A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (39 page)

For the next few months, I worked and traveled as needed for my summer commitments but tried to spend as much time with Zaire and baby Zion as possible. Siohvaughn was hot and cold. We had no big blowups but the end was near.

We weren’t even good roommates helping to pass the time. There was no question: we were done.

In late July, I happened to be in Hank’s office in Chicago when Lisa was in town. In the middle of discussing something else, I finally heard myself say, “Well, I guess I’m going to have to make the move.”

My reason was not hard to explain. “I don’t feel comfortable in my own home.”

Since I was traveling for photo shoots and commercials over the next month or so, I didn’t make any attempts to officially separate or move out. But I had a lot of time to think about what really mattered.

From as far back as I could remember, all I wanted to do was to be happy. Willie Mae Morris had told us well enough what was important: not to be no trouble, but to be good to others and find a space of happiness. Whatever wasn’t working, I had seen Siohvaughn’s problems getting worse but I couldn’t figure them out; I knew I couldn’t fix them. All I knew was that I wasn’t happy.

After the struggles, overcoming so much, was I missing something on the happiness test? The injury and surgery that I’d been through were a reminder that nothing is promised. Nothing, that is, but death and taxes. And if life is so short and it can be taken away in the blink of an eye, I wanted to enjoy the present.

Maybe selfishly, I admit. At the time my feeling was that God gave me opportunities and He didn’t give it all for me to be unhappy. If I couldn’t be the person He wanted me to become, how was that living up to my promises? Facing hard truths, I didn’t like the unhappy person I was turning out to be, a man who wasn’t the way I had dreamed of one day becoming.

My decision was a huge relief. In the Olympic trials of life that come to each one of us, in some shape or form, I had to accept that not everyone is great at everything; I had to accept that I had failed at this marriage. Selfish or not, the truth set me free: I didn’t want to be unhappy anymore.

There were still some conflicts in my mind that were clogging up how or when I was going to act on my decision. In August, when Siohvaughn and the boys moved back to Miami so that Zaire could get started in kindergarten, I stayed at Marcus’s for a while rather than move back into our house. Every time I visited the boys, I avoided interacting with Siohvaughn.

In doing so, nothing changed my mind about us having a chance to stay married, even just for the sake of the kids. The timing was such that it would be better to split now rather than keep trying to hold on for my sons’ sakes and become more unhappy and less of the father I was supposed to be. If this tough passage happened while Siohvaughn and I were still young, we could create our own dreams while still being loving parents to our boys. With the kids being young, rather than in adolescence when divorce would take a greater toll, they, too, would be better served.

Those were all my thoughts when I got myself a suite at the Four Seasons, still not ready to move my stuff out of our house. There was no point in making excuses or casting blame. This was a decision that was for me, not something that I expected my kids to ever understand. But at the same time, if I wasn’t happy, I felt that the boys would also sense that and feel that something was not right. The clarity came for me from the realization that the unhappiness was going to affect them anyway, even if I was in the house.

Clearly, none of the process was easy. But the hard part, now behind me, was that I could at least be at peace with my decision to go find my happiness.

“I’M READY,” I ANNOUNCED TO MY LAWYER, JIM PRITIKIN, IN his Chicago offices in September 2007.

When Hank Thomas met my request to find the best divorce and custody attorney he could for me, he was thoughtful in recommending someone like Jim, who had the sensitivity that he did.

In fact, as we talked about how to proceed, Jim wasn’t convinced that I had fully made up my mind. Through the conversation, I admitted that a divorce would mean that I had failed—that I didn’t try hard enough. Also, I explained, there were my promises in childhood to be different, to be there for my children at every step of their growth. Even though I knew the statistics, how one in every two marriages ends in divorce, I didn’t want to be a statistic. A deep concern was that marriage in the black community had been on the decline for generations while the rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births and children being raised in homes without two parents, dads in particular, were increasing. As I said to Jim, “I do
not
want to continue this generational curse.”

His recommendation was that instead of filing for divorce or raising the issue of separation, I could sign a document called a praecipe and leave it as a legal placeholder, signifying the intention to file for divorce later. That would be important because this legal form would show that I was the first to file and would allow me to lock in a jurisdiction.

