Wade ready to prove Redeem Team has substance
BEIJING — It doesn’t really matter if Dwyane Wade is dating Starr Jones, as rumor has it, though his wife might disagree. It’s not important if he’s a little cocky going into the Beijing Olympics, talking about touring the gold medal around the U.S. when it’s over.
That is the celebrity side of Wade, the former quiet kid from Chicago. For the next two weeks, he’s about one thing: winning gold.
(AP)
He is the embodiment of the team’s nickname, Redeem Team.
His plan? "Just have the best 16 days of your career and you’ll be fine. I’ve been ready for the Olympics for four years now."
On Sunday, they open the Olympics by playing China, in what figures to be the most-watched basketball game ever.
And for now, Wade is not about his T-Mobile commercials with Charles Barkley, getting on his list of faves. In fact, that might be true of the entire team.
Well, wait a minute. No, it’s not true. Wade is still about those things. What’s happening here with him, and with the team, is about finding a way to mold superstars into something we can respect, not just marvel over.
"They welcome us with open arms here,’’ he said. "Totally different than in Greece (at the Athens Olympics four years ago). "That was like being on the road: `Boo.’ Americans were cocky, overconfident, overpaid athletes. That’s the way we were perceived. They see us in a different light now: We’re not about the money. We’re about playing the game we love."
Wade is one of four players returning from the team that won bronze four years ago, if you can call it winning. Carmelo Anthony said people would boo them even when they weren’t on the court.
To listen to Wade is to think he might have been booing that team, too. And he doesn’t want his legacy to be associated with it.
This is his chance to redeem himself.
His own career wasn’t looking too good just a few months ago, with a battered body and a bum knee that just wouldn’t heal. Jerry Colangelo, in charge of restructuring this team, went to Chicago to watch Wade workout, make sure his body really could handle being on the team.
Not long ago, he could hardly dunk. People were wondering if he would ever be healthy again, and frankly, so was he.
So he did something this summer that he has never done before — "Live in the weight room" — in preparation for the Games. He blamed his knee pain on weak muscles around the knee.
And now, in practice games for the Olympics, he has made big windmill dunks and splashy plays.
Are you 100 percent?
"Have you seen the highlights?"
That snappy little comment, which sounds like a commercial slogan for "I’m back" is the new Wade.
It seems funny, somehow, to hear him talk in such a folksy, back-to-basics way about the Olympis. I met him when he was at Marquette, and wrote that, "This is a nice story about a nice young man who had a not-so nice early childhood on the South Side."
Over the next few days, I got emails from his former teachers giving testimonials about how nice he really was.
Is that Wade still here? He seems so different now.
He talked about meeting President Bush once, with Shaquille O’Neal.
"He was very funny," Wade said. "I can’t say what he said, but know that he looked at Shaq and was awed by his size."
Don’t take this wrong. Wade still seems like a nice guy, but an entirely different person. Nothing wrong with that. He has made a gigantic success of himself. And maybe now he’s about to redefine the word superstar. It was hard to stomach that word in Greece.
"That wasn’t about this team," he said. "This wasn’t the team."
See, Wade doesn’t see this as the same team with different players. It’s a different team entirely.
NBA players didn’t want to play in the Olympics four years ago. Wade said that even he arrived not exactly dreaming of winning gold.
And it wasn’t until they lost to Puerto Rico, he said, that it hit them that other countries might be good, too.
Darn superstars.
What’s impossible to figure out is when it no longer was an honor to win gold for the U.S., and how that has changed back now.
"Once we lost in `04, all the talk was the USA is not this, not that," he said. "Everyone has pride. I’ve been thinking about it for four years. I want it as bad as an NBA championship."
Someone asked Wade who his favorite player is on a foreign team.
"I have no favorite player on any other team," he said.
Another cool line. So the commitment is there, but it had better be real.
You hear Wade talk about visiting the athletes in the Olympic village, and his plans to go watch boxing, track, diving and swimming, and feel part of the Games. At the same time, the team is staying in a ritzy hotel off the grounds.
He says today’s players are not about the money. But later, someone asks him if he’d consider leaving the NBA for a European team if offered $50 million. There are rumors about that with LeBron James.
"Yeah, yeah," Wade said about 1/1000th of a second after the question was asked.
Is he a fake? Is Redeem Team a fake, too, setting us up?
I don’t think so. That shy Chicago kid is buried deep under a superstar. But superstar doesn’t have to be a swear word.
Wade can prove it.
