(Pics) NBA: Dwayne Wade fashion spread in Esquire’s December issue
Leather jacket ($3,450) by Louis Vuitton; cotton T-shirt ($30 for three-pack) by Calvin Klein Underwear; cotton jeans ($235) by AG Adriano Goldschmied.
Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl
Story and more pics after the jump….
Wool cardigan ($1,360) by Louis Vuitton; cotton T-shirt ($30 for three-pack) by Calvin Klein Underwear; rose-gold Big Bang King Power Gold Split Second Power Reserve watch ($30,900) by Hublot.
Cashmere cardigan ($1,395) by Gucci; cotton shirt ($415) and wool flannel trousers ($700) by Louis Vuitton; rose-gold Big Bang King Power Gold Split Second Power Reserve watch ($30,900) by Hublot.
Never has a team been so engineered for dominance as this year’s Miami Heat. Chris Bosh left Toronto for a ring, joined by that guy from Cleveland. But this is the man they came to play with, and who’ll show them how it’s done.
It is media day for the Miami Heat, the team at the center of the NBA universe. Soon every day will be Media Day for the Heat; never will an NBA season, which has long been an eighty-two-game warm-up for the NBA playoffs, feel so long. This summer, LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors, both free agents, decided to join forces with the Heat’s Dwyane Wade to create a team of such ineffable puissance that oddsmakers already have installed them as heavy favorites to win it all, while sundry pundits are predicting that they’ll break the regular-season record of seventy-two wins currently held by Michael Jordan’s 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. It is, no doubt, the greatest basketball team in history never to have played a single game. In an hour, Dwyane Wade will be in uniform, sitting at a microphone flanked by Bosh and James as three hundred or so reporters and cameramen gather for a press conference. He sits center stage because, at twenty-eight, Wade’s still the Man, still the face of the franchise he led, helped hugely by Shaquille O’Neal, to an NBA championship in 2006. But today’s press conference — a clusterfuck without precedent for Miami, no NBA hotbed — will mainly be about LeBron, who will furrow his brow, stroke his chin, and look puzzled and unhappy as questioner after questioner asks him how it feels to go from hero to shitheel.
Later today, Wade and the Heat will head to an Air Force base six hundred miles away, where Pat Riley, the team’s president, decided to hold training camp in an apparent effort both to keep his team cloistered and to instill a more ascetic sense of mission than that provided by the Heat’s traditional post-practice South Beach excursions.
And in a few days — only three minutes into Miami’s preseason opener — Dwyane Wade will tweak a hamstring, leave the floor, and give journalists all the reason they’ll need to start talking about how the Heat is now LeBron’s team.
Right now, though, Wade’s sitting in a black T-shirt with NERD in big white block letters on the chest, talking with Esquire about his journey from the South Side of Chicago to fame, fortune, and scarfing shrimp on the White House lawn:
I have no idea. I’m a junior — I got that name from my father. I asked him — my grandma said that’s how she felt it was spelled. There you go.
My freshman year, I was academically ineligible — I didn’t pass my ACT. But I was able to practice with the team. This one day, the ball swung to me in the corner. I took it to the baseline and Jon Harris came to take a charge, and I just took off over the top of him. As I’m taking off, he’s trying to fall back, and I just go over the top of him and dunk.
I mean, I surprised myself. Everybody in the gym was like, Holy shit! It was one of those moments where everybody stopped. They couldn’t believe it. It was in the school paper the next day, it was talked about all over campus, and what it did was just make everybody continue to keep my name in their minds for next season when I’d take that court.
A lot of the stuff you do in games, you can’t practice it. You can practice your jump shot, you can practice your ball handling, but you can’t practice some of the moves and the things you do in games. It just comes at that moment — it’s God-given.
I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do none of that. No tattoos.
When you get to college, you’re finally on your own, and you feel like, I’m a man now, I can make my own decisions. When I was growing up, we couldn’t wear earrings, couldn’t wear hats, and my father said, “No tattoos.” So I started wearing hats, I got my ears pierced, and I said, “I’m gonna go to the tattoo parlor.” I walked in there and I walked right out. It just wasn’t me. And I knew it wasn’t me. It would’ve been forced. I would’ve been being like other people and not myself.
