Wade destined to return home to Chicago Bulls

One year ago, more than 1,300 miles separated Dwyane Wade from the Chicago he grew up in.

Fifteen years had passed, and cracked concrete playgrounds turned into white-sand beaches, but the link never truly washed away.

"From Robbins, IL," read the first line of his bio on Twitter, or the way he showed himself to the world.

It's the easy narrative now that it's happening, now that Wade finally is a member of the Bulls via a two-year, $47.5 million contract he agreed to last week after negotiations with the Heat turned sour.

At 34, after 13 years and three championships, Wade's finally coming back to Chicago. He's doing it during the summer of LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, when the nation is conditioned to feel some type of way about star players who return home.

But it wrestled in Wade back in 2015, as a rare playoff-less season was reaching its end and he was set to become a free agent, only to re-sign with the Heat one more time. It was the day before the final game of the season, and Wade was asked if he had time to talk about Chicago for a story on his alma mater, Richards High School in Oak Lawn.

He had plenty of time for that.

"You know how the world is now, everything's on the go," he said that day in April 2015 as he was ready to board a plane to Philadