A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (35 page)

Part of the reasoning for that was because summers were busy for me with photo shoots, commercials, charity work, and various exhibition games, all part of what I did for a living. Since she didn’t want to hang around Miami during the hottest time of the year, either, I understood her position.

That is, until I was doing a photo shoot in Los Angeles and an incident occurred, which involved Siohvaughn getting jealous, as I understood it, and sending a message to Lisa Joseph that she was on her way back to Miami to slash my tires and bash in my car windows. Feeling like this was not an idle threat, I flew back home to try to stop her—too late. When I arrived in Miami, Udonis Haslem picked me up at the airport and we raced over to the house to find that the damage had been done.

At first, I didn’t think we could get past this. I’d seen instances before of what I perceived to be anger issues and a volatile personality. But more and more I seemed to be the target of her resentment, which resulted in things in the house getting broken, my trophies and shoes and things being given away, and my clothes having holes cut in them or being ruined by bleach. She would deny doing these things or even being mad at me. But she also couldn’t say who or what was causing all of this.

Other reports weren’t as alarming as upsetting. When I wanted to fly some of the fellas in for a visit, I got the impression that she wanted to make sure that Lisa would book their tickets with connections, almost as if she wanted them preferably in cargo. Instead of sending a Town Car to pick them up, the implication was that she wanted them to have a van without windows pick them up. Later on, she would go on sprees, flying her girlfriends into town, booking them into fancy hotel suites and then paying for spa services at ridiculous expense.

The tire-slashing incident was a symbol for her being mad and wanting, as the expression goes, to hurt me where it hurt: in my pocket. As in financially.

Every time I’d get to the place of thinking
This is it, I’m going to have to file for divorce,
I’d lose it and end up crying because of the thought of being separated from Zaire. I didn’t want him to have to grow up being shuttled between homes. That was the life I was trying to protect him from. Just like I was going to find a way to support us, I believed I was going to find a way to fix us.

The money thing I was sure we could handle. We were married, two halves of one whole, and I couldn’t distrust her as my wife. But for my peace of mind, I insisted we bring in a financial adviser who could help us get control of our spending. Soon afterward the guy came to both of us and said, “There is a lot of money that is being moved around that I don’t understand.” When he mentioned the amounts, I was in shock. Could we be spending that much?

She denied that could even be possible and as soon as the adviser left she got into my head and once again convinced me that this was how people lost money: by having outsiders come in and make such accusations. At the time, her ability to turn my thinking around, what I now know was a kind of brainwashing, convinced me to fire him the next day.

But as the marriage deteriorated, with the summer of 2005 coming to an end, I asked Hank Thomas and Lisa Joseph to bring in a financial adviser who could get to the bottom of what had been happening and make sure that I had better access to my money.

Lisa and I met at a Chili’s restaurant not far from the arena. With paperwork from the bank in her hand, she sat down with a sigh, saying, “We need to talk.”

She, Hank, and the new adviser had confirmed that a large sum of money had been moved out of our accounts. The numbers in black and white on the page couldn’t be contradicted. After all that time I’d been saying, “My wife handles the money, I shoot baskets,” I finally realized that in a way she had put that attitude in my head so I wouldn’t question her.

I was sick. Where was the trust? Our money was for us and Zaire. Fighting back tears, I was angry at myself more than anything. What could I do? By this point, Siohvaughn and Zaire were back in Miami. But she and I were already bringing up the possibility of splitting up. I didn’t want that. Except—how could I get past this? I was beside myself.

Just then a young man came over to our table and in the most polite, excited voice asked for an autograph. As I wrote my name on the piece of paper he gave me, the young man was so thankful and happy. I realized he couldn’t have imagined that someone in my position could be sitting there having a really rough day. A lot of folks think that every day must be an amazing one if you’ve reached a certain level of stardom and success—as if you’re not even human.

“He has no idea,” I remember saying to Lisa, thinking back to a time when I might have thought the same thing. This wasn’t how things were supposed to be.

