A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (33 page)

Dad heads over to the floor, where Zaire appears almost to be sulking, and pats him on the back before having him tuck one leg in and stretch out the other. Then Dad leans down and says something that seems to get my son’s attention. I have no idea what my father has just said, but I do know that he doesn’t talk to Zaire the way he used to talk to me. Not even close.

Zaire looks at Grandpa after the talk and nods solemnly.

I later had to ask my father what he had said to his grandson. He said, “I told Zaire that the way he was acting, with that attitude, no one was gonna want to see him play basketball like that. And I asked him to think about how his mother would want him to play.” Dad was aware, as everyone who knows Zaire is, how much he loves his mother and wants her to be proud of him. Dad felt that was the one way to get him to understand. Looking back, I seem to remember similar lectures about making my mother proud but delivered in much stronger fashion and colorful language when I was having emotional games at age nine.

Dad’s talk seems to help initially, but as the game goes on, Zaire reverts to being upset by calls and playing without any enjoyment. With no improvement, I get up and start to walk over. Again, I never thought I’d be like this as a dad.

“Zaire,” I say quietly, in my normal, soft-spoken, no-drama voice, and gesture over to a spot on the floor, “come here and let me talk to you.”

Then I get into him with a stern tone that’s important to me to right our ship together. “Listen, son, I know this attitude is out of character. If it doesn’t change, we’re going to get into the car and go home.” I continue and remind him that how he is acting on the court is a reflection of us as a family, first of all, but more than that, “That’s not what we do. That’s not what we promised each other we’d do if you played basketball. You were only going to play to have fun and all this emotion and all this stress you got right now is defeating the purpose. Zaire, this is your outlet, this is your enjoyment, but not right now.”

Reacting the same way as he did to my father’s serious comments, my son nods in understanding and sets his jaw with a resolve to do better.

So then I change my tone a bit and add, “Good. Now—go out there. Let me see some of that swagger. That Zaire swagger. Let me see you enjoy yourself. Let me see you smile. When your teammates do something well, you make sure you let them know they did something well. Don’t mope around. And when your coach says something to you and when the ref makes a call, you respect them and you listen.”

That’s the dad-sideline-private-chat-with-son I wasn’t going to resort to. How’d that approach work? Well, Zaire comes out and has a fantastic second half. I’m talking about scoring, stealing, rebounding, all of that, passing the ball to his teammates and high-fiving them when they do well. And then maybe because he has found the inner joy again, he reclaims his ability to delight onlookers—shooting the ball, having it go in, and then celebrating with a little move and a signature look to the crowd.

Of course, now I’m fired up. Forget the nod and the light applause. I’m all up on my feet, letting him hear me: “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!” My dad’s next to me doing the same thing, too, cheering loudly for his grandson.

For the baller in training, there will come a time when, if he’s open, I can offer more instruction. But the priority of enjoying himself is tops for now. Besides the fact that this was his first year to play and I don’t want him to lose this as an outlet, I do want to prevent him from getting into the pressure of being my son, or having to think he has to score twenty points for me to be proud of him.

My plan to be the dad who would just show up to watch didn’t play out, on the other hand. Apparently I can’t do that.

Still, on the theme of being a father first and understanding that life is bigger than basketball, I have found that the most important feats start with a visionary planning approach—whether we’re talking about being a parent or pursuing a dream.

I’m hard-core on having a plan. At the same time, as I learned after my rookie year in Miami, the ability to adapt a plan in the face of changing circumstances—off or on the court—is ultimately what wins.

WHEN I’D FIRST ARRIVED AT THE HEAT, I WALKED INTO THE gym and saw this fierce warrior on the court. His hair in braids and with a powerful build, all cut, he looked like somebody you would not want as an opponent.

“Who’s that?” I asked someone standing next to me.

“That’s Udonis Haslem.”

Wait. Udonis Haslem? I’d known him from when he played as a Florida Gator. Udonis Haslem was not cut like that. “You mean Udonis, fat Udonis?”

“He ain’t fat no more.”

So Udonis had come into the league at the same time as me (in tiptop shape) and would journey with me through all the highs and lows on and off the court together as a tremendous basketball player and friend. U.D. or Udon often comes across as this big tough, gruff guy, but take off that mask and he is all caring, all heart.

In those early days, U.D. also liked to point out the surprising side of me as one of the quieter, more soft-spoken guys who at the same time could come out and make some pretty strong statements about how I felt, whatever it was.

True. With me, what you see is what you get. I have been known to wear my heart on my sleeve and, even with my teammates and coaches, not to hold back from telling them how much I care about them. You know the “I love you, man” guy? Sometimes I can be that guy. Other times I can be the best at compartmentalizing and setting aside whatever is hurting me—whether from the past or elsewhere—and not let it jeopardize my playing time.

That’s where I was after finishing up a promising rookie year—trying to forget any negativity at home and putting my focus on the fastest way to get to the mountaintop—yep, the Big One. Being realistic, I knew it could take many seasons. When you think about Michael Jordan, who had come into the league in 1984 and didn’t win a championship for seven years, that gives you an idea of what it can take—and that was with the best player in the world.

Of course, I had high hopes for us. Considering how far we came in one season from the year before I arrived, we were moving fast. Yet no sooner had we started to really mesh than all the dynamics shifted when a decision was made to trade Lamar Odom to the Lakers. When I talk about the highs and lows of the NBA, that was a low for me. However, it also turned into a high because as a result of the trade the Heat brought in Shaquille O’Neal, one of the greatest centers in the game.

