A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (11 page)

Fun! That was our job, at least for those waning days and weeks of summer. No curfew or nuthin’! We could be out until midnight or one in the morning. When we weren’t shooting hoops in a makeshift basket or throwing a football or playing baseball in the back lot, we were organizing games with the little girls in the neighborhood, from jump rope to chase games to dancing in the street to old-fashioned hide-and-seek. We had some boundaries, of course, that kept us from straying too far away from the house. But until the time came for the school year to begin, we’d run nonstop all day and long into the night. When we couldn’t go anymore, we’d crash out and sleep, then wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

All that freedom didn’t liberate the part of my mentality that kept me from completely letting go and dropping my guard. But the one thing that allowed me to relax in new ways was that I had a daddy in my life on a daily basis. Not that he was doing anything extra to raise me or anything. Instead of singling me out, Dad saw me as being raised alongside Bessie’s three sons—Demetrius, Donny, and the youngest, Kodhamus—which removed the pressure of being always in the spotlight.

By now I was already familiar with the militant side of Dwyane Wade Sr. He was the tough-guy drill sergeant who showed up when it was report card, inspection, cleanup time. A lot of that wasn’t going to change. So I was prepared for that military mind-set of Dad, who was tough stuff, who laid down the law, and who would assure you that there was to be no stepping outside the lines and no mouthing off and no doing things halfway. Or else. He was bottom line an army man. I had every reason to respect him and every reason to avoid going outside the box and getting myself into trouble.

At Bessie’s house, Dad continued the role of enforcer, holding accountable any of us who did something wrong, and then getting us all back in line—as much as anyone could have in that atmosphere where there weren’t many rules. Dad probably held back from instituting boot camp right away, as if he were allowing the two of us to get a feel for each other before he decided what kind of toughening up I needed.

If you ask him, Dad will say that he wanted his life to be an open book, complete with his disappointments and shortcomings and secrets. “I wanted you to know my mistakes and be better than me,” he’d remind me later on. “I told you everything. You just forgot!” Maybe so. Or maybe we had selective hearing.

I do remember that my dad’s dad had been an excellent athlete in his younger days and went on to make a living as a referee and an umpire for various local leagues. My father did say, “My dad was never at home but I knew where to find him so I could go to his games and ask him questions about why he wasn’t around.” Sports became their connection and Dwyane Sr. was talented in a multitude of them. In high school he played football and baseball extremely well and also wrestled.

After he got out of the army, the most popular sport around the city of Chicago with the most competitive amateur league was softball—the same league that his dad had umped for. Before basketball came along, softball and baseball dominated Dad’s interests. We used to watch him win championships in softball during weekdays and then play in a basketball league on Sundays. Dad’s diverse athletic background was his explanation for why he was so loud and wild on the court—running over people or just jumping over them. By his own admission, he was not even playing basketball. His game? Football on a basketball court. What were the fights about? Anything. As he himself put it, “I’m not a bad loser but I like winning.”

That may give you some insight into Big Dwayne. He was nothing if not consistent. He worked hard, he drank hard, and he played every sport he ever tried even harder.

Who exactly he was, I wasn’t so sure that I knew.

That is, until the school year began and Dad let it be known that he didn’t think the free-for-all was good for raising children. So he looked for a place where he and Bessie could raise us with more structure. Eventually, they moved us all in together in an apartment at Sixty-Ninth and Harper. While there, after I missed some chunks of the school year, I enrolled at Fermi Elementary School for the remainder of third grade. Interestingly enough, I didn’t suffer too much at the time academically. Maybe that was a function of being forced to adapt to new and changing circumstances. The downside was that there was only so much information I could process and retain. Later this would take a toll when it came to testing, but in the meantime, despite the moves and missed time in the classroom, I continued to do well at school in both the third and fourth grades.