Then I told Lisa, “I’m calling my mom. We need to fly her down here. Have her bring her Bible.”

If talk wasn’t getting us closer, maybe the spiritual path, the place where we began in making our commitment to get married, would steer us back to where we needed to be.

When Mom arrived, I went over to the house and she had me get Von on the phone, trying to help us establish some calm. Before long, Von and I were yelling and unloading resentment that had been stored up a long time. In the middle of my loud phone call, the doorbell rang. It was Lisa Joseph, whom my mother ushered upstairs, asking her, “Do you pray?”

Lisa is very spiritual but also private. She said, “Yes, but usually by myself.”

Mom could be heard to say, “Well we gonna pray today!”

So they were upstairs praying loudly and downstairs I was on the telephone fighting even more loudly.

Drama-trauma. That’s a phrase I didn’t know at the time but would later.

Eventually we did calm down. And prayer did help. Mom agreed to work with us and see where that went. Suddenly, Siohvaughn, who had not been that connected to my family, did look to my mother to help us salvage our marriage.

Around this time we happened to have a long-scheduled meeting with Hank and Lisa to discuss setting up a will. We didn’t have one and needed to talk first before sitting down with an attorney to draw it up. Since we weren’t really speaking at the time, Hank just finally said, “We need to talk about what’s happening with you two.”

Going beyond the call of duty, Hank and Lisa all of a sudden found themselves trying to give us marriage counseling. One of Siohvaughn’s complaints was that I wasn’t home enough. She admitted that she wasn’t feeling great about herself and her self-image. Those kinds of insecurities are easy to have in the splashy world of South Beach and I tried to be reassuring, telling her that she was beautiful, a wonderful mother to our son, and a really good cook. Without a doubt, I thought we could both work on our communication. And the bottom line for me was that I wanted to keep our family together. Zaire meant more to me than anything in the world. Whatever I had to do, I was willing to make the sacrifice.

The stubborn side of me believed, for better and worse, that you’re not supposed to run at the first or second or third sign of trouble. You fight until you believe in your heart that you can’t anymore. I was willing to give it more chances than I probably should have, and even logic couldn’t change me.

Siohvaughn made it seem that she wanted that, too. The one idea that came up that appealed to both of us was to find that dream home we’d always talked about. That actually gave her an area to oversee and control and she threw herself into the task of finding and remodeling a home we purchased in a new, more exclusive neighborhood.

Were we happy? That was a question that wasn’t in my capacity to answer. My duty was to keep proving that I could make a way in this world. Somehow I convinced myself that happiness should take a backseat to that.

The love that I hadn’t forgotten we had shared was when we came together to welcome Zaire into the world. As time went on, I started to wonder if perhaps another child might bring back that sense of joint purpose. In a way that’s what had happened with my parents, even though that hadn’t in fact kept them together. I thought they had other issues, including a lack of financial security, that kept them from building a lasting marriage. But that was, again, naïve.

In the fall of 2005, the thought of divorce after three years still went against the plan I made long ago not to follow the negative examples that had been set for me. So I kept on those blinders and got ready for another climb up the mountain.

SO MUCH FOR BEST-LAID PLANS.

Once again when we returned after the off-season, Heat management had done a remix to achieve what they saw as the new edition of a team built to win. In what was the biggest trade in NBA history, given how many teams were involved, Miami brought in veteran superstars Gary Payton, Antoine Walker, James Posey, and Jason Williams.

Jokingly (but not completely), I initially commented to Hank and Lisa, “Are you kidding me? They’ve blown up the team that was one game away from the finals and brought in some old guys.”

The season lacked the magic and flow of the previous year. It was just tough all around, let alone in contrast to that euphoric feeling we’d enjoyed in the wake of Shaq’s arrival. We were up and down. Trying to get it together. With a record of eleven wins and ten losses, injuries (Shaq’s) already incurred, I felt that we weren’t much better than the average team.