Even with that as a viable option, I couldn’t bring myself to go forward. For the next two months I wavered. In my mind, I kept running down lists of new action steps I could take to salvage some kind of marriage, but without putting blame on either of us they all seemed too little too late.

With that in my thoughts, I went ahead and signed the praecipe in November. Nothing was announced. No one knew. Not yet. Before I could go forward with the next steps toward filing a petition for divorce or backing away, I did have a season of basketball to play.

“WE NEED TO TALK.” LISA JOSEPH STARTED OFF A LUNCH meeting with me and Hank Thomas in the early spring of 2008 at Tempo’s in Chicago.

If you didn’t really know Lisa, her “We need to talk” would have sounded as the most matter-of-fact, no drama, no worry, everyday takin’ care of business, no more chitchat kind of statement. But knowing her as I do—and as I did in that period—I braced myself.

The deal with Lisa is that over the nearly four years since she had come on board, just after my rookie year, she had proved there were few problems she couldn’t handle on her own or with Hank. And so on that rare occasion when she couldn’t address a thorny issue without my participation, I would hear those four words from her, “We need to talk.”

Then again, I had so much trust in her and in Hank that there was no point in building up any more stress than what was already in the mix.

By mix, I should confess that in the grand sweep of highs and lows, the 2007–2008 season that had just ended was the subzero low. Forget what was happening with my marital problems. Basketball-wise, pretty much my take on it all was
Whoa, everything just sucks!

That’s saying a lot for me, because if there’s growth to be gained and wisdom to be learned, I’ll usually find that silver lining. No, this was just the sludge. One mistake of my own had been to come back to the game without being fully recovered from surgeries. The season hadn’t begun well and Shaq wasn’t so happy with the newer talent on the team. The veterans were gone and the Heat was in a necessary rebuilding stage. Seeing their struggles, I rushed the healing process to get out there and try to help. But things only went south. After Shaq was injured, he wound up being traded in the middle of the season.

The fans mourned the end-of-the D-Wade/Shaq-Diesel era, as did I, and I attempted to go it alone, playing hard but still impaired from injury and surgery until finally, in March 2008, the decision was made to shut me down so I could get healthy. A month later, Pat Riley, again without much explanation given for his change in thinking, had stepped down from coaching to focus on his role as president of the team. Riley had retired as the third-winningest coach in NBA history. Erik Spoelstra, the thirty-seven-year-old assistant coach for the Heat—who had begun as a video coordinator before rising up through the ranks of the coaching staff (and who worked with me on my shooting when I first arrived)—was catapulted to head coach for the remaining weeks of the season.

The atmosphere was like a morgue. We won fifteen games the entire season. Two years after winning a championship we won fifteen games! A low for the organization, it was pitiful. Worse than pitiful. When the Heat didn’t make the playoffs, something I’d never experienced before, the low became all the more pronounced.

Given that fiasco and the new hurdles that were being thrown up to keep me from seeing the boys, I had some real heart-stomping days when I felt that despite everything I had nothing to show for myself. Walking around Miami brought more rude awakenings. There was a time when I had to go places incognito not to get mobbed, but it sure didn’t seem like everybody was screaming my name anymore.

Wow, Lamar Odom had been more right than he could have ever guessed.

The stress over deciding whether to fully file for divorce was building. When Lisa began to go over the list of items we had to discuss at our lunch at Tempo’s, I was relieved to hear that nothing about logistics with Siohvaughn was on the agenda. Instead, Hank explained that the main focus for our meeting was to discuss the profile that AP writer Tim Reynolds was going to be doing about my participation in the Olympics.

“Great,” I said, exhaling, so thankful
that’s
what we needed to talk about. “What are my travel dates?”

Hank and Lisa glanced at each other, like something was up. A hesitation followed. Seconds seemed to stretch into minutes.

