DAN LE BATARD: IN MY OPINION Dwyane Wade not yet holding up his end of bargain

DAN LE BATARD | IN MY OPINION
Miami Heat's Dwyane Wade not yet holding up his end of bargain

By Dan Le Batard

dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com

At what point is it simple human nature, as the mockery grows and echoes, for LeBron James and Chris Bosh to look at leader/big brother Dwyane Wade and ask themselves, ``What the hell did he get me into here? And when is he going to start holding up his end?'' Wade doesn't look like Wade. He is missing easy shots (or easy for him, anyway) we've watched him make here for seven years. Headed into Saturday night, he had only two games this season in which he made more shots than he missed. Two. This from a guy who, for his career, basically makes half his shots. In four losses, he has gone 4 for 16, 2 for 12, 1 for 13 and 6 for 21. That's not Dwyane Wade. That's Ricky Davis.

Worse still, players are having huge nights while he's guarding them. Ray Allen (35 points), Stephen Jackson (30), Anthony Morrow (25), Jodie Meeks (21), Brandon Rush (20) have had their best games this season with Wade in their wake. Demar DeRozan got him for 21, too. This is because Wade is cheating on defense, trying to get steals to ignite a nonexistent fast break that will bring the promised fun and joy in the open court. For all the swirling hate around LeBron, a national narrative so strong and unrelenting that it doesn't sway even as James plays well and Wade plays poorly, the stumbling Heat wouldn't be the subject of such laughter today ifWade had merely been Wade so far.

Seventeen games ago, Wade was a beloved champion who would never have to buy a meal in this town again because he had orchestrated a free agent coup unlike any in sports history. Seventeen games later -- it can happen so fast in sports, as Brett Favre can attest -- James and Bosh can't help but notice that the Wade they gave up so much to play with hasn't been the Wade they played against.

There is a lot of empty noise swirling around the Heat at present, a sea-to-shining-sea laughter and hatred that might bother or even cripple insecure men. It is poisonous and angry and a lot to go up against if you don't have an uncommon kind of confidence in yourself and the people around you. That us-against-the-world stuff that is usually manufactured sports cliché, teams railing against imaginary doubters and nonbelievers, happens to be very real in Miami. America despises this fascinating, famous mess of a Heat team, and enjoys its every misery, and the players themselves admit that the size and weight of that has surprised them early.

But I'd like to take you back to one of the most revealing conversations I've ever had with Wade. It was in the middle of the 2006 Finals, around midnight in the center of June, which is the only time that the noise around a basketball team actually matters.

Miami had played two games on the sport's largest stage, lost them both by double digits and was down 13 points at home in the fourth quarter of the third. Wade would save that night late, as he would that entire season, forever branding himself a champion, and immediately afterward, in the dark bowels of the arena, away from all the TV lights and cameras, I asked him if he had been afraid.

He stared at me with cold eyes. There was such a long silence after my question that I thought I had insulted him. I stammered and tried to replace the idea of ``fear'' with the word ``doubt.'' He quickly corrected me then, interrupting me to do so.

``Not doubt,'' he said. ``Never doubt. Never, ever doubt.''

But he came back to my original question on his own.

``Yeah, you fear,'' he said. ``I was afraid. There's something wrong with you if you aren't afraid.''

But isn't there something wrong with you if you don't doubt?

``The building was quiet,'' he said. ``Our season was slipping. I was afraid.''

I asked Wade if this -- 42 points, 15 in the fourth quarter -- was his best moment ever.

``Nah,'' he said. ``My highest emotional moment hasn't happened.''

He laughed.

``Not yet.''

This is how real confidence sounds, vanquishing vulnerability instead of concealing it. Courage is not the absence of fear. That's fearlessness, and it is not human. Courage is the ability to overcome fear -- to not let the fear morph into doubt and the doubt to morph into defeat. Wade felt that happen all around him three games after our conversation, as he made basket after basket after basket in the quietest Dallas you've never heard.

