A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (22 page)

For the next several weeks, I tried to stay positive and focused on ending high school on a high note. And in that mind-set, I was called out of class to come to the office. The hall pass indicated that the results were in.

Many high-pressure moments had happened to me before that day and many more would come later. But for the rest of my life, I will never forget how long that walk was when I went down to get my scores. I remember the level of humidity in the air inside that hallway, leftover smells of lunch from the teacher’s lounge, the dim institutional lighting, and the sounds of muffled voices behind closed classroom doors.

I remember my heart beating, the hesitation of my footsteps. “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst” was another mantra that had served me well so I reverted to that. The weight of the moment was how many people I cared about were counting on me. For that reason, before I even got to the office and was handed the envelope, I was teary-eyed.

Envelope in hand, I left the office and took a few steps down the hallway, then stopped, leaned against the wall, and opened it up. Pulling out the paperwork, I scanned down to where the different scores were listed and even lower to the previous scores. At that moment, I calculated what I would have needed to get and what I had gotten.

A second or two ticked by before I realized that I didn’t get the scores that I needed to pass. Now with the envelope in my jeans pocket, I went into the bathroom and cried like a baby.

With a deep breath, I threw water on my face, pulled myself together, and finished the rest of the school day. Later in the afternoon, I went over to Darlene’s house and used the phone to do what would become natural as time went on: I called Coach Crean at Marquette.

“My scores came in today,” I began, with tears starting. “I . . . uh . . . I didn’t pass.”

“Oh, Dwyane, I’m sorry . . .” Coach C paused, and then he started crying too. “I’m sorry . . . ,” he repeated. He knew how much doing well mattered to me. His disappointment wasn’t so much in me as it was with the situation.

“I’m sorry,” I wept. “I’m sorry.”

He told me I had nothing to apologize for, that I’d worked hard. But then he broke down again. A long silence followed as we both fought for composure.

At last I heard him take a determined breath. His energy and tone changed. Now he was the coach, making a call after a tough loss. “Look, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re coming here and we’ll stay with everything as planned. The only difference is you won’t be able to play in the games or travel. But you’ll do everything else. You’re on the team.”

“I am?”

“Marquette needs you. I’ll see you when school starts.”

As I listened to a few more details of the plan, the weight of the world lifted off me. My gratitude to Tom Crean was boundless, my thanks even greater to God for blessing me and giving me this chance.

Coach C believed that much in me. And I swore to myself, on my life, that come the next few years, I would prove him right for doing so.

A LIFE-AND-DEATH QUESTION WAS RARELY FAR FROM MY thoughts. It had to do with my fear that time was running out for my mom.

Over the summer before taking off to Marquette for my first year there, I woke up from a bad dream that left me with a dark feeling. Mom appeared in my dreams periodically, mostly as the way I saw her in my heart: beautiful, strong, a loving figure. But in this dream, she was in a terrible place—a dark, burned-out abandoned building—like she was trapped, struggling to get to a door that didn’t exist.

I awoke with a jolt.

No point telling myself this was only a dream. We were connected; this was her reality now. Three and a half years as a fugitive. Because she couldn’t risk having identification, she had no access to resources or help for her addiction. She was out there alone—everything I’d worried about as a little boy sitting up on the stoop waiting for her.

A part of me wondered if the dream was picking up on her needing to see me. That was a strange thought, because the last I’d heard from Dad and Tragil was that she was avoiding us.

Why? Mom clarified her reasons later, saying, “I didn’t want you all to see me because I had lost so much weight, my head was the biggest thing on my body. I was down to a size five. My arms were scarred up. I was with a man with no dreams who had beat me so bad he had knocked my teeth out of my mouth.”

In our last encounters, I saw her embarrassment. But she usually put herself together, kept her hand over her mouth, or wore long sleeves even in the summer. Dad agreed to help contact her and after a week or so a meeting was arranged.

