Dwyane Wade has always owned up to the struggles of growing up in rough neighborhoods of Chicago and talked of it in detail in his 2012 memoir ‘A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball.’
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From getting candid about his mother’s addiction to the rampant drug dealing around him, the Miami Heat legend bared his heart in it. While every moment of the memoir is stark and full of life, even during the tough moments, a moment that stood out starkly from all others involved his grandma and hunger.
Still a kid, perhaps not even in his teens, Wade was accustomed to staying hungry. But hunger is not an easy feeling to navigate, especially for a child. And though it wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling for him, being hungry, it still made him think of turning to ‘illegal’ work.
In the book, Wade talks about how, whenever he was hungry, his grandmother would force him to eat at her house. Though he was grateful to have food to eat, he also felt guilt. Eating at his grandma’s often meant that his mother was unable to provide for her children, an implication he wanted to avoid.
In the memoir, Wade wrote, “The real issue was that I didn’t want Grandma to even think that Mom wasn’t feeding us. That was my mother and I didn’t want her to look bad in my grandmother’s eyes.”
This dilemma combined with hunger made him ponder getting a job so that he’d be able to buy sweets. In his own words, “The thought of the candy that a couple of bucks could buy made my mouth water so much I could taste the sweetness.”
However, his biggest issue with the job he wanted, or rather a job he could easily get, was that it was illegal. Wade talked about watching other children in his neighborhood do the same job and get paid a few bucks. In all fairness, the way Dwyane Wade described it, it sounded like an easy job too.
He wrote about this dilemma, saying,“The dilemma had me starting to think about asking for a job as a watch-out boy. I’d seen how kids younger than me in the neighborhood would get tipped now and then with a few dollars just for watching-something I did anyway.”
However, the job of a “watch out boy” was illegal. It essentially needed a young child to just keep a lookout for any figure of authority, like a police officer, while an illicit deal takes place.
Wade, despite how badly he wanted extra money to buy himself sweets, didn’t want to disappoint his grandmother. He described his crisis of confidence, “But here too, sugar fiend though I was, the fear of Grandma finding out how I came by that money had always kept me from going outside the law. A healthy fear.”
To read of hunger in a book and think of ways to get rid of it is, to say the least, easy. For someone who has never truly felt it, never lived years of their life never knowing where or when they’d see the next meal, the complexity of the emotion is all but impossible to comprehend.
Wade lived through that. He felt it day in and day out. But it is not just the process of surviving it that is impressive, it is the moral compass he carried that is inspiring. Even when hungry, Wade was conscious of his mother’s image. He was ready to avoid eating just to not make Jolinda look bad.
