Dwyane Wade, Dime #43

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

But today we’re rolling out some brand-new content: excerpts from Dime #43, our Olympic Issue, which is on sale now in stores and on newsstands nationwide.

Reprinted from Dime #43, August 2008

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The dueling spotlights shining on Dwyane Wade are suddenly hotter than the 80-degree Manhattan humidity outside. In a small fourth-floor room at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, Wade sits in a director’s chair, juggling a basketball and a water bottle, facing a Spartan phalanx of recorders, notepads and cameras in his blue USA Basketball uniform and special-edition Converse Olympic signature sneakers.

Wade is in NYC with the rest of the United States men’s senior national team — Team USA to you and I — on a one-day media tour of the nation’s real capital before flying back to Las Vegas to resume training camp. With the Olympic Games in Beijing, China, a little more than a month away, today is dedicated to photo shoots, interviews and public appearances for what is, on paper, the best basketball team in the world.

For this two-hour media session at the Plaza, some players — Chris Bosh, Tayshaun Prince, Michael Redd, even Chris Paul — share rooms with others, getting an occasional break from the question-and-answer dance. But the big dogs — Kobe, LeBron, Kidd — have their own rooms, and no time or space to escape inquiries both serious and stupid. D-Wade is one of the big dogs.

What does this mean to you to represent the United States?

Is LeBron in your Fave Five?

Watching him take on even the silliest of questions with a smile and genuinely thoughtful answer, or slyly deflecting questions about his impending free agency in 2010 (“I accept all bribes. I love gifts, especially if my name’s engraved on it.”), or fire off jokes about his famous commercial co-star (“I’m getting Charles back for getting me with those Star Jones rumors.”), you can see just how much Dwyane Wade, 26, has grown up.

Wade wasn’t a five-star recruit at Harold Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Illinois. He didn’t gain recognition with the office-pool college fan until his junior year at Marquette. He wasn’t one of the holy trinity of hype (LeBron, Carmelo, Darko) leading up to the 2003 NBA Draft. Matter of fact, it took a good year as a pro before the majority of mainstream media outlets stopped constantly misspelling his first name.

And sometime between then and now, D-Wade has become as polished a public figure as any athlete in the game: a go-to bankable endorser for everything from cell phones to SUVs to sports drinks. He almost automatically resonated with fans as a rookie (Dime #13, Wade’s first national magazine cover, christened him “America’s Most Wanted”), and by the end of his third season, had an NBA championship trophy and Finals MVP honors under his belt, truly exploding as a global celebrity. Today, Dwyane Wade is as famous with 65-year-old retirees as he is with 15-year-old ballplayers.

In the middle of this Q&A, though, one question makes him blink:

Do you think people have, in a sense, written you off?

He initially answers me with a surprised, “Huh?” leaving his always-smooth veneer exposed for a beat. Then he regroups. Then he thinks about it. Thinks about the losing and the injuries that stained his 2007-08 season with the Miami Heat. Thinks about how his name, once cemented in any “Who’s the best?” argument as if it were a commandment (Dime #26: “The best player in the world.”), has fallen, if only slightly, from its pedestal.

“Well, I mean, you know, the world today is ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Simple as that,” Wade says. “You have people in the NBA who emerged this year. Chris Paul has emerged; he could have possibly won MVP. So, I’m not one of those guys who’s a hater. Everyone needs their time and everyone’s gonna get their time. I know with me coming back healthy I’ll have my time again, but I’m not worried about it at all.”

With that, he sweeps the pool of reporters and photogs with his eyes.

“Y’all see my commercials. I’m still in y’all eyes.”

They laugh. He smiles. He’s back.

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photo. Chad Griffith

Last season was the toughest of Dwyane Wade’s career. Although he was slated to miss the first couple of weeks while coming off of shoulder and knee surgery, Wade and the Heat still had championship aspirations. Looking to erase the memory of being swept out of the ’07 playoffs in the first round by the Chicago Bulls, Miami’s goals were rooted in a foundation of Wade, Shaq, coach Pat Riley and a veteran group of role players with postseason experience.

But while Wade sat out, Shaq played the worst basketball of his career, and the Heat never recovered. A pandemic of injuries hit the team hard. Shaq was traded in February, going to Phoenix for a package that brought Shawn Marion to Miami. By the end of the regular season, the Heat had the worst record in the League (15-67) and a roster that looked like that of a D-League All-Star Game. Battling the injuries that lingered from the previous summer, Wade managed to put up his customary All-Star numbers (26.4 points, 6.9 assists, 4.2 rebounds, 1.7 steals per game), but also posted his lowest field-goal and free-throw percentages since his rookie year, and for the second season in a row missed 31 games due to injury.

And even when D-Wade was at his best, the Heat never achieved theirs. When Wade dumped 48 points, 11 assists, seven boards, three steals and three blocks on Orlando on Dec. 28, Miami lost. When he gave New Jersey 41 points the week before, Miami lost. Thirty-six and 10 dimes against Atlanta wasn’t enough for a win. Neither was 33 and 11 against Houston, or 42 points, six boards, seven assists and three steals against Cleveland. From Jan. 1, 2008, until the day he was shut down for the season, March 10, Dwyane Wade played in 27 games. His team won three of them.