Athletes at the very top of sports have overcome too many opponents -- competition, upbringing, poverty, surroundings, trauma, odds -- to doubt their own ability. Their ability has allowed them to conquer too much, has rewarded them too many times in too many ways, to question it. Sports is too competitive an ecosystem, too literally survival-of-the-fittest. Doubt usually gets weeded out, vaccinated, made extinct, long before it can climb as high as the bejeweled place where the Wades of the world reside.

That kind of conviction, however, does not extend to the man next to you. You don't trust him nearly the same way you trust yourself.

So what about now? In the middle of this unprecedented thing, Wade has never endured a stretch like this. He has no reference points, no landmarks. And LeBron is the one with the ball. Wade put this whole thing together. The King came to him, risking his image and legacy to do so. And the offense, supposed to be fun and soaring, looks sometimes like it is being run in a janitor's closet.

It is hard to imagine that James and Bosh haven't noticed this. They have been essentially what they are and what they promised. Wade hasn't. His midrange game has vanished. He isn't finishing. It is a small sample size, a ridiculous one -- 17 games -- and it is unfair to put it up against a seven-year body of work that has no betrayal. But the volume and perspective on this team is completely distorted, and the laughter that grows louder with every stumble is the ally of a doubt you don't want around your team.

Oddly, the only one being made better by all this merging of talent is Carlos Arroyo, who already has made more three-pointers than he did all of last year, but that wasn't quite the point when three players rose from the earth to be introduced amid smoke and fireworks. It has all been such a famous mess that Barbara Walters actually asked President Barack Obama about it, which would have been the strangest basketball moment of last week if Kobe Bryant hadn't revealed to Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski that he was mentored by Michael Jackson.

There are many tests in the months ahead for the Heat, but those tests are not in Boston or even Los Angeles. Yes, there are questions here at home -- Is there enough rebounding? How do you defend the point guard? Where's the fast break? Can you do real winning while last in the league in points in the paint? -- but this team has 65 meaningless meaningful games to answer all those.

The more interesting test ahead is this:

Will these players start doubting not themselves but each other? Will they be contaminated by the doubt that surrounds this us-against-them team?

It would be the most natural thing in the world. Human. A superteam losing to Memphis? Blown out at home against an Indiana team that didn't even play well? Appearing to regress the past two weeks while laboring against Toronto, Charlotte, Memphis, Indiana, Philadelphia? This as a national media howls with delight in an angry, unrelenting way that mocks your every loss? And the few fans you do have are frustrated and disappointed? And that $50 million you gave up to cover your weaknesses (Udonis Haslem on the inside, Mike Miller on the outside) isn't around to help?

Flailing could test friendships, and failing could test faiths.

That's overstated? It's just basketball? No, it isn't. Basketball is who they are, what they are. Most men get a lopsided amount of their self-worth from what they do for a living. Coach Erik Spoelstra talks a lot about team ego, but do these individuals have the team confidence to push all of that unrelenting laughter and hatred back to believe in each other as the noise rattles all around their faith and the standings shake it? You know what usually births team confidence? Winning. Successes stacked atop each other to reaffirm belief.

(By the way, would anyone out there even want Spoelstra's job at the moment? If the Heat loses, it is because of him. If the Heat wins, it is not because of him. It is no-win, even if he wins.)

There is plenty of room for perspective here. This sport is filled with champions who had slower starts than this, including one Wade led. A team is still going to have to beat James, Wade and Bosh four times in seven games, and there aren't a lot talented enough to do that. And the young core of this was put together for the years ahead, not the weeks ahead, as the Celtics and Lakers age faster. The next 65 games are for learning more than winning. Though disappointing, it doesn't matter at all if the Heat goes into the playoffs a No. 4 seed. That's what Boston did last year in going 27-27 down the stretch.

But, at some point, if this stumbling continues, because all three of these stars believe in themselves in an uncommon way, the doubt isn't going to be something they place on themselves as national shame and ridicule grow. That mirror is always going to tell them that they are the fairest of them all, that someone else is to blame for all that laughter they've never before heard.

A long time ago, before he had a trophy as proof, before he put this whole thing together, down 13 in the fourth quarter, Wade did not for a second doubt Wade.

Never, ever.

But at what point do you?

And, more relevantly, at what point does LeBron?



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