A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (42 page)

Every day, I’d focus on the overriding and underlying goal of having contact with Zaire and Zion. Every parent knows the joy of hearing “Daddy!” or “Mommy!” when walking through the door or calling on the phone. When I couldn’t talk to them, I would feel numb and empty. When we did talk, and they weren’t able to connect or were even negative, I would feel just as lost.

But there was no giving up. Nothing else mattered without them. Nothing.

E
ARLY
MORNING

N
OVEMBER
19, 2011

P
ORTLAND
, O
REGON

SHOWERED, DRESSED, AND READY TO GO DOWNSTAIRS TO catch a ride over to Nike campus, I look out the window at the rain that continues to fall.

Like always, being separated from the boys even for a couple of days continues to be hard. I thought that by now, eight months after gaining full custody, it might be less of a worry. Of course, as is often the case with single-parent households, I’m fortunate to have great people around like Brenda and Rich, as well as family members who are close by with the kids when I’m gone.

Whenever I do travel, I can talk and Skype and text throughout the day, rarely missing any of the main events. But I do try to make it easy for the boys to talk about any feelings of worry they may have while I’m gone—including any feelings that may come up from the past, given all that they’ve been through.

That’s a question I hear from men and women who’ve been through a nightmarish divorce process. It’s important to say from my point of view that navigating the future, once a judgment has been given, is always a work in progress. Even as estranged parents, the goal is not to give up on the other parent. Although my ex and I aren’t in direct contact, whenever I talk about her to the kids I choose to do so always in positive ways—with reminders to the boys to love and respect her.

This brings me to questions about the need to forgive, which I’ve saved for the last. The answers take me back to Grandma and the stoop, and to the prayers that my sister and I prayed a long, long time ago.

Chapter
Eleven

Keeping Promises, Keeping Faith
 

N
OVEMBER
27, 2011

A
NYWHERE
AND
E
VERYWHERE

O
VER THE WEEKEND AFTER THANKSGIVING DAY 2011, basketball world and the public at large celebrated breaking news that ran in media outlets around the globe, like this piece in the
Miami Herald:

Now it looks like it is over, finally. The players and the owners reached a tentative agreement early Saturday that is expected to end one of the longest labor disputes in the history of professional sports. LeBron and Dwyane and the rest should be back on the court by Christmas. It will be a 66-game season, instead of the standard (and seemingly endless) 82 games. The fans will forgive, eventually, as they always have. And the money machine that is professional sports will fire back up on all cylinders.

The settlement was by no means perfect for players or owners. And in the coming weeks there would be some unfair decisions, in my view, in last-minute trades or attempted trades. But the fact was that we had a season. Everyone contemplating a stint playing overseas or already gone could now come back and get into shape—and fast—for a season set to begin on Christmas Day.

Not a bad early present to have under the Wade family tree!

In the week following the news, as I cancel all the alternative plans, the boys and I have some team meetings to discuss schedules and responsibilities now that Daddy’s workload just got heavier. Listening to the three of them express their excitement about having a season after all is just so touching. They’ve been praying for this day—for themselves and for me.

Gratitude overflows my heart. Not that I needed the lockout to be over to feel grateful. Still, I am thankful for every bit of certainty we can have. I’m also thankful that Zaire and Zion had a good recent visit with their mother and that they will have a Christmas visit with her that we’re starting to plan, too.

Zion looks quickly at his brother and cousin and then asks, “Daddy, can I show you my list?” He’s already started the Christmas gift request list, apparently with the help of Zaire and Dada. Not waiting for any answer, Zion dashes from the room and comes back in seconds. There’s a list of several items. The first is a Christmas tree.

The boys are so excited.

To honor the spirit of the holiday, Siohvaughn has always gone away from the commercial Christmas celebrations and has tried to emphasize the season as a time of giving to others. I respect that belief and have told the boys so. Since they’ll have their celebration with her and one with me, I think a Christmas tree is a great idea and tell Zion he’s made another fine choice, too.

Dada’s list is much longer, including video games, music, clothes, and a chain like mine. I tell him maybe he’ll have to wait until he’s older for the chain. But as for the sneakers he wants with his name on them like mine, I give that a thumbs-up. The other two want those as well.

Then there’s Zaire, who has some similar requests to Dada. But one of the items is hard to read. I squint.

Am I reading this correctly? “Does this say a ‘real live elf’?”

Zion is excited for his brother. I’m suspicious. Is there such a thing? Zaire insists there is. He and Dada suggest that an elf could be helpful with chores and make extra toys they could give to boys and girls who don’t have many of their own.