We didn’t talk about where she was staying the rest of the time. No, she didn’t look good. There was no denying that. Still, she was fighting. Jolinda Wade was always a fighter.

There were two things that had been weighing on her, as it turned out, and she wanted to talk to me about them. I couldn’t tell if she was high or not, but her words were chosen carefully. Mom began by saying she was concerned about what she had done to me and Tragil.

“You didn’t—” I started to interrupt, but she wouldn’t let me.

“No, no, I did. I went to God first on this and now I’m talking to you and your sister next. One thing is I don’t want you kids to have to bury what I did to you and not get that off of you. I can’t and won’t allow you to suffer like that. So . . . I need . . . I need to know how you feel—how do you feel about me leaving your life all this time?”

I just looked at her, shrugged, and said, “What do you mean, Mom?”

In her husky, smoky voice, she cried, “I wasn’t there!” Then she paused, ready for me to come at her, it seemed, to beat up on her with something worse than she was already beating up on herself with.

None of it mattered in this moment except what I told her: “I still love you.”

Mom looked back at me and shook her head. She leaned back and turned her eyes up to heaven and asked, “What type of kid is this that I have?” Then she let me give her a hug and I repeated what I had said.

By staying positive, I wanted to show my belief in her. That’s all I could do.

My burden was my burden. Tragil and my older sisters responded as I did when Mom talked to them, too. We understood that our mother didn’t want us to be burdened. The day would come for us to deal with what we’d been through. But that was work for another day.

Before we said good-bye, Mom told me again how proud she was that I was on my way to college. She was starting to get shaky, shivering on that hot summer afternoon as she lit herself a cigarette. I got up to go and Mom continued to talk about destiny and making the most of the opportunities that basketball had brought me. That was when, for the second time in my eighteen years, Mom made sure I didn’t forget that my life was bigger than basketball.

At the time, I couldn’t see that far down the road. Besides, what could be bigger than the chance to finally make our lives easier and get my mother the help she needed before it was too late?

TOM CREAN, AS I LIKE TO SAY, WAS A COMBINATION OF ALL my coaches put together, with his own spin as well. Like my dad, he was tough, harping on fundamentals and tireless preparation. At times he used tough love, like Dad, seeing how far my limits could be pushed. Like Gary Adams, Coach C went the extra mile after team practices to take me to the gym and work with me; if I called late at night or during his off hours, he was right there. For a head coach, he was unusually hands-on. And like Coach Fitzgerald, Coach C put his focus on team and team success. He drove home for me the truth that if a coach doesn’t say anything to you, then you’re not working as hard as you should—whereas if he’s always on you, then he sees something that shows he believes in you.

Coach Crean stayed on me from the moment I set foot on the Marquette University campus. That first year, in spite of the fact that I had to redshirt and sit out that season, I practiced and trained at the same level of intensity as everyone else. In our practices, he clearly saw strengths in me, but he also could see that I needed a lot of work. There was no question that I was ready to be pushed even though the constraints of not being able to compete in actual games was sometimes maddening. Still, what was the most motivating aspect of Tom Crean’s approach with me—and why we became so close—was that he emerged as the father figure I needed at the time. He would hug me and let me know he loved me and offer genuine approval of me as a person, aside from my efforts as an athlete.

By the same token, in treating me like a son Coach C placed me in a leadership position with unbelievably high expectations that went along with that role. In effect, that first season he made me practically an assistant coach. Since I couldn’t dress out and play, I would be on the bench in my suit watching and taking notes. When the team won or did well, Tom Crean would give all the credit to me—like I was responsible. Oh, but when they lost, he could tear into me like nobody’s business, as though I was the reason for the failure.

Brutal!

Nothing had prepared me for this trial by fire. Early in the season at a home game, for example, we were down by at least fifteen points at halftime and as soon as we all marched into the locker room, Coach C turned to me and said, “Dwyane?”

