answer in words. But whenever I hit the floor, during practice and especially during games, I was going to answer with
actions.
In my increasingly confident mind-set, why not try to do it all? That became my own mantra: Let my game show you; let the score speak for itself.

Where I did gain additional experience and attention was in playing for the Illinois Warriors, an AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) team. In the summer before junior year, my goal was to be remembered. Sure enough, by the time school began that fall, and with Coach Adams getting me out to see the college possibilities, I started to get letters and inquiries.

My dream school? No question. The University of Michigan. When the scout came to my workout, I didn’t hesitate to say that’s where I wanted to go. The reason was clear: Michigan had been the home of the Fab Five. Led by Chris Webber, that 1991 team captured my imagination right along with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

Michigan was where I’d dreamed about going since I was a kid. When they began to show interest in Darius Miles, who played with me at the AAU (and ended up skipping college to go to the pros), he told a scout, “Yo, D-Wade wants to come to Michigan,” to see how much they wanted him. Darius was told, “Oh, yeah, we’ll recruit D-Wade, too.”

Other than hoping to play for a top school, I mainly wanted to go where they wanted me the most and to a good university. Many suitors came knocking. Nice! But by the end of junior year my first round of ACT scores became cause for concern and next thing I knew, the crowd thinned. Michigan moved on. Interest started to wane on the part of all those recruiters who’d been sending letters and watching me on the AAU circuit.

My first set of scores wasn’t bad. They were disastrous. They sucked.

My grades were right on target for a college-bound athlete, if not better than expected. But my ACTs were below passing. My coaches and the recruiters assured me that there was plenty of time to retake the test and bring up my scores. You could take it up to a total of three times. All that was required was to achieve a composite score of 17 out of 36. To do that, you were allowed to take the best score for each section from any of the different sittings.

Right away I signed up for prep sessions, speed-reading classes, special tutors for the different subjects. Using that same work ethic that I brought to the court, I convinced myself that I could do this. I
had
to do this.

Once the dust had settled, about a dozen schools were still in the mix. Ultimately, four stayed in the hunt: DePaul, Illinois State, Bradley, and Marquette. There were pluses and minuses with each of the programs. Marquette was a top choice from the start, because of something that happened on the day when their recruitment calls were scheduled to begin.

On that day, June 25, at 11:01
A
.
M
., one minute after the calls were to begin, I was over at Siohvaughn’s house, where I’d been hanging out regularly, and the phone rang with a hopeful sound. As I recall, Siohvaughn’s mom, Darlene, told me to pick up. Soon I heard the warm, strong voice of Tom Crean, head coach of men’s basketball at Marquette University. Instead of waiting to contact me later in the day, he said, “I wanted to be your first call. And I want to be your first call because this is how important you are to Marquette and our future.” The conversation was even better from there. Coach Crean had just arrived at Marquette. He had come from Michigan State, where he was the assistant coach. So, to know that for his first order of business he would make the call to me—wow. That carried weight with me; it meant a lot.

Even so, I held off making any kind of decisions until the rest of the calls came in, the other suitors had a chance and the official visits took place over the coming months . . . and until I saw my next set of scores. Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, was the one program I could see wasn’t a fit for me and didn’t take the visit; I wanted to play at a more competitive level than where the team was at the time. But the visits to DePaul and Illinois State were amazing. At DePaul I had a ball—hanging out with Quentin Richardson, who was now my homey, getting to see him in his school and social setting, and imagining myself being able to finally have the big-man-on-campus experience. Being able to stay in Chicago was also a plus.