Dwyane Wade has gone down as one of the greatest NBA players of all time, but his father didn’t think he was going to amount to much growing up. Dwyane Wade Sr. appeared on The Timeout, where he was asked when he realized his son was going to be good at basketball.
“It took a long time for me to recognize him as a basketball player,” Wade Sr. said. “So, it probably happened like when he went to Marquette. It wasn’t before that. I mean, it was one time before that. He went down state or something in his AAU, and he came off the bench and they won the championship ’cause he led them there.
“So, that probably was the opening, the eye-opening,” Wade Sr. continued. “Before that, I mean, he was just an average basketball player. He wasn’t all that… He was alright.”
Wade admitted he wasn’t great at basketball when he was young, but thought he had started “hooping” when he got to Harold L. Richards High School. Wade Sr. stated that was indeed the time when he played in that AAU tournament, but despite seeing those flashes, he still didn’t think his son would make it to the NBA.
“The truth is this,” Wade Sr. stated. “Everybody be talking about, ‘Oh, when I saw him at Marquette, I knew he was going NBA.’ But like, I didn’t even know it when he was at Marquette until the Final Four. Like, that’s really when you could see it, ’cause you didn’t really see too many games. So, you couldn’t see it see it.
“And then when he went to the Final Four and he put up the stats he did, you was like, ‘All right, yeah, he might be ready, you know,'” Wade Sr. added. “So, but no, I ain’t see it before then.”
Wade Sr. revealed that Wade couldn’t jump too high at first and wasn’t all that athletic. It was only later on that he became the athletic freak that we saw in the NBA.
Wade really started making a name for himself when he led Marquette to the Final Four in 2003. The highlight of that magical run, of course, was a 29-point triple-double in an 83-69 win against No. 1 overall seed Kentucky in the Elite Eight.
Marquette would lose to Kansas in the next round, but Wade’s stock had risen tremendously by then. He had averaged 21.8 points, 6.6 rebounds, 6.0 assists, 1.8 steals, and 1.6 blocks per game in the tournament, and the Miami Heat would select him with the fifth pick in the 2003 NBA Draft.
Wade would go on to win three titles, a Finals MVP, and a scoring title in his 16-year NBA career. He also made 13 All-Star, eight All-NBA, and three All-Defensive teams. We ranked Wade as the third greatest shooting guard of all time, with only Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant being ahead of him.
Wade was named to the NBA’s 75th Anniversary Team in 2021 and was later inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2023.
