A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (43 page)

I thought about the heightened awareness of the good and the blanking out of the bad when playing at the upper levels of adrenaline and intention. Kind of the same, I had to admit. Then again, that mental firepower, when you have defenders coming at you from all directions, is hard to explain—you’re not just putting a ball into the air to fall through a round metal rim that has a net hanging from it; you are bending time and space to obey your will. The blanking-out process is about surrender, for me. Like the way music can take you away.

More than ever, I had to have that feeling of surrender and sanctuary that only basketball gave me. That had come through loud and clear during the epic home court game in early 2009 against the Chicago Bulls. With three seconds remaining at the end of a second overtime, we were tied and the Bulls had the ball. After dominating throughout the game, I seized the final moment, stole the ball, and flew down the length of the court to shoot a three-pointer off one leg—beating the buzzer, winning the game. Right then, with the roar of the crowd, the blood pounding in my ears, I jumped up onto the scorer’s table, all the while pointing down at the floor and hollering, “This is
my
house!”

Yep, I had become that guy.

Nobody was going to take my house,
our
house for all the fans, away. From then on, at the start of every home game, I added a new ritual of running both sides of the court and giving the number-one sign to every single spectator there to be part of the game, to show us the love, and, yeah, to feel the Heat.

Even with the nasty wave of rumors coming at me, I kept on playing like that, powering through the end of the season and into the next. Not thinking, blanking everything out but the finer points of the game.

That’s also how the 2009–2010 season was starting, as Lisa and Hank and I discussed briefly that morning. As we toured the youth center where hundreds of participants and fans were on hand, I once again blocked out the worries for the next hour—all amid countless hugs, high-fives, and as many autographs as I could sign for the kids who’d lined up for hours ahead of time in the hopes of getting one.

As we were leaving, a cadre of reporters and photographers followed us in a swarm as we made our way to the waiting SUV. We joked and cut up all the way there and I realized that in the eyes of everyone at the youth center and most of the media, I was living any kid’s dream.

Once we were in the car and the e-mails started to come in for all three of us about the legal matters on multiple fronts, I stopped blocking everything out long enough to make a comment to Hank and Lisa that became memorable. With photographers and camera people still shooting away from the sidewalk as the SUV maneuvered through the throngs, I just shook my head and said, “If people only knew what my life is really like right know. They see me and I’m great and everything’s cool. But this hell right now, they wouldn’t believe it.”

Practically in tears, Lisa said, “I can’t believe it and I know what’s happening.” During the Christmas fiasco of the previous year, she had come after I texted her to meet me and had taken pictures of the police cars parked in front of my own house when I was only trying to get to see my kids.

Hank, never one to lose his cool, just gave me that familiar look with the glint in his eyes that asked,
So what are you going to do about it?

What was I going to do about it? My faith that we would get to a better place was all I had. That’s what had kept me going with my mother, and that’s what had to happen with my dad. When he was at his lowest, around the time that he came out to Miami, when he battled his adversary—also substance abuse—I kept that same faith. Some days I’d see him and just hug him, rub on his head like he was my own son.

So what I was going to do was to keep fighting, keep pushing, keep praying.

Oh, there was a lot to untangle in my head and block out on the court. To add insult to injury, I had another lawsuit being waged by principals in a restaurant operation that had gone out of business. This was the result of not following lessons I’d learned early on that had come back to haunt me—an investment opportunity that I had recently tried to claim on my own without seeking business advice. I was being sued for $25 million. A couple of smaller lawsuits that came about similarly then were piled on.

Honestly, I had never been one for cussing a whole hell of a lot, maybe because my dad sometimes had the mouth that he did. But I was thinking about picking up the habit.

Somewhere in late 2009, Jim, my divorce attorney, had gently introduced the option of filing for sole custody, since Siohvaughn had gone that route from the start. There were many reasons why I didn’t want to do that. Besides the fact that doing so could drag us further away from the goal of coparenting, the high road would be that much harder to stay on, too. In the world where I come from, nuthin’ good ever arose from wanting to get back and do to someone else what they were doing to you.

