Dwyane Wade, Dime #13

While Team USA goes for the gold in the Beijing Olympics, we’re digging into the Dime archives for a closer look at the players who will make it happen. For the duration of the Games, we’ll be re-running some of our best Dime Magazine feature stories on DimeMag.com.

Reprinted from Dime #13, Aug/Sept 2004

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Dwyane Wade poses solemnly in the cradle of the stars and stripes. He stares earnestly back at the camera, mindful of the American Flag draped behind him.

It’s the first magazine cover shoot for the 22-year-old Miami Heat guard; playing to a camera lens is uncharted territory. He has to be directed a little, told where to look, where to put his hands, how to stand, but he’s eager to follow instructions. “I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated once back at Marquette,” Dwyane says. “But this is the first one that’s just for me. I want to do it right.”

Many more magazine covers are in Dwyane’s future and there will be plenty of time to perfect his modeling game, because he is on the precipice of something very, very big. After just one season in the NBA, Dwyane Wade is already many things to many people. He’s a humble Olympian, a God-fearing, devoted family man and a blue-collar star with game to spare. And as we saw this summer, from talking to everyone from teammates and opponents to Dime readers and even casual hoop fans, on some level, Wade resonates with everybody. Dwyane Wade is what American basketball is all about.

The R. Kelly/Jay-Z collaboration “The Best of Both Worlds” is playing in the background – an appropriate soundtrack for the cover shoot, considering Dwyane is floating between two worlds. It took his entire rookie season to fully emerge from the long shadows cast by LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, and now Dwyane is on the verge of white-hot fame.

The next leg of Dwyane’s journey will begin in August in Athens as a member of Team USA, where his steady, heady play will be called upon to balance the frenetic, frenzied attack of America’s starting backcourt of A.I. and Stephon Marbury. The Olympics will then lead into his sophomore NBA campaign, where he will be expected to lead the Heat into battle as one of the best teams in the East. After coming within a breath of the Eastern Conference Finals, much will be expected of Wade and his teammates the second time around.

“I’m ready,” Dwyane says. “It feels great to be on the verge of something big. This is like the calm before the storm for me. As a kid, you always dream of becoming a celebrity. It’s something to be cherished and done the right way. It’s a powerful thing to be a public figure, a role model. You have to be careful.”

After the photo shoot, a limo takes Dwyane from the studio back to his Times Square hotel, crawling through brutal afternoon midtown Manhattan traffic. The talk turns to the impending rush of fame that’s about to wash over him. “I feel like, to an extent, it’s already started in Miami,” Dwyane says. “It’s like that 50 Cent song says, ‘I can’t even walk through the mall no more.’”

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photo. Jonathan Mannion

His game reeks of smashmouth grittiness, honed in thousands of grind-it-out blood and guts playground pickup games typical of Chicago’s South Side. The Windy City is in his blood and Dwyane reps all things Chicago. Today he’s taking some heat for his Yankees cap. Dwyane fields the barbs with his easy smile and defends his fashion sense. “I’m from the Chi, but [the Yankees] make the best hats,” he says.

“You know the story,” Wade says when he’s asked about his childhood in Chicago. “It’s the typical ‘grew up in the hood’ thing. My family wasn’t poor, but we definitely weren’t rich either. There were some tough times.”

He lived with his mother Jolinda and his sister Tragil on the South Side until he was nine years old, before moving out to live with his father Dwyane Sr. in the Southern Chicago suburb of Robbins. He grew up learning the game from his father and his three step-brothers, making frequent trips into the city in search of the best pickup games.

Wade starred at Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Ill., but despite putting up mammoth numbers and playing on the same powerhouse AAU team as Darius Miles and T.J. Cummings, Wade was only really recruited by Marquette, Bradley and Illinois State. He sat back and watched as friends he had made on the AAU circuit like Caron Butler and Eddy Curry took their games to higher places.

The majority of the basketball world was first introduced to Dwyane in is his third and final season at Marquette, where he led an average supporting cast to the Final Four, eventually losing to Kansas. His showing in the regional finals against Kentucky will stand as one of the great performances in NCAA Tournament history – Wade poured in 29 points, grabbed 11 boards, dropped 11 dimes and recorded four blocked shots in the victory over the top-seeded Wildcats. It was a performance that prompted then-Kansas coach Roy Williams to compare Dywane to Michael Jordan. “It was scary the things (Wade) did in the Kentucky game,” Williams told reporters after his Jayhawks eliminated Marquette. “I looked up a couple times to make sure it was still No. 3 I was watching on tape and not No. 23. He was that sensational.”

Wade was saddled with the dreaded “’tweener” status by draft pundits — Dwyane stands 6′4″ — traditionally to be too short to be an effective shooting guard and thought to be lacking in a point guard’s playmaking skills — but the Miami Heat still selected him 5th overall, right behind ’Bron, Darko, ’Melo and Chris Bosh.