The thing about fame or celebrity is that there’s not a book to show you how to do things. You’ve got to learn on the fly, and you’ve got to feel your personality — how much you can deal with, how much you can’t deal with — and try to make it work. You’ve got to take the arrows that come with it and just try to be the best person you can be.
One thing Shaq did for me when he came was give me knowledge that I needed. I was still a shy kid, and he pretty much told me to open up. He said, “Let your creativity be seen, put your fingerprints on the things that you’re doing.” It opened up so many more business opportunities for me.
Anybody can say what they want to about Shaq, but he’s a great businessman, a very smart man.
We love to play this game — we would play this game for free — but we have an unbelievable opportunity to do more. Guys are brands and guys are part of big brands. You have to look at yourself as a brand, no question about it.
No one said success in life is easy. If it was, everybody would be successful, and success wouldn’t be a big thing. I know I got a great opportunity and I cherish it.
My time in Miami will come and go. There’s going to be another guy come in, but that fan stays the same. There’s going to be fans in the arena now watching me who’re going to be here thirty years from now watching someone else.
If I come back, in my next life I’d like to be a trust-fund baby, where my parents made a lot of money and I could just fly under the radar.
We’ll be the Yankees of basketball. It’s already true — a love/hate thing, but you know what? We’re fine with that. We understand that we did something we wanted to do. As an individual, you don’t get an opportunity to do that often in this game. That’s what it came down to with us — myself and Chris and LeBron — we all felt for the first time we were able to control our own destiny.
It’s weird, really, because I haven’t felt it yet. I haven’t been on the court with those guys yet in battle. The only thing I can go off of is that when Shaq was here, I was on the court and I said, “I got Shaq.” It changes the game — the game is totally different. Right now I haven’t felt it yet.
This team has a lot of work to do. I don’t look at the individual players right now and say, “Oh, my God, this is amazing.” I say, “This team, we got a lot of work to do, because there’s a lot of teams out there — L. A., Orlando, Boston, and so on — that are better teams than the Miami Heat right now. So how do we get to their page fast, like, now?” I look at this team and I’m proud of it, I’m happy, but once tomorrow starts, we got to get to practice. We got to get to work.
It’s hard, what I was doing the last couple years, trying to score forty a night, trying to lead us. It’s hard on your body. So let these guys take me to the mountaintop, and I’ll ride the wave.
The way I was raised, getting married early, having a kid early — all that set me up to be in this position where I have guys who look to me as the older guy. And I am that — I can be that for them. I do have a championship I was blessed to be able to win. I know how it looks, so now I’m able to pass that knowledge on to guys that haven’t won it yet, that haven’t done it. So this is a great opportunity for all of us.
Getting invited to the White House is unbelievable. All these friends — LeBron, Chris Paul, Magic Johnson, Alonzo, Carmelo, Bill Russell — the basketball was unbelievable. But the best thing was when we went back to the White House on the lawn, and it was like a big picnic, everyone sitting out there, talking, Luther Vandross playing in the background. It was just a great vibe.
It was a reflective moment. You look around and say, Not only is this something I’ve never dreamed of, but it makes you want to strive to be better. I just felt at that moment, I want to do more, because I like this. I want to feel this again, how it felt to be there amongst a lot of greats.
You have those moments where you reflect. Wherever you’re at — driving the car, in the plane, wherever — and you say, “No matter what I’m going through in life at the moment, from where I came from to where I am now, you know what? Life ain’t bad.”
Written by By Scott Raab
Pictures by Matt Jones
THE BLOG
HOT 97
OT the REAL | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle152
Another Philly spitta spitting in NYC, OT the Real! OT has been on his been on his grind since he got out from his 6yr bid, and he likes to show his street side through his bars.
LGP QUA | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle151
We’ve been watching this young man spit bars for a while now, the very talented “Voice of the Youth” has been dropping bars all over the Web! LGP Qua, LGP stands for “Let’s Get Paid”, one of Philly’sfinest… it was time to bring him up!
SMOKE DZA | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle150
A lot of speculation since the launch of “Block Work” that the legendary Hot97 #FlexFreestyle Series was not happening any more… But not only is it still counting with Smoke Dza hitting the 150 mark with Bars!
HOODCELEBRITYY | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle149
Ok… We’re getting back into action and here’s a great start with the spicy HOODCELEBRITYY!! She’s petite but packs a an exciting lyrical punch.