But I slowly began to reconsider the option, holding it out as a last resort. The questions no longer to be ignored were those filled with growing concern and fear for what was happening to the boys. What were they being told about me on top of not being allowed to have me (or anyone connected to me) in their lives? What kinds of influences were dictating how they were being raised without any of my input?

In mid-December, four days after the court issued an updated parenting order, agreed upon by all parties, Tragil—who was legally allowed to transport my sons for pickups and drop-offs for my visitations—went to the house in Chicago to get them. Zion, now two and a half, probably didn’t understand what was going on, but Zaire, almost eight, had to watch as a woman spoke in tongues and berated my sister as she broke down sobbing in front of them because, she said, she was a slave to others and following the orders of men.

Shocked, hurt for her, and seriously scared, I told Tragil that she would never have to be subjected to that again, whatever it was going to take. We each talked to Mom, who helped us pray for light to be shone in this darkness. Even my mother, the most faithful of us all in this time period, was bewildered and wanting me to be vigilant in thought and prayer. Mom also knew that I was remembering how she and Dad had maintained a relationship after they split up, in order to give us a sense of family after divorce. But, as she pointed out, “Siohvaughn isn’t me.”

She wasn’t necessarily herself, either, I suspected.

One thing was clear to me, though. In trying to punish everyone around me—and regardless of whether she was being egged on by others who had money to gain or their own axes to grind—Siohvaughn was damaging herself in the process, too. That made me sad. But it was what she was doing to our sons that made me mad.

THE 2009–2010 SEASON FOR ME WAS SIMILAR TO THE ONE before it, giving me opportunities to celebrate milestones on behalf of the Miami Heat—a team that I was prouder than ever to serve as its face. Only my great friend and fellow warrior Udonis Haslem was left from my first year. He and I, along with Dorell Wright, who came in the year after we did, were the only remaining players from our championship season. Also one of my closest friends, Dorell would leave the next year to join the Golden State Warriors. By the summer, I would be a free agent and wasn’t sure whether I would stay or go elsewhere. As long as the divorce hung over me and my family, those questions would have to take a backseat.

In the meantime, I continued to play with a crazy intensity and a need to dominate. In the third game of the season, playing against the Bulls, I scored my ten thousandth career point, and then, feeling my wings wanting to soar higher, had a gravity-defying dunk over Anderson Varejao of the Cavaliers. LeBron just shook his head in awe at that one. Varejao and I started to go at it when the whistle blew and we were both given technicals.

The most intense and on fire that I played all season was at my sixth All-Star Game. My excitement was fueled by the fact that the attendance at Cowboys Stadium on February 14, 2010, broke all records when 108,713 spectators showed up to become the largest crowd ever to watch a basketball game in the history of the sport. In planning for this very special weekend—with lots of fun activities lined up for the kids and charitable events that I was going to be hosting or supporting on behalf of my foundation—I wanted more than anything to share the time with Zaire. In January, I had made a motion to have parenting time with him. Grandmama Jolinda would travel there and watch the game with Zaire while I was playing. Siohvaughn objected to this arrangement by saying something along the lines of my mom not being acceptable to care for the boys. Later, when asked about it, Siohvaughn contradicted that assertion. But the bottom line was that Zaire didn’t get to come.

Finding my sanctuary on the court and feeding off the energy of the crowd during the All-Star game, I helped lead the East to a 141–139 victory over the West, contributing 28 points, 11 assists, 6 rebounds, and 5 steals. During the presentation of the MVP award, which I was given for the game, I remember smiling and feeling amazing in one minute and then walking away with a broken heart the next. Most of the other players with kids had them at the game. Mine had been prevented from attending. For what?