That’s a great explanation. I’m so proud of my sons and my nephew. They have been very resilient over the past eight-plus months since the judge’s custody ruling.

One of the few times that the older boys ever complained was not too long ago when they both started telling me about how hard their lives were. Seems that too much homework, difficult subject matter, and not getting to play basketball for the next session in the local league was the cause of their distress.

That had been a tough one for me. The deal was that if their grades didn’t go down in the fall, they could both play in the winter session. When I saw Zaire’s grades slipping, I pulled him out for the winter session, giving him plenty of time to come back and play in the spring. Dada decided he’d wait for Zaire and play when the lockout was over.

In the meantime, both had been going on about how bad they had it, until I finally had to get to the bottom of what was going on.

Neither could really say. “It’s just hard,” Zaire repeated.

“Really? Because it’s important that you guys are happy. That’s the most important thing.”

Then we decided to take a walk downstairs. In the condo complex where we were living until the remodel was done on my house, there was a back area with a walkway down to the beach that was lit up that night for the coming holidays and looked like something out of a movie.

We strolled down the walkway and out to the sand to look at the yellow moon reflecting on the ocean at night. The stars were out and the early December air was balmy.

“You know what? This is where you guys get to live,” I said. “Do you know that I used to just dream of getting to see something like this in my life. For a long time, I didn’t even have a backyard and this is your backyard! This is pretty cool.”

They both agreed and started to get excited. “Whoa, it is cool!” Zaire said, doing his little dance moves.

With a shrug Dada agreed and quietly added, “It is like our backyard.”

After we came back upstairs and said good-bye to Brenda, who had been reading to Zion and then got everyone ready for bed, I started to think about other ways to help the boys deal with the stress of having their moms in a different city and how to deal with whatever unhappiness or anger could be getting stored in them from the past.

That was when I began to ponder this question of forgiveness and how to teach it to my kids—something I’ve had to learn how to teach to myself, after all.

Actually, my first teacher was Grandma, who taught me to forgive but never to forget. My other teacher was Tragil—who taught me, from her own lessons, that if you seek forgiveness from others or from life, you have to first forgive.

I believe that’s true. At the same time, I won’t forget what it is that I need to find forgiveness for. This is personal to me not only as a father to my kids but also as a proponent of good parenting. There are too many would-be good parents who may not even know what alienation is, how damaging it is to children, and why the effort to coparent during separation or divorce can and should be successful.

Learning to put the best interests of the kids above all other concerns, like learning to forgive, can be a challenge. But what greater rewards can there be than seeing your children happy and healthy?

In keeping promises made as a child to myself to be a devoted father, and in keeping the faith that was severely tested during the divorce and custody battles, that question ultimately would find an answer.

“WHAT HAPPENS RIGHT BEFORE YOU DO SOMETHING THAT’S like, well, so ridiculous on the court?” Lisa Joseph asked me in the fall of 2009.

We were waiting to meet with Hank before going together to a youth program supported by the work of Wade’s World Foundation. Lisa had never asked me that question before so I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

She explained: “I mean, right before you do something that’s unbelievable, like when you’re going to jump over someone—do you plan it, see it, or how does that work? Do you know that you’re about to kill it or does that happen naturally?”

I laughed. At about that point, my laughter was a rare sound to my own ears. “You know,” I reminded her, “I’m used to blocking out everything so I don’t think, I just
do
.”

Lisa then recalled a much earlier conversation, just after she’d started working with Hank for me, when I had first talked about the life that I had lived growing up.

At that time we were meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel with Marcus and Shivani Desai, the rep from Converse, and we had been asked to go around the table to say something significant about our lives. When it was my turn, I began by saying, “Well, I’m a father first and probably everything else after that.” At the beginning of my career, that must have caught everyone in the room off guard. Then I went on to describe the nights of waiting up on the stoop for my mom, what it was like to worry for her welfare, how I felt watching her shoot up, the fear that lived in me of having police come in and take her away.

The table became very quiet after that. Most everyone commented that they would have never known that was in my past.

My answer then was “I blanked it out for a long time, like it didn’t happen. I tried basketball, did well. I lived.” That may have been the first time that I had allowed the past to be part of the conversation about how the basketball court had become a place of escape and refuge, where no one would know what was going on in my life. Tears filled my eyes, Lisa recalled.

The irony that Lisa pointed out five or so years later was that just as basketball had been the one thing that never let me down as a kid, the same could be said now. She wanted to know, “Is it the same process?”