Dj Drama | Jack Harlow | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle148
On our 148th freestyle, we received the great Dj Drama highlighting his latest treasure find Jack Harlow from Louuvile(Louisville KY) to spit some BARS on the Big platform!
Lil Baby | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle147
Yes Lil Baby is on promo run for sure, dropping freestyles here and there to promote his album “My Turn”. No Doubt dropping by the series with Actual Numbers was a top priority of his and his team!
LINKS
MUSIC
Tee Grizzley | FUNK FLEX | #Freestyle129
Tee Grizzley rejoined us like it’s his next ‘First Day Out’ in these streets! This time he brought Sada Baby to sit next to him as he delivers his bars to Funk Flex.
Bobby Konders Presents: Massive B Legacy, Vol. 1
Release Date: November 19th, 2018 Bobby Konders Presents: Massive B Legacy – Volume 1 is now available and includes ten features on ten tracks. Burro Banton, Vybez Kartel, Bounty Killa, Sizzla, T.O.K., Elephantman, Richie Spice, Chezidek, Chronicle, and King Kong. You can listen on Apple Music, Spotify, and Tidal.
#MusicStillMatters New Music: A Boogie – Nice For What
A boogie gave fans a snippet of this one via his instagram. Finally after all the request to drop the full version from fans – here it is. Check A Boogie’s version of “Nice For What.” Listen below.
#MusicStillMatters New Music: Dave East – Imagine
Dave East is set to release the 2nd installment of his “Karma” series, next week on July 27. Check out this new one off the tape called “Imagine.” Listen below.
#MusicStillMatters New Music: 070 Shake – Accusations
The G.O.O.D. Music rookie 070 Shake releases a new one called “Accusations.” Listen below.
(Video) Tony James – Sweat Slow
Toronto’s very own Tony James has released his major label debut single and visual for “Sweat Slow.” Tony says this one “Is about the one that got away, so we wanted to show the beautiful, happy women representing the ex-girlfriends of the men who took them for granted.” Look out for more from Tony this…
#MusicStillMatters New Music: Childish Gambino – Summertime Magic / Feels Like Summer
Childish Gambino aka Donald Glover follows up his video/song “This Is America” with not only one, but two records for the summer. The “Atlanta” creator tweeted “summer pack,” with a link to his songs, “Summertime Magic” and “Feels Like Summer.”
#MusicStillMatters Stream: Meek Mill – Legends Of The Summer
Meek Mill decided to treat his fans to new music when he dropped a new EP called “Legends of the Summer.” the 4-track tape features Swizz Beatz, Jeremih and PNB Rock. Stream below.
#MusicStillMatters Stream: Future – Beast Mode 2
Future links up with Zaytoven for the follow up to 2015’s “Beast Mode” titled “Beast Mode 2” which includes 9 tracks with a feature from Young Scooter. Listen below.
#MusicStillMatters New Music: T-Pain – Boo’d Up (Remix)
First it was Nicki Minaj and Quavo who put their touch on the track to mixed reviews. Then Fabolous laid his verse on the hit single. Now, T-Pain decided to give his take on the track. Listen below.
TECH TALK
We Know What YG’s Next Purchase Will Be: This ALL RED Special Edition iPhone!
An all red iPhone is on the way – I’m sure much to the delight of the Bloods. LOL! A special edition red version of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus have been introduced, in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of Apple’s partnership with HIV/AIDS organization, (Red).
(Video) Apple Unveils New Spaceship Campus Called “Apple Park”
One of Steve Jobs projects he left behind before his untimely death from pancreatic cancer, was the Apple spaceship campus. Take a look.
(Video) Lil Wayne Featured In EA’s ‘Need For Speed: No Limits’ Game
While we still have no Carter 5 in sight, we can at least get SOMETHING from Lil Wayne in the form of EA’s new mobile game, Need For Speed: No Limits. Players can drive as Weezy in the game, and both his voice and likeness are there for fans to enjoy. Tune is also working…
Sprint Purchases 33% Stake In Jay-Z’s Tidal
Power moves on power moves on top of power moves. Hov just struck a big deal for Tidal and the artists who have stake in the company as well, through Sprint.
(Video) Travis Scott Previews New Heat On Snapchat
Looks like Travis Scott is cooking something up…Astroworld this year?
