A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball by Dwyane Wade

engine that drives me.
    On the minus side, I’ve also built up a high tolerance for the causes of distress and, unfortunately, learned to tolerate toxic situations much longer than I ever should have.
    But standing in the locker room after announcing “The court has awarded me full custody of Zaire Blessing Dwyane Wade and Zion Malachi Aramis Wade,” I’m starting to think that can change. At twenty-nine years old, I get to unlearn some of those old coping mechanisms and write a new chapter.
    Even if most of the guys didn’t know the details, as I listen to the cheers coming from an entire locker room of NBA players and coaching staff, I know they share the sense that justice has prevailed. After all, as a team we share the value that family comes first, something that our team president, the legendary Pat Riley, often reminds us right before he emphasizes what comes next: the will to win.
    If the game today was any indication, no one will have to worry that the weight now lifted from me means that I’ll play with any less intensity.
    For one thing, having my boys there with us courtside to watch the game had given me added fuel—and that’s an understatement. For another, that intensity is a fact of who I am—bred into me not just from the childhood I lived but from the history of what came before me.

    MY MOTHER NEVER USED TO TALK MUCH ABOUT WHAT HER younger life had been like, growing up as one of nine children, raised by a single mother. From time to time, she’d answer questions. But not at length. Mostly, I felt robbed of getting to experience her true personality or how smart she really was, or even how beautiful she was before being in her madness.
    Jolinda Morris had been a natural beauty. Tragil and I would study pictures of Mom in her teens—and compliment her soft, pretty features, with her big, soulful eyes, mysterious smile, and a fine complexion someone once compared to milk chocolate.
    “Well,” she’d laugh and admit in her smoky voice, “you know the thing I always wanted to be first was a model.”
    A great dream! Was it a stretch? Not to me. Yeah, I was biased because I was a boy and she was my mother and we were so closely connected. And still are. But in those old pictures you could see the sparkle in her eyes of someone who was going places, someone who believed she was marked by destiny. Then, after she traveled the world as a fashion model and achieved independence, her plan was to find a good man and they’d have twelve children together. Mom had it all mapped out—complete with a storybook house and a white picket fence.
    What happened?
    Only later, after we became adults, did Tragil and I start to ask that question of Mom and began to piece together the puzzle. Without blame or self-pity, my mother went back to where the dreams originated, growing up with eight siblings, the daughter of two country kids from Mississippi who’d come up to Chicago without the skills needed to thrive in the labor force or for raising children.
    “All they knew,” Mom would say, “was how to make babies.”
    “Did you know your father?”
    “We knew Dad but he wasn’t around.”
    That left her mother—our grandma—not much time except for work. Willie Mae kept three jobs at a time. “Your grandma was a workaholic who made sure that we had the necessities we needed to survive. I always appreciated that. And her independence.”
    Grandma also liked to have something to drink at the end of the day. Mom explained: “That was her way of releasing her cares and enjoying herself, being able to party a little bit and have a good time.” As a little girl, my mom looked up to her mother very much. “More than once, I made the statement that when I grew up I wanted to be just like my mom. Your grandma was the prettiest woman in the world back then. She had this long beautiful hair that was a showstopper, and when she dressed to go out with her face made up, I’d look at her and think life would be