Was there a problem? No, there couldn’t be. I mean, I’d been a shoo-in since being co-captain of Team USA with LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony for the 2006 FIBA World Championships (FIBA essentially means International Basketball Federation). There’d never been a question. In fact, when USA Basketball turned the reins over to Jerry Colangelo for team selection before the Worlds, there had been much to-do about some top NBA players deciding not to play; when those of us like Kobe Bryant and I announced we would compete in 2006, we were asked to make a three-year commitment that would allow us to build back into a powerhouse capable of winning gold in Beijing.

The strategy for asking for our commitment was to prevent another fall from grace that Team USA had experienced in the early 2000s. The story in 2004 in Athens was that nine out of the twelve NBA superstars originally slated to go—who were on the Team USA that had qualified as first-place finishers in the 2003 FIBA Americas Championship—changed their minds about going to the Olympics. That opened the door for some of us younger players like Melo and Bron and me to be brought in at the last minute. Between inexperience and a lack of time to get up to speed, in the early games we had lost to teams like Puerto Rico and Lithuania. We fought back hard enough to win against the solid play of Australia and to give the undefeated Spain its first loss in the quarterfinal game—only to fall to Argentina in the semifinal match. We did revive to win against Lithuania in a game that earned us the bronze. Even so, Greece 2004 would rank from then on as one of the worst showings for Team USA in the Olympics. After the Dream Team of the 1990s, during the 2004 Olympics we’d been humiliated badly enough to be known as the Nightmare Team.

But that was all water under the bridge, and I’d already been getting mentally prepared to be part of what planners hoped would be called the Redeem Team in China.

Of course, in my thinking, there would never be a problem with me being on Team USA.

“Well,” Lisa began after that moment of awkwardness passed, “we’re not sure about the logistics yet.” Her face told all. There was a problem.

She went on to say that a friend of hers who worked for one of the advertising sponsors for the Olympics had called with a heads-up. Apparently, in their marketing meeting while going over plans for Beijing, my name hadn’t come up. From the sound of it, other names were being floated to fill my spot. Lisa, not easily rattled, had already been upset in hearing of photo shoots that had included Kobe, Melo, and LeBron but not me. When she followed up to see what the real facts were, she was told that, yeah, I wasn’t a shoo-in. Worse, it didn’t look good. Being practical, though, the point was that the tone needed to change for the profile with Tim Reynolds. Instead of the piece being about me absolutely going to China, the focus should be about how much I hoped to contribute to Team USA.

As Lisa broke the news, Hank Thomas studied me closely. In his expression was a combination of caring and concern over what Lisa had just conveyed. But as a father figure who knew the competitor in me so well, Hank also had this challenging glint in his eyes. He watched what must have been a reaction of complete shock on my face as it fell, with the wind being knocked out of me at the same time. And then, saying nothing, Hank locked into my eyes, as if to say,
So, Dwyane, what are you going to do about it?

In that instant, I wasn’t sure. Had the doubters really gotten to me?

When we left Tempo’s and we started down the short walk to where I was staying, I remember telling Lisa, “You know, right now I wanna disappear and hide under a rock somewhere.”

Frowning, she couldn’t disguise her surprise at hearing me talk like that. Maybe I even surprised myself.

But in answer to Hank’s question, one thing I could do, for starters, was to adapt on the fly and let Tim Reynolds know how excited I was about the possibility of going, rather than acting like a shoo-in.

That being said, I couldn’t let the powers that be control my game, my destiny. A younger me might have. Whoever that guy was whose team had only won fifteen games all season, who had come back not fully recovered from surgery, I had to erase those question marks from the minds of the decision makers about whether I was of Olympic caliber. To do so, I had to shut everything down, strip away all distractions, and build my own fortress of solitude so I could focus and get healthy—physically and mentally. If I had to go and try out, I would, however much we all thought I shouldn’t have had to do that.

Oh, and if that shock wasn’t enough, there was another one that took place in Miami during this period when a call came in from Siohvaughn to inform me that she had just picked up and moved back to Chicago with the boys. Without telling anyone and without warning, she had pulled Zaire out of school before the end of the school year, packed up all their things, and left. She let me know that since it seemed we weren’t going to be together anymore, there was no point in staying in Miami.