On a Sunday in October, a group of spectators gathered outside the Kaseya Center, the home of the Miami Heat. They sat in rows of chairs, arranged in a half circle. The crowd was there for the unveiling of a statue of Dwyane Wade, the superstar who had led the team to three NBA championships.
I wasn’t enough of a VIP to get a seat, so I found a spot on a gate during the unveiling, behind Wade and his family. I knew he had been anxiously awaiting the day. I’d watched, eight months earlier, as he’d paced around an early clay model in the sculptors’ studio, asking detailed questions—about the definition of his arms and legs, the way his jersey would be rendered. I knew how much this statue meant to him. And I knew he thought it captured him, as a player, perfectly.
The statue was made by Rotblatt Amrany Studio, a firm that has designed monuments to some of the most well-known athletes in America: Ernie Banks, Barry Sanders, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. When I’d visited the studio, in the Chicago suburbs, the sculpture of Wade ended at the wrists. I’d asked a member of the studio’s team where the hands were; he’d explained that the sculptors still needed more reference photos. “Wade has really, really big hands,” he’d said. “The biggest hands on a human that I ever saw.”
At the unveiling, flames shot up into the air and two black panels that had been concealing the statue slid apart. When the smoke cleared, there it was: a bronze behemoth, muscles rippling, Heat jersey clinging to the torso, hands appropriately disproportionate. The sculpture was based on a moment in a 2009 game against the Chicago Bulls. In the second overtime, Wade stole the ball and made a running, game-winning three-pointer as time expired. He then leaped onto the scorers’ table and yelled, “This is my house!” The face of the sculpture was a rictus of fury, with furrowed eyebrows and bared teeth. It also looked nothing like Dwyane Wade.
Wade took the podium and shook his head in awe. “Who is that guy?” he said. The comment was intended as a statement of humility—I can’t believe that’s me—but laughter rippled through the crowd. “I don’t know who that guy is either,” someone near me whispered. On social media, the statue was immediately mocked. “Why they make Dwyane Wade look like Laurence Fishburne?” one sports reporter posted on X. Others compared the likeness to Thanos, or to the villain from The Mask.
To Wade, if the sculpture looked strange or monstrous, it befitted that moment in his career: an outburst of raw competitive energy, a pure expression of the rage that had driven him on the court. “It’s not a beauty shot of me,” he later told me.
Wade took the response to the statue in stride. “I saw some funny shit along the way about it,” he said. “That’s just the world we live in, man.” But perhaps behind the jokes was a recognition of a different kind of dissonance. Wade’s public image today is far removed from that 2009 moment, so much so that the two can be hard to reconcile. Maybe it wasn’t just the statue that was strange. Maybe people didn’t quite recognize the person the statue was meant to immortalize.
A year earlier, as I prepared to meet Wade for the first time, my usual barber took his wife on a cruise. I needed a cut, so I had to do the unthinkable: trust a stranger with my thinning hairline. I wandered into an unfamiliar barbershop in my hometown of Baltimore. The vibe of the spot was revolutionary; the walls were lined with faded posters of Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Chuck D, Nas. The barbers all wore dashikis or T-shirts that celebrated the motherland.
The man who stepped up to cut my hair told me his name was Power. Just Power. We made small talk, other guys chiming in. Eventually, as barbershop conversations do, the talk drifted to the NBA, and how the NBA of today is nowhere near as hard as it used to be. We talked about the days when Michael Jordan would get assaulted by the “Bad Boy” Pistons and still drop 50, about how you can barely touch another player nowadays without being ejected.
“Them kids softer than baby shit!” a UPS driver with a tight gray afro said. “I can play in the league now!” We all laughed.
I couldn’t help myself. I mentioned that I had an interview scheduled with Dwyane Wade. On the court, Wade had been one of the last avatars of the old-school way of hooping we’d just been reminiscing about, a warrior who played hurt and held grudges. But at the mention of Wade, the mood in the room immediately shifted; all around me, eyebrows raised. “Be careful around those Hollywood Negroes, brother,” Power warned me in a low tone. “Wade used to be a good brother. He hit Hollywood and he changed.”
Wade has the kind of NBA origin story that would ordinarily make him a hero in a room like that one. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, at the corner of 59th Street and South Prairie Avenue. His mother, Jolinda, struggled with drug addiction. The police raided their apartment so often that it became a familiar routine: Wade and his older sister Tragil Wade would escape through a back door and scale an outdoor stairway to their grandmother’s back porch, on the top floor of the same building, where they could hide. Other times, Jolinda wouldn’t come home. Wade could never sleep w...
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