Dwyane Wade Conquered the NBA. Can He Win at TV?

Luka, of course, shares a roster with LeBron James, who was a member of the 2003 draft class like Wade. But while Wade already has several postretirement side quests under his belt, James—who seemingly defies both the limits of what the human body can do and the space-time continuum—is still going strong on the court. Wade, on the other hand, tries and fails to stifle a laugh when he talks about some of the creaky noises his body makes these days. There’s a bit of whiplash in going from the leaping, spinning, slashing dynamo to someone whose knees feel it during every long flight. When the aged version of D-Wade could no longer find that “explosion level”—the ability to take off like a rocket with its final destination at the rim—he started to think about life after basketball. “Once I knew that I didn’t have that special quality anymore, that I lost all my powers and I became a regular basketball player, the game was not as fun as it used to be,” he explains. So, no, he does not envy the King, or any of his former running mates who are still playing.

At one point, Wade had the league’s highest-selling jersey. He’s got a scoring title to boot, and a spot on the NBA’s 75th anniversary team. He is beyond comfortable watching the game with a headset on now.

“When you had the career I had, you don’t envy someone else’s journey,” Wade says, sagely. “I got everything out of the game of basketball that I possibly wanted.” He does struggle to throttle down, though, to replace the adrenaline withdrawal. The dilemma for so many athletic titans like himself, whose career comes with an inherent expiration date, is how to go from the locker room old head to a relatively young member of general society. And in Wade’s case, he knows that inactivity could breed contempt in the ones who love him. “What else are you going to do? I retired at 37. There’s no way I’m just going to sit around. I wouldn’t be fulfilled, and people would not want to be around me.” He does not yearn for training camp, does not pine for a game in Cleveland on Tuesday and another in Boston on Wednesday.

The missing piece for him is less tangible. “What I do miss is being better than people,” Wade says with a mixture of playfulness and I was one of the greats in his voice. “I miss being good at something, really good at it.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Nick Sethi
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Skin by Sam Fine
Grooming by Donato Smith
Tailoring by Jessica Yuen
Special Thanks to New Vibe Yoga