A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (17 page)

So as I gear up for the game with the Washington Wizards in D.C. and talk on Skype with the boys, I try to explain my disappointment in myself for not doing more to help my team keep our heads in the game. “And what else did I forget?” I ask my sons.

Bad question.

Next thing I know, the two of them are coming up with a slew of ridiculous answers—everything from forgetting to change my socks to not doing my pregame ritual of grabbing the hoop and doing the three pull-ups.

Now we’re all laughing about who has the stankiest feet and so on. On that note, I remind them to go take care of business and help out the home team and that I’ll see them soon.

The answer I was trying to have the boys remember was about the importance of playing for the love of the game. Certainly in the past there have been times when I’ve played angry and hurt and with a chip on my shoulder and managed to score points and help win. Sometimes those emotions are needed to power up a team, too. Spo, as we call Coach Spoelstra, has said that I can play mad probably better than any player he knows.

But in the end, without joy, the game just becomes a slugfest powered by testosterone and ego. Without heart, teams can become little more than a set of stats and basketball runs the risk of not really mattering. Without heart and without the choice to embrace joy even in the midst of fear and uncertainties, life is just a series of events that don’t connect to each other and don’t connect us to the purpose that we’re all given.

And those are only some of the conversations that can be inspired by the question “How was your day?”

NOT LONG AGO, I HEARD A STORY MY FATHER HAD NEVER told me before. He recalled an evening in spring 1998 at the end of the basketball season for my alma matter, Harold L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Illinois. As Dad tells this tale, a very emotional head coach, Jack Fitzgerald, approached him after the awards ceremony that night to confess how broken up he was that my brother was going to be graduating soon.

“I’ll never have another player like Demetrius,” Coach Fitzgerald told Dad, tears in his eyes. “Never.”

Without question, when Demetrius McDaniel finished playing his last season of varsity basketball for Richards, he already had earned himself a page in the history books for breaking almost every school record. At the time, he claimed the all-time number-one spot in points scored (1,432)—a record broken by only one other player eight years later, Cody Yelder. Demetrius also held the all-time high for rebounds (504), surpassed only by two others: Cody Yelder in 2006 (516) for the number-two spot, and yours truly in 2000 for the current all-time record of 539.

What Demetrius had done for the basketball program itself was just as impressive. When he arrived at Harold L. Richards, boys basketball was a far cry from the powerhouse football program. In those days, when you walked down the halls of the school, most of the banners and trophies on display were for Bulldog victories in football. Photos hanging in the gym showed the famous Richards graduates who had won all-state and gone on to play football at Division 1 colleges and even in the NFL. Demetrius had this ambitious belief that he could be a contributor in changing the perception of basketball at our school. He did so as a varsity starter for three years and as a senior by becoming the first all-state player in school history and by leading the Bulldogs to a 28–2 record, which included winning our conference championship, our regional division, and sectionals.

So it was no surprise that Coach Fitzgerald would tell my father that he would never have a player as good as Demetrius again. The surprise to me was that Dad then told Coach not to worry. “You’ll be all right,” said Mr. Dwyane Tyrone Wade Sr., with a shrug. “You’ve got Dwyane.”

“Dwyane? You think Dwyane could be as good as Demetrius?”

Dad had to pause to think about it. Up until that moment, as he himself would admit, he had not been so confident. But something told him I was going to be coming on. Even maybe better than Demetrius. Good enough for college basketball? No, nobody was looking that far down the road. The NBA was like winning a lottery. That was something you never talked about seriously anyway. Except in your dreams. But the question Coach Fitzgerald put to my father, my first coach, was whether I could do on the court for my high school everything my stepbrother had done. Finally, my old man just laughed and said, “Sure.”

Whether or not I could be as good or better was definitely yet to be seen. But Dad did know that I certainly aspired to follow in Demetrius’s footsteps. From the start, that was why I’d gone to Richards instead of other area high schools. Oh, yeah, and the football program. No, I hadn’t gotten that out of my system yet. That actually turned out to be to my benefit because I could use my position as cornerback and wide receiver in football to work on toughness, just as track let me work on quickness and the high jump helped develop my jumping and all-around athletic abilities. All of that served basketball in the end.

If you asked me what was my favorite sport back then, I would have answered whatever it was for the season we happened to be in. A form of “love the one you’re with.” But when it came time to choosing which sport I loved most, basketball would inevitably win out—especially once junior year rolled around.

The irony was that even though I had followed Demetrius to Richards, the timing didn’t work out exactly for us to be the daring duo on the court that I had originally expected. That said, coming in as Demetrius’s little brother got me early attention. I remember the first day of freshman tryouts when the sophomore coach recognized me from all the weekend practices I used to attend with Demetrius. When the team was doing drills, I’d be down at the other end of the court shooting on my own. Not being no trouble to anyone, as my beloved Grandma used to advise.

When we started freshman tryouts that day I was clearly above the skill level of the rest of the players. They couldn’t make left-hand lay-ups and other basic moves; but, to me, a left-hand lay-up was easy. Chalk that up to the backyard court and my dad. So when the sophomore coach spotted me, the first thing he said was “What are you doing down here with the freshmen?”

Before I could answer, he waved me over to sophomore tryouts. In essence, that meant I had made the team and was being moved up to play at the next level. That first season I started on the sophomore team and went on to be a top scorer for us, leading also in rebounds and steals. The only problem was that at a young fifteen I was still small—five foot six, closing in on five seven.