Meaning . . . I had to stand in front of the team and identify what they were doing wrong on the basketball court. Me? The quiet newcomer and redshirt they only knew from what I could do in practice?

“Well,” I began, glancing down at my notes, “you guys are playing soft.”

Coach Crean nodded and gestured for me to continue.

Then I went on, telling them how many missed shot opportunities I’d counted and where the defense was crumbling and why weren’t they passing the ball to their open men instead of taking bad or contestable shots. “Make those adjustments, go hard, and you got this,” I said with a shrug. Not harsh but direct. Inside, I was cringing. My powers of observation weren’t bad. But giving criticism wasn’t in keeping with my personality and wasn’t where I normally came from.

Tom Crean had found a way to cultivate my leadership skills and teach me a different kind of toughness. Once I found a comfort zone in talking to the guys, he pushed me further, requiring me to come to his office and watch game films and work with the guys on that. In hindsight, I can see that he wanted everything to be ready when I hopefully met the academic requirement that would allow me to play the next year. Then I would not have to struggle to get up to speed on the court. Smart plan, but I didn’t always see that. In fact, there were plenty of times when I was convinced of one thing—
This man is crazy!

At different points, he pushed so hard I was seriously ready to go home. Then, of course, I realized there was nuthin’ to go home to. But that didn’t change the backing vocal track inside my head
—This man is crazy!

There was, no doubt, a method to the madness. Coach C wanted me to shed some skin, even to let go of beliefs about myself that weren’t necessarily true. Pretty soon, I came to my own conclusion that if I could retain masses of basketball stats and information being thrown at me and then handle the discomfort of standing up and speaking, there was no reason that I couldn’t retain material for my academic classes or confront my test anxiety.

I’m not saying that the transformation was overnight. For most of that year I felt the stigma of not being good enough and of letting the team down by not being out there. No matter how hard I threw myself into my studies, I had to wait until most of the reporting periods were in to be told if I would play that next year.

Fortunately, per the terms of my redshirt status, I didn’t have to worry about taking the ACT again or passing it. What I had to do to be eligible to play my sophomore year was attain a GPA of 2.5 or higher for the year. There were encouraging grades in individual classes and I had reason to be optimistic. But it wasn’t until the day near the end of the season when our athletic director came to address the team that the official verdict came in. At the first reporting period, I had surpassed the minimum with a 2.67. By the second report I had a 2.8 and then a 3.0 with the next. (And my GPA continued to rise from there.)

Once the athletic director concluded his comments and announced that I was cleared to play that next season, a loud cheer went up in the gym. Coach C and the rest of the coaching staff, along with my teammates, went nuts, cheering, applauding, hugging me, backslapping and high-fiving each other, like we had won a tournament or something! Everyone knew how hard it had been and how the uncertainty had weighed on me. So to see them all celebrating and taking pride over something I had done—off the court no less—was unforgettable.

That first year at Marquette certainly taught me the importance of patience and reinforced lessons about focus. But more than anything the experience opened my eyes to what Mom had been trying to tell me as I came to understand that, yes, there was more to life than basketball. What had seemed like a postponement of my dreams actually helped me become better and stronger—a better student, a better person. Because I didn’t have basketball as my outlet or as the one thing that I did well and that made me cool or heroic, the year changed how I looked at
everything.

The process was painful, like being separated from the love of my life, such that when I was reunited with the game, that is, able to play again, I was fiercely in control, in charge of everything that happened on the court. Win, lose, or draw. But more than that, I now saw the possibilities beyond the game, at least enough to realize that my world wasn’t just about basketball.

Oddly enough, that made me lethal as a competitor. A warrior at age nineteen.

The transformation was powerful. Coach Crean, with laser-sharp instincts, had helped me to help myself in tapping the emotional pressure cooker that up until now had controlled me. Whatever happened, I’d figured out how to put all of the anger, hurt, confusion, and uncertainty that arose from circumstances beyond my control and throw it all into the burner. As for the naysayers, I now had great use for their disregard.