“I remember watching him play as a sophomore in the Conference USA tournament, and what I saw was unbridled talent,” says Heat GM Randy Pfund. “We started following him closely after that, watching a lot of his games on tape. We noticed that he had a tendency to start slow, kind of lulling people to sleep while he got his teammates involved. To be honest, at the time, we almost looked at it as a weakness. We’d be watching the tape and saying things like, ‘When’s Wade gonna make something happen?’ Then by the end of the tape, we’d be saying ‘This guy’s amazing.’ After watching one of those games, we started calling him ‘The Closer’ because of the way he would just take over games down the stretch and just will his team to wins.”

Dwyane wasted no time in making his presence felt in the NBA. In his very first game, on the road in Philly against the Sixers, Wade logged a team-high 41 minutes and scored 18 points, including several clutch baskets down the stretch to keep his team close. The Sixers were visibly taken aback by the aggressiveness of the rookie; by the end of the game, Miami was clearing out the lane for Dwyane while he took Sixers guards to the rim time and time again.

“We knew in summer league before the season that we had something special,” says Heat assistant coach and former NBA player Keith Askins. “If you look at his hands, you’ll notice that they’re huge. That and his athletic ability let Dwyane do so many things. He can really do anything. He can post, we put him in iso situations all the time and he’s obviously a driver, so you have to play that first. So if he’s hitting his mid-range jumpers, it’s over.

Dwyane averaged 4.5 assists per game this season in his double duty, playing both point guard and shooting guard, and recorded a total of eight assists in a game five different times. With point guard Rafer Alston leaving Miami to sign a lucrative free agent deal with Toronto in the offseason, and with no real point guard on the Heat’s roster, Wade will find himself at the one even more this upcoming season.

When the playoffs arrived last spring, no one gave the eighth-seeded Miami Heat much of a shot to get out of the first round against the Hornets, let alone push the Indiana Pacers to the brink of elimination in the second round. Wade was a beast in the second season, his scoring average going from 15 points per game in Round One to better than 21 points a game in Round Two.

“Now that we’re several weeks removed from the playoffs, when you look back, most of what sticks out in your mind is what Dwyane did,” Pfund says. “Think of the highlights of those two series, what were the real ‘playoff’ moments? He hit the big shot in the first game of the New Orleans series (a basket with 1.3 seconds left that game Miami their first playoff win in four years), there was his big three at the end of the New Orleans series and there was the dunk over Jermaine O’Neal. Those are the plays that stick out.”

There were several times when the Pacers’ Ron Artest, the Defensive Player of the Year, usually assigned to eliminate the other team’s best shooting guard or small forward, found himself shadowing the rookie Wade. “Here’s the thing about Ron Artest – he’s coming for blood,” Wade says. “The only way to deal with it is to attack him first. I look up and see the Defensive Player of the Year in front of me? I have to attack or else I’m not going to survive.

“But that’s who I am. I have an attack mindset. I grew up getting beat on by my brothers and my dad playing ball in the backyard. I had to attack then to survive. When I would play at places like Foster Park in Chicago, I had to be on the attack then to survive. And I still have attack to survive now.”

Says Artest: “Dwyane Wade plays tough. He does whatever. There are a few guys in the League like that, but not many.”

“I’ve seen Dwyane up close day in and day out,” says Heat third-year player Rasual Butler. “He’s an attacker. He’s unstoppable. He does, like, MJ stuff. Our team last season before he got here was so much more deliberate. This year just having him on the floor made us a more up-tempo team because we had D at the point. In my mind you can make the argument that he was the best rookie in the draft because he was the last rookie standing and we were 20 wins better.”

If there is one knock on Wade’s game, it’s that he has trouble hitting the long-range jumper with consistency. He shot just 30 percent from behind the arc last season.

When Dwyane isn’t in Athens with Team USA this summer, he’ll be back home in Chicago, training with Michael Jordan’s fitness guru, Tim Grover, at Hoops the Gym. Dwyane has spent the last few summers working out with Grover and playing in pickup games called by NBA refs, featuring competition like Antoine Walker, Michael Finley, Paul Pierce, Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles.

“Like we used to do with Michael, we’re trying to add a different weapon to Dwyane’s game every summer,” Grover says. “This summer, we’re trying to develop a one-dribble, two-dribble pull-up jump shot to Dwyane’s arsenal and we’re trying to add upper body strength so that he can shoot with greater consistency from distance. His strengths are in his core and lower body, his weaknesses are in his upper body, but that’s normal with guys his age. Teams won’t be letting him get to the basket this season like they did last year, so he’s going to need more options.

“He reminds me of Michael in the sense that Dwyane’s just as explosive and they both had such great change of direction speed. It took Michael four or five years to realize how important this offseason work is, and Dwyane’s just realizing it now, so he’s ahead of the game. Dwyane doesn’t necessarily like the workouts, but nobody does. Trust me, he’d rather be spending this time playing ball, but that never effects his intensity, ever.”