It was Shaq who decided that I needed a new nickname besides “D-Wade” and would eventually coin one while watching a block-defying dunk over defenders much taller than me. How’d it come about? Just from him saying, “Wow! When you go, you go like ‘Flash.’ ” And from then on I’d also be known as Flash.

When Shaq first came to the Heat he brought with him a history of sometimes clashing with the other lead teammates—with Penny Hardaway at Orlando and with Kobe in Los Angeles. So he wanted to make it clear that he and I would share in making things happen for our season ahead. At the same time, he took me under his wing. On and off the court, he was totally generous and gracious.

Almost immediately after Shaq’s arrival, the Heat went from being a team that no one really took seriously to being on TV almost every night. When we traveled, no matter what city we were coming into, throngs of fans and reporters would be on hand, taking pictures, asking for autographs from Shaq and the rest of us. Shaq-Diesel gave us license to think, act, and play big.

The way that Shaq felt free to use his humor and his big-man swagger was invigorating. I’ll never forget the Miami masses who turned out to welcome him to our city and how he stood on a stage promising to bring a championship to the Heat, and after not getting enough of a roar, repeating, “Do you hear me, Miami?”

Wow! That promise worked for me.

Shaq also helped open up my eyes to another side of the NBA—to the obvious and more hidden opportunities in endorsements, of course, as well as to the concept of being not just an athlete but also a brand, an entertainer, and a public figure with the privilege of using those fifteen minutes of fame to do some good. In the process, he encouraged me to allow my authentic personality to get out there more. Yeah, I was the real quiet, shy guy. But Shaq kept pointing out that I had style and charisma and a creative side with pretty good instincts.

Hank Thomas—who would remain based in Chicago but eventually move to the sports division of Creative Artists Agency with his stable of NBA and European players—started hearing a certain buzz about me early in the season after Shaq’s arrival. Endorsement deals were floated, the talk-show circuit beckoned. A whirlwind awaited. Hank had a plan. He said, “Let’s be strategic and not accept everything.”

I embraced that approach completely. It’s easy to become overexposed as the new kid on the block or be aligned with products that don’t really make sense. Hank wasn’t in a rush and neither was I. The approach was golden, as only time would tell. In terms of publicity, my story as a young father drew a lot of interest from the media, as did some of the elements of my journey in overcoming the odds.

However, during these years, I rarely talked about childhood or the more traumatic aspects of my story. Those, too, became compartmentalized. Maybe the reasoning was, you know, hey, if I’m only at base camp preparing to scale Mount Everest, no way do I want to think about being back in the valley, no way do I want to carry that with me.

At twenty-two years old, going on twenty-three, I wasn’t ready to bare my chest and show the scars. Instead, I wanted to savor the blessing that my mother was rebuilding a life, a purposeful life; that my sister could finish her degree in education; and that my dad was beginning to look at making a new plan for himself. The pleasure of being able to share my adventures with the fellas, or I should say the “Flash Crew”—my brothers Demetrius and Donny, my cousin Wug, and my two best friends, Vinny and Marcus—was another blessing we could celebrate, even if we didn’t see each other as often as I’d like. Marcus actually moved to Miami shortly after I did. None of my close family and friends ever needed to remind me where I came from. We all came from the same place, after all, and now they could be part of the trek up, too.

I started to have a sense of momentum but still had no concept of how much was going to change over the course of this second season. Hank did, however. That fall of 2004, he decided to add someone to his team who was based in Miami and who could coordinate the various off-the-court activities that were being added to my plate.

In all honesty, I didn’t think that having a “go-to” was really needed at the time. Since I wasn’t that big of a player yet, I wondered if we weren’t getting ahead of ourselves. Obviously, I didn’t know the big picture or how radically the tempo of life and work can change.

As we put the word out, the first name that came up as a possibility was Carmen Green-Wilson. A veteran in the industry, she had gone from the Heat organization to work for Nike and manage their athletes. Carmen was also married to Ric Wilson, who was at Converse and was instrumental in bringing me on board with them. But since she wasn’t available, Carmen recommended Lisa Joseph, a young woman who had been working with Alonzo Mourning. (As fate would have it, Zo would end up returning to the Heat at the end of our 2004–2005 regular season.)

Here’s the “what a small world” piece of this story. Hank Thomas remembered Lisa Joseph from some years earlier. With a background in PR and communications, she had graduated from the University of Miami and had earned an internship at the Heat back in 1997–98, when the team was on fire. Pat Riley had come to South Florida to build a championship team and guys like Zo and Tim Hardaway were making Heat basketball must-see TV—with an epic rivalry against the Knicks that was burning up the airwaves, too. As Hardaway’s agent, Hank was in Miami frequently and crossed paths with Lisa at the time.

When her name came up now as a candidate, Hank remembered liking her cool-under-pressure attitude and arranged to interview her. On paper, she sounded impressive. About twenty-eight years old, Lisa had been overseeing the day-to-day of activities of Alonzo Mourning Charities, Zo’s foundation, which included a youth center in Overtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Miami. Her main focus had been running the development and fund-raising programs for the youth center, raising millions while serving the greater community with vital services, and also doing publicity for Zo.

Alonzo had actually left Miami to go play for the New Jersey Nets the same year that I arrived, so Lisa wasn’t very familiar with me. “Well,” she would recall later, “I knew you wore number three.” Other than that, before she went to meet Hank, Lisa had to Google me and print out my bio. Hank discussed the responsibilities entailed in the job and felt she could easily handle them.

That was more or less the rundown he gave me before I interviewed her. If Hank approved, I was ready to say, “Let’s go with her.” But I went ahead with the interview, as I often joke, just to make sure she wasn’t crazy!