Azealia Banks Has Been Banned From Facebook
AzealiaBanksVEVO Well, that took longer than expected.
(Video + Photo) Ariana Grande Got Her Own Character In “Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius” Game
Soon you’ll be able to play as Ariana in Final Fantasy and she broke the news to her fans yesterday.
SoundCloud Makes A Major Update That MANY People Will Be Happy About!
When SoundCloud first came out, it quickly became a hub for DJs, uploading their mixes and gaining a decent following because of it. However, as labels became more hip to the new site, they began issuing copyright infringements left to right, and DJs began leaving the streaming website in droves – especially because their accounts…
MARISA EXPLAINS IT ALL
Marisa Mendez x Jamal x Tunisia – Marisa Explains It All [Episode 16: “Holiday Hangover”]
We’ve made it to episode 16 of my podcast, Marisa Explains It All, and I finally decided to share it with you guys here. LOL! On this episode, we pre-gamed before the Ebro In The Morning holiday party…and uh, yeah. Drunk talk and feelings were at an all time high. Our music picks are as…
Behind The Lyrics: Lil Wayne Admits To Botched Suicide Attempt As A Child On “London Roads”
Lil Wayne has long recounted a story of “accidentally” shooting himself when he was 12, playing with a 9 mm handgun. Thankfully, an off-duty cop was around to help young Tune, and he survived to become the rap star he is today. Apparently, that wasn’t the whole story, though! On “London Roads”, a song from…
(Video) Machine Gun Kelly Finally Opens Up About Amber Rose
Machine Gun Kelly is one of my favorite artists and has been a good friend of mine for years now, so it was double the blessing to make my Hot 97 interview debut with him on Ebro In The Morning today! The Bad Boy rapper stopped by to discuss his new single and its powerful…
Behind The Lyrics: Wiz Khalifa Comes For Amber’s Neck On “For Everybody”
Last night, Juicy J dropped his Wiz Khalifa-assisted single “For Everybody,” and boy did Wiz have some choice words for his ex Amber Rose on the track! And to drive the point home, they included a photo of themselves at his wedding to Amber as the song’s artwork.
(Video) Honey Cocaine Plays A Hilarious Game Of Taboo
Toronto-bred raptress Honey Cocaine made her rounds at Hot 97 a few weeks back, promoting her latest mixtape Like A Drug, and its 2 singles, “Gwola” featuring Kid Ink and Maino, and “None Of My Business” with Kirko Bangz and Constantine. Following her dope interview with Jen From BK for Jen’s “Ladies First” segment, I…
Interview: Machine Gun Kelly On Debut Film: “I hope that it kind of strikes a social issue…” [PLUS Details On Sophomore Album!]
This Friday, Colson ‘MGK‘ Baker will make his big-screen debut, starring as Kid Culprit in the romantic drama, Beyond The Lights. Since his 2012 Bad Boy/Interscope debut Lace Up and his breakout single “Wild Boy,” Kells has toured the world and shot not only Beyond The Lights, but two more as-of-yet unreleased films as well.…
Elijah Blake Gives 7 Tips How NOT To Act Around A Celeb, Plus Talks New EP, His First Big Check & More!
Singer/songwriter Elijah Blake has worked with a majority of the biggest names in the music business from Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Usher, Mary J and more, either having written for them or being featured on their songs. Now with his recently released Drift EP (available on iTunes here,) the talented Def Jam signee sat down to…
IFWT Exclusive: Maino Gives Us The REAL Story Of What Happened With The Porn Star!
Maino is currently being sought out by the NYPD for questioning, after an adult film star accused him of assaulting her inside of his truck after they partied at Griffin on Monday night with Drake, Ashanti, JR Smith and more. According to the police report filed by the porn star, Mellanie Monroe, “he started punching…
Mila J Reveals The Real Deal Between Her & A Rumored Beau, Plus Talks New EP, Diet/Workout, Her Mains & More!
Gorgeous singer/songwriter/dancer Mila J finally released her debut EP M.I.L.A. (Made In L.A.) yesterday, after years of trying out girl groups, various solo ventures, random day jobs and the like. She’s finally found her niche now though, and has seen success with her latest singles, “Smoke, Drink, Break-Up” and the Ty Dolla $ign-assisted, “My Main.”…