Then, to throw in another wrench, or shake up the lackluster energy, the news hit that Coach Van Gundy was leaving to deal with personal concerns and Pat Riley was going to return to coaching duties. Say what? No one explained exactly the strategy or the thinking. But the major theme that Coach Riley wanted to emphasize with us at this point in the Heat’s journey was the power of team. He introduced a phrase that he called “15 Strong,” and then brought in this little bowl and gave each of us a card with names of our loved ones on it and philosophical statements that meant something to us as a team and individually. He wanted us to remember that this season was going to be about all fifteen of us on the team. “You are only as strong as your weakest link” was one of the statements he used. We weren’t stars and bench. We were 15 Strong. Then Coach Riley covered up the little bowl with some kind of cloth and swore us to secrecy about its contents. Immediately, the press caught wind of this strange bowl in the Heat locker room but we said nothing.

We improved overall in the next weeks, although we’d lost that sense of mission that had reverberated across Miami when Shaq promised to bring the championship home. We were no longer believers in ourselves—especially in our contests against the kinds of teams we might be facing if we did make it past the conference title and into the national playoffs. Teams like the Spurs and the Suns rolled over us and Dallas beat us by a humiliating thirty-six points.

For the rest of my life, I will never forget Coach Riley standing in front of the team after the bloodbath by the Mavericks and how he seemed to be speaking to each one of us individually and all of us together. He pointed out all the talent within our ranks. But the one thing he was beginning to question was whether we had heart. For the answer, he asked us to look deep within ourselves.

I couldn’t answer for anyone but myself. There was never a question for me about my heart or lack thereof. And to prove it, come the next game, which so happened to be against the Detroit Pistons—our very nemesis that had stolen our championship dreams in the game seven loss of the Eastern Conference Finals—I found my answer in the last quarter and took it out on them. Whether Pat Riley had decided the time had come to test my leadership, he would never say. But watching the Pistons increase their lead over us, the switch flipped and I went Super Flash, pulling my teammates with me until we had scored seventeen unanswered points to win the game. That was my answer as far as the heart that we all had in us. We were 15 Strong.

That game proved to be a rite of passage for me. Kind of like being handed a new sword to wield, I had found something that was more powerful than I maybe knew how to handle yet. But I was ready to learn.

From that game on, the made-to-order team found its heart and began to click. Pat brought in a bigger bowl with a bigger tablecloth to cover it. He filled it with more cards that mattered to us, reminding us who and what we were playing for. As if overnight, we began to play like a team and then began benefiting from the leadership of the new “old guys”—whose veteran expertise was the factor needed to balance those of us “young” guys who’d been on the journey as a team the year before. Surprise, surprise, we finished the regular season as the second seed in our conference, with a 52–30 record.

At that point, going into the postseason, in addition to our heart we found something else to connect us: each of us
wanted
to win a championship. None of our veteran superstars had been to the top before. And so, behind that unifying desire, we were transformed. Clearly we knew we had talent, but it didn’t gel during the regular season. We had hoped we would get it together and had struggled to get there. But when it came together and was about to unfold, wow, it was a beautiful thing!

Pretty soon the big bowl became a huge vat with a blanket wrapped over it to keep anyone from snooping. Fifteen Strong was only for us.

One of the changes in planning for our win this time by Pat Riley was to limit Shaq’s time on the court to keep him healthy—since injuries had cursed us before. Critics wondered why Shaquille would agree to do that when it could hurt his stats.

Famously, Shaq responded, “Stats don’t matter. I care about winning, not stats. If I score zero points and we win, I’m happy.”

His vision on that subject would stay with me and impact future decisions for myself.

In the meantime, the first round of the wild ride had begun. We were pitted against the Chicago Bulls—which we took in six games, winning 4–2. With greatness from the veterans who upped their game and showed why they’d been brought in, those of us who’d been to the playoffs the year before could elevate from where we’d been the last time around. There was plenty of drama in the Chicago series—including one miserable loss caused when we got into foul trouble and a hip contusion that threatened to keep me on the bench before I rallied enough to return to the game. Yet in that crazy mix, playing against the hometown team, I was having so much fun!