The varsity team that year, which included Demetrius, a junior, was having a great season. He was the man—outgoing, popular, putting Harold L. Richards High School on the map—the guy you loved to cheer for. As one of his coaches, John Chappetto, later said about Demetrius, “I’ve never seen anyone that loves basketball like he loves it. Basketball makes him happy and, because of that, everyone around him gets a piece of that happiness.”

Part of my brother’s influence was teaching me to take that joy onto the court and combine it with the work ethic Dad had drilled into us, along with the direction that Coach Fitzgerald and his assistant, Gary Adams, provided. Could I put all those elements together as well as Demetrius? The answer began to be revealed over the summer between my ninth and tenth grade, when he and I played together, side by side, in a local league that had some of the top high school players in the state of Illinois.

The Chicago summer league is well known to college and pro scouts as being one of the most competitive in the nation. And even if I only grew about an inch that summer, my confidence soared. What’s more, I think Demetrius sensed me starting to elevate my game. With nothing to lose, at the end of the league competition he and I entered a two-on-two contest. In the early rounds of the contest, my brother kind of messed around in one game and we lost. To make it out of the losing bracket at that stage and then make it to the championship game, we had to win two grueling games in a row.

So adrenaline at a certain point takes over and now he and I are suddenly unstoppable. I’m like, wow, we ballin’—both of us, going against seniors, older guys, all the best players in the area. Holding my own, I start to score above twenty and then in the final, I kicked into a higher gear that didn’t seem like it had been there before—hoopin’, ballin’, going crazy scoring thirty points on my own.

Then there was the moment, as we closed in on the win, when I saw Demetrius take a step back and really look at me. The expression on his face was something—as if to say, oh, my God, this is my little brother. Soon after he must have come to the conclusion that little bro was growing up and ready to come back to school and win side by side with him for the school in what would be for him his senior year.

Well, it didn’t go quite like that. When basketball season got under way, Coach Fitzgerald did bring me up to play on varsity. Coach did let me play the first three games, but he didn’t play me a lot. He had a tight rotation developed with a team that had been together since the guys were freshmen, and here I was, a sophomore, trying to get playing time—at least as the sixth man off the bench. But he didn’t seem to feel that I was ready yet. After a few games, I asked him, basically, that if I am not going to play much, rather than sit me on the bench the whole year, could you send me down back to sophomore so I could at least play with my friends?

When I’d been to the sophomore games, I’d felt baaaaaad. They were down there struggling and I’m like—
Dang, my boys losing, they getting killed! Let me go try to help!

So I went down to that team again and I murdered sophomore level. Coach Fitzgerald then moved me back up to varsity for the playoffs and I had an okay first game, scoring six points, and then something like two points for the next game. Demetrius did indeed lead the team to the finals, coming within two points of winning the state championship. I remember sitting on the bench watching the clock ticking down and being able to visualize how I would have brought the ball in and shot to make it at the buzzer. But maybe only in my dreams. Or maybe not.

And it was a few nights later, after we came within a basket of winning the state championship, that my father made his comment to Coach Fitzgerald. Dad distinctly remembered repeating the fact that he didn’t have to worry about losing Demetrius—who was going to go play for a junior college in New Mexico—and again saying, “You’ll see. Dwyane could be as good. Maybe better.”

That may have been my father’s last bold prediction about my career that he made. The truth is that I would have loved to have heard such confidence from Dad back in those days. But the good news was that he got Coach Fitzgerald’s attention. Even so, I don’t think he or anyone was really expecting much from me.

That is, until after that summer between sophomore and junior year, and I returned to school in the fall a drastically changed young man.

TRAGIL HAD GONE THROUGH EXTREME CULTURE SHOCK OUT there in San Diego. After having been one of the best students in her classes throughout her schooling in the Southside of Chicago, she found out that at the suburban California high school she attended, most students in her grade were close to a year ahead of her academically. In that more affluent, mostly white and Asian population, Tragil said she would have flunked out if it hadn’t been for an assignment given to her by an English teacher.

When she was assigned to write a paper about her life, my sister sat down and began to pour her heart onto the page. Tragil wrote as if possessed, she said, about everything that had happened from as far back as she could remember. The teacher not only gave her an A but she broke down crying after class, telling Tragil how much she admired and respected her ability to survive and hold on to her faith. That teacher went on to help her graduate, which allowed her to attend college afterward.

If she had been anyone else, Tragil could have stayed in the sunny, safer world of Southern California, working a few jobs to put herself through college and finishing up her degree in education. But as she would explain, Tragil felt that her family needed her back in Chicago.

Interrupting her education, she returned to the Southside but moved into a different, more secure neighborhood. My sister, T.J., as I started calling her, was forging a new path. With the middle name of Jolinda, Tragil had made sure to put her full name on her diploma to honor our mom. T.J. was coming into her own, hoopin’ in her way. Not just because she was holding down a job that allowed her to afford her own apartment and buy her own car. Tragil also continued college part-time, made sure Grandma was doing all right, and started a youth services program at our same church on Prairie Avenue. Oh yeah, and led the youth choir, kept the financial books for the church, and brought in new members so that the seats were full every Sunday. A one-woman force of nature.

Between her activities and mine, we didn’t see each other much. But every time she checked in, her questions were all about what I needed: could she bring me clothes or some spending money, whatever it was. Tragil knew that times were lean at home and that the chaotic atmosphere at Dad’s house was causing me to spend more time at my friends’ houses.