Meanwhile — commercials aside — Wade slipped from the public eye. Riding a historically eventful and exciting season, the NBA was all about Kobe, CP3, LeBron, the Celtics, the Spurs … coincidentally, even a rejuvenated Shaq was a more popular topic than ol’ boy down in Miami, the guy who was starting to be called the next Penny Hardaway: a surefire Hall of Famer once upon a time, now poised to take a career nosedive because he couldn’t stay healthy and no longer had a good team around him.

“Man, I can’t even really explain what it was like,” Wade says. “Not being healthy, not having the team I wanted to have this year, it was tough. I grew up a lot this season. There were times when I probably put my head down too much and I wasn’t the leader I needed to be, but I’m human. I’m not used to losing. So I take that on the chin and just say next year I’ll be a better leader for the young guys and for the city of Miami.”

But if you believe what you read online, he almost never got the chance. After the Heat landed the No. 2 overall pick in the Draft Lottery, Wade’s name popped up in several trade rumors, most of them involving the Bulls, who had the No. 1 pick. It hadn’t been that long ago that any talk of Miami trading D-Wade would have been as comical an idea as the Cavs trading LeBron or the Magic trading Dwight Howard, but now some fans and analysts were actually receptive to a deal.

The trade talk eventually died, and the Heat used their pick to get college sensation Michael Beasley, who will join Wade and Marion to form the nucleus of what could be an instant contender in the Eastern Conference. Provided, of course, that No. 3 is healthy.

“They’re gonna bounce back,” says Howard, Wade’s U.S. teammate and reigning king of the NBA’s Southeast Division following Miami’s freefall. “We’re not worried about them having another bad season. They’re gonna be strong, especially if D-Wade is healthy.

“He should never have to prove anything to nobody,” Howard says. “Everybody knows what kind of player Dwyane Wade is. It’s tough when you lose and everybody’s not healthy — I saw it taking a toll on him — but I know for him, winning a world championship will be the best thing.”

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photo. Chad Griffith

Dwyane Wade was there when Team USA fell off. He watched (literally) as the 2004 Olympic squad took bronze in Athens, Greece, the low point in a rapid decline of U.S. basketball dominance in international competition. Coming off his rookie year, Wade, LeBron, Carmelo and Carlos Boozer were all part of that version of Team USA, none of them earning a starting spot in Larry Brown’s rotation, none of them escaping the widespread ridicule dished out to anyone associated with that team.

“The criticism you get with the Miami Heat, you get in Miami,” Wade says. “But the criticism for Team USA is exactly that: the United States of America. It’s the whole country. You get it everywhere you go.”

And so Wade was also there when USA Basketball hired Jerry Colangelo to construct a national program from which an actual team — not just a collection of convenient high-profile names — would emerge, with continuity and teamwork and an actual identity. A team built with the right pieces to win gold. The first experiment under the new system yielded another bronze medal, at the ’06 World Championship in Japan. Since then, however, Team USA hasn’t lost a game. Going into the Olympics at press time, they are ranked No. 1 in the world by FIBA and are favored to win the gold medal in Beijing.

“The only thing we’ve been planning to do is win a gold medal,” LeBron says. “It’s going to take a lot of hard work and dedication. Everyone has to sacrifice what they might do on their (NBA) team for the better of our team. We’ve got the right group, the right coaching staff…it’s up to us to go get it.”

Says Wade: “There’s no comparison between this team and the ’04 team. My experience from ’04 is we got together, a week and a half training camp in Jacksonville, shot off to Greece. This team has been together roughly three years. Everybody knows the system, everybody is familiar with each other. Everybody respects the system.

“We’ve all got something to prove,” Wade goes on. “We’re not the champions from 2004 or 2006. And if you wanna talk about NBA-wise, if you’re not the Boston Celtics, you’ve got something to prove because you didn’t win a championship this year. You always have something to prove once you hit the court—whether you’re Kobe Bryant or the Finals MVP, you have to prove something because you were the MVP. As professionals, as athletes, you always have something to prove.”

Wade doesn’t plan on leaving Beijing without gold. No one on this team does. Six weeks before the opening ceremonies, he is already talking about the shoes Converse made for him that he’s going to wear in the gold-medal game. No “if we get there” qualifier is given.

“The biggest thing about redemption,” Boozer says, “is that we’ve got four guys on this team that were in Athens: D-Wade, myself, LeBron and ’Melo. We didn’t get a chance to contribute like we wanted in Athens. This time around we have a great chance to do that.”

“Four years ago, when we got done getting that bronze around our necks, we sat in the back of the bus and said, ‘Wait for ’08 so we can redeem ourselves, when this is our team,’” Wade says. “Carmelo, LeBron, myself, Carlos, all of us who were on the 2004 team, it’s been burning in our minds for four years. We were highly criticized then, so we wanna go out and make sure all that is changed. I’ve been waiting four years for this.” …

** To read the rest of this article, pick up Dime #43 on sale now in stores and on newsstands nationwide.