The place where we lived wasn’t terrible, but the surrounding area was bad. The atmosphere at home changed. All of sudden, the fun of the free-for-all and running the streets at all hours came to a halt. To create more structure, Dad and Bessie implemented more rules than they had in the past. Needless to say, we hated having our freedom restricted.

Apparently, this was when Dad came up with a compromise. As long as we didn’t get into trouble and didn’t bring home D’s or F’s on our report cards, we could get some special coaching on the basketball court from him. On Sundays he’d take a group of us kids to the park to watch him play, and either before or after the game we’d get to go out on the court ourselves to shoot hoops and get some pointers. On other days, he also made time to take us across the street from our apartment to play at the church that had a hoop in the back. We weren’t in an official team at that time but Dad was serious business, introducing us to fundamentals and drills; no glory moves whatsoever. And, yeah, he was tough, always pushing us to demand more of ourselves.

This was his program, his way of creating better father-son relationships. He started to think about putting together a real team. To hear him talk about his expectations and what we would need to do to play in the competitive Chicago youth leagues, you would have thought we were being groomed for the NBA. That was Dad, thinking ambitiously.

Once we had a team, there was no doubt Demetrius was going to be our star. He was lanky and fast and could shoot. Donny wasn’t bad, either. There was some other good local talent that Dad would consider.

And then there was me. Other than Dad’s workouts so far, I had never been coached and had a lot to learn. I likely had a level of natural athletic ability that gave me some potential. Or so Dad would acknowledge on occasion. But he never said a word to the effect that he saw anything special about me. Not his style, unfortunately. No matter how much we improved in our skills, we were never good enough. Never.

That left it to me to decide for myself at age nine that I
did
have something special, that I had found in basketball the love of my life, and that if I worked hard enough, who knew, one day the game really could take me somewhere. Somewhere big.

If I needed any proof that such a feat would ever be achievable, I didn’t have to look any farther than my own backyard—where the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, now reigned supreme. The whole 1990–91 season had been a fairy tale come true for all of Chi-town. Not only had Jordan been named Most Valuable Player for the season—after the Bulls clinched the division with a franchise record of sixty-one wins—but we had then swept our archrivals and nemesis, the Detroit Pistons, to take the Eastern Conference. With that, the Bulls rolled into the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history, vying for the championship against the Los Angeles Lakers.

Most of that chaotic year had been a blur, but time stopped for me during that series, which Chicago won decisively, 4 games to 1. Although there were so many electrifying moments, the one that stood above the rest was when Michael Jordan was going up for a dunk on Sam Perkins and was able to avoid a block by—unbelievably—switching the ball from his right to left hand in midair, before laying in a thunderous basket. No living, breathing person of sound mind could fail to see who would win the trophy for MVP in the finals.

Jordan fever caught hold that spring and summer in Chicago like an unprecedented epidemic. Local teams of young hopefuls with dreams like mine flocked madly to basketball courts in parks, schoolyards, and gyms.

We all wanted to fly.

EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMED LIKE MONTHS THAT I WAS SEPARATED from my sister, actually Tragil had come to check up on me within a few weeks of dropping me off at Bessie’s. Over the next couple of years, she continued to make regular appearances, always fussing over me to be sure to dress warmly so as not to get a cold or even whipping out some iron-on patches in case recent falls had left rips in my pants or shirts.

When I complained during that first visit about missing Mom, Tragil agreed to come for me on the bus and take me back home to surprise our mother that next weekend. As the days ticked by, all I could think about was how happy Jolinda Wade was going to be when she came back from wherever she might have been and found me sitting on the stoop waiting for her.

On Saturday, we rode the bus together and Tragil asked me questions about the new household, laughing at my stories of our free-for-all. When we arrived at the front yard of 5901 Prairie and saw Grandma up on the porch like always, I could have sworn that in just those three weeks the building had gotten smaller, more neglected, and the neighborhood even more run-down.

After a long hug, the first thing Grandma wanted to know, of course, was, “You children hungry?”