This weekend had come on the heels of a confusing episode earlier in the week when I went to Chicago for Zaire’s birthday. The weekend visitation with both boys had been planned and we were going to celebrate at my mom’s house. At the last minute, Siohvaughn texted to say Zion was too sick with a high fever to attend. She e-mailed me a photo of him throwing up. The choice for me at that moment was whether to leave Zion at home with his mother or to have him with me and get him the medical care needed, whatever it was. Trying to be diplomatic, I texted back and let her know that I appreciated being told that he wasn’t well, but I would keep the visitation and get him the necessary care because I was his parent. At that time Tragil was on her way to the house accompanied by a representative from the court, an attorney, whose job it was to be neutral and look to the best interests of the children. After the drama with the talking in tongues when Tragil had picked up the boys before, the judge had requested the representative to be there as an observer. Unlike the previous visit, there were signs posted on the blacked-out gates saying things like “We fear no evil.” When they buzzed in, the gates didn’t open. Eventually, the children’s representative called Siohvaughn’s lawyer and about fifteen minutes later the gate opened and a friend of Von’s drove both boys to the gate and dropped them off. Tragil was confused because earlier I had called her to say Zion was going to stay home sick. But he seemed to feel just fine and was able to enjoy the weekend with Zaire and the rest of us.

The really troubling element that was starting to emerge wasn’t so much how Zaire acted around me. Yet. It was the kinds of things he was saying on the phone and, as I learned later, what he said to the court-appointed expert who would eventually testify in trial. Zaire described me negatively in ways that sounded to the expert as if they were embellished or repeated from what he had heard. The expert noted this statement, “Imagine that you’re a mother of a five-year-old and you were about to have another child, and imagine your husband walks out on you,” as an example of an alienated attitude toward me. Of course that wasn’t the story of what had happened but he had heard it as such and repeated it, something the expert said was strange for a child of his age to say anyway.

One judge who was hearing motions and issuing orders at the time described the drama of this period by writing, “Well, the problem is that the same thing keeps happening over and over again. We’ve got like Groundhog Day where every time there is an order . . . there’s drama involved. And I don’t know why there has to be drama over putting the child at the gate and saying bye. Maybe the first time you would think, okay, and then it’s a second time, and then now the third time, and it’s back again. And obviously, every time there is drama, children don’t deal well with drama. So we try to keep the drama to a minimum, and obviously that doesn’t seem to be happening.”

The drama was intensifying. A second judge who had issued an order for me to have visitation after weeks without contact watched every motion I filed—for a phone call—be met with a motion to reconsider. When that was denied and when things didn’t go her way, all of a sudden the phone would be off the hook and no one knew where the kids were. This judge’s observations at the time: “My concern is that I got two little children and they’re in the middle of a battlefield here. And every time it’s time to go visit daddy or return to mom, there’s tension; there’s friction. Why should children have to endure this? What did these two little kids ever do that they have to be in the middle of muddle. . . . I’m very, very troubled by the pattern that is developing in this case.”

The breaking point for me had come before the end of the season, on the weekend of March 12–14, when I had two games at home, and Tragil was supposed to pick up Zaire and Zion from school on Friday to bring them to Miami. When she arrived at school, they weren’t there. So she went to the house.

“I’m here now,” Tragil said on the phone to me. “I’m outside calling the house and there’s no one picking up.”

“Call Jim and have him get a hold of her lawyers.”

A bad feeling spreads through me. Was this more of the same or something worse? Trying to keep calm as I waited to hear for the next couple of hours, I couldn’t shake off nervousness I already had about her actions and what she might do to the kids. Tragil checked in constantly and nobody, Von’s lawyers included, knew where the boys were.

By late afternoon I’m thinking the worst—that my boys are hurt, that they’ve been taken somewhere, and no one can tell me where this woman is. So instead of going to practice, I call and admit, “I’m an emotional wreck. I can’t make it.” When it comes time to decide whether I can make the game or not, I decide to go rather than stay at home and lose my mind. Against the Bulls, of all teams, I get off to a slow start but come on strong in the second half, playing with my angry persona—to the point of being called for a flagrant foul.