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photo. Jonathan Mannion

Dwyane Wade was born to play this role, to embody American basketball. At a time when other stars are exposed as paper idols, Wade is pure. To be honest, Dwyane is almost too good to be true. He is married to his best friend from grade school, Siovaughn, and has a two-year old son, Zaire. During his 2002 season at Marquette, he spent the majority of his down time driving between Milwaukee and Chicago to see his son and Siovaughn. The next season, after he and Siovaughn wed, she and Zaire moved to Milwaukee to be close to Dwyane. When Wade’s teammates would head home to their dorms at the end of the day, Dwyane would go back to his apartment to spend time with his family and cook dinner for Zaire. Academically ineligible when he first arrived at Marquette, Dwyane’s GPA rose above a 3.0 when his family relocated.

By all accounts, both in Miami and on the road, he is a homebody, preferring to stay in with his family instead of hitting the club scene. “When I’m not playing, I’m either sleeping or playing with my son,” Wade says when asked about what he does for fun. Even with a hectic schedule, he tries to attend church as much as possible and donates portions of his NBA paychecks to his old church on Chicago’s South Side.

He is polite and affable, if a bit shy. He answers questions directly, but in a cautious, measured professional way and more than once notes that he realizes everything that he does and says reflects on him, his family’s name and Zaire. “The most important thing to me is that I set a good example for my son,” Dwyane says.

“We call him ‘Clark Kent’ in the locker room,” Butler says. “He could have just come from robbing a bank, but he’s always got that same school boy look on his face. He doesn’t ever curse or anything like that. It’s when he steps onto the court that he turns into a monster.”

Dwayne’s greatest asset may be his ability to connect with people. His blue-collar, unassuming working-man image is a welcome change for fans looking for an alternative to more brash, abrasive NBA personalities. He doesn’t open his mouth on the court and he doesn’t roll with an entourage. The only symbol of his newfound privilege is the chunky piece hanging around his neck. It’s a platinum, diamond-encrusted mini Miami jersey with “Heat” on one side and “Wade” on the other, set in dazzling red rubies.

True, personality-wise, he’s more Grant Hill or Tim Duncan than he is Allen Iverson. And while both Hill and Duncan may be good guys, their wholesome images don’t necessarily translate to a fan following. But Dwyane is different. There’s something about him that people just love.

Tyree Evans, a viciously talented high school player we interviewed for the “What’s My Name?” section of this issue told us that his favorite player used to be Ray Allen, but now Ray’s been replaced by Dwyane Wade.

During the playoffs, the Dime editorial staff realized that Wade didn’t have a nickname. We mentioned in the daily “Smack” column on DimeMag.com that readers should submit nickname suggestions for Dwyane. Hundreds of responses poured in over the next week and entries still come in now, months later. Some of the more entertaining entries? “Hurricane Wade,” “Ginsu (because he cuts like the knife),” “D-Eezy”, “D-Bay (like eBay, because he delivers anytime, anywhere),” “Dubya” and “Miami Nice.” And those are just a few.

“The closest thing I’ve ever had to a nickname is ‘D-Wade’,” Dwyane says. When we jokingly tell him that we’re thinking of naming him “Miami Nice,” he starts laughing and pleads with us, “Please don’t.”

A lot of the allure certainly has to do with Dwyane’s style of play. For all of his role model behavior, Dwyane cuts out hearts on the basketball court when it matters most. It’s easy to love a player who’s fearless. We’d all like to think that we’d have the steely grit to be able to step up in crunch time just like Dwyane does.

In typical Wade fashion, he volunteered to play on the Olympic team when more several more established stars backed out for a number of reasons, most notably over security concerns in Athens.

“I look at the Olympics as an honor,” Wade says. “It’s not a burden, it’s a responsibility. Everyone who backed out has his own opinion and reason why he’s not going to be there. And that’s fine. But I wanted to go. I want to wear the red, white and blue. I’m proud to represent my country, and I think that if we come back with the gold medal, there are going to be a lot of jealous guys who wished that hey had gone.”

When it’s pointed out that the glow of the spotlight could cause more issues than just having problems going to the mall, Wade laughs. “If it gets worse, then I’m doing my job,” he says. “This is something I want. I want to get my face out there. I want to do magazines and TV shows. I think that I can appeal to different crowds, I want to market myself.”

On the way back from the photo studio to the hotel, the limo driver asks Dwyane if he’s afraid of losing his privacy. “I think of it this way,” Wade says. “On the court I have no fear. Everyone on a basketball court is a man and you can’t ever be afraid of another man. The only other fear that I have is in life, dying or having everything taken away from me before I get to finish what God has planned for me. And I feel like he has a lot more in store.”

Horns blare and the limo is forced to make sudden moves to veer out of the way of other vehicles and crazed bike messengers. Dwyane watches the New York buildings slip by his side window, preferring that view instead of the madness of the traffic ahead. His life will be like that soon enough.