“I’m always hungry!” is what I answered. But before going up to have something to eat, I wanted to go see Mom, who was already inside.

Tragil accompanied me into the apartment but went back to our bedroom, telling me that I’d probably find Mom at the kitchen table.

Nervous, I walked slowly down the hall, afraid of what I was going to see. But I relaxed as soon as I turned the corner and found my pretty mother sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, looking not too different from the last time I’d seen her.

Mom did seem a little sleepy. Still, when she looked up and saw me, a light of joyful recognition came into her eyes and her beautiful, familiar smile spread across her face. “Come on over, baby,” she said, gesturing me toward her, as I went to give her a hug and a kiss. Mom went on to say that she knew I was staying with Dad and that she believed that was a good thing.

I sat down next to her as she continued to hold my hands, asking me to tell her how I’d been spending my summer days. As I talked, Mom closed her eyes, the way you would do if you were going to listen closely.

But after a few minutes her hands went limp in mine and her chin fell toward her chest.

“Mom?”

No answer. Bent over in the chair, almost frozen, Mom didn’t even seem to be breathing.

“Mom?!” I shook her.

No answer.

“
Mom, please wake up,”
I pleaded, thinking she was dying.

Finally, she stirred, sat up, and smiled, telling me to keep talking. She nodded off again like that a few more times. After an hour or so passed, she said that maybe I should be heading back before anyone started to miss me.

That was my clue that our visit had been as painful for my mother as it had been for me. Another couple of months went by before I went to visit again. The next time I saw her she was staying somewhere else. Dad drove me that time, dropping me off and returning for me later. Mom was more alert than she’d been during our previous visit. She made a point of telling me to mind my father and, with a laugh, warned me to stay away from “all them fast women trying to talk to you” because I was her baby, her only son. When I left, Mom remembered to ask, “Who your favorite girl?” and I hugged her tight, answering as always, “You!” fighting like hell to hold back the tears.

When I left that day, I tried to tell myself that she was getting better. But I didn’t know that. There was another visit in there somewhere when she was less alert, nodding out so much that as before I panicked that she was going to die. And when I left that day, the battle within me had begun to rage: fear for her life versus faith that she could find the power to save herself.

No matter what happened, I never believed there was something wrong with Mom at her core, only that she had a sickness that made her need the drugs. The idea occurred to me that she was using them as medicine for some basic hurt in her life—even if I couldn’t put that thought into words at the time.

The most heartbreaking visit that I paid to my mother during this period took place one spring weekend day when I decided to go on my own to see her. Tragil had given me an address where Mom was staying and had told me how to get there on foot or by bus. When I arrived in the vicinity of the address, having had no problem getting there, I had a little lift to my step and was kind of proud of my navigational skills.

But as I turned a corner and headed down the block to the exact address, I saw an ambulance parked directly in front of the house. There was no light blazing, no sirens wailing. Everything suddenly became deathly quiet. A crowd gathered outside on the sidewalk in total silence as an emergency crew brought out a yellow stretcher with a person on it. The body and face were covered.

“Please, please, don’t let that be my momma!” I started to pray out loud for all to hear, and kept on praying as I raced into the building and found the apartment where she was supposed to be. After I banged on the door while calling her name, a man slowly opened it. I flew inside, out of breath, my chest pounding, eyes wide, and found my mother sitting there clearly unaware of anyone being carried out on a stretcher.

“I thought that was you!”

“No, baby, I’m okay.”

“I thought you was taken out dead!”

“No, no, my sweet boy, my little man, I’m not dead. Everything’s gone be all right.” Mom saw how scared I was and spent the rest of our short visit telling me how I was the best thing that happened to her all day, any day. She motioned to the man in the room there to give me a couple of dollars so I could get some candy on the way home.

That was one of the toughest moments of my young life—the realization that she was too ashamed to have me stick around. As it turned out, because of subsequent events beyond our control, we wouldn’t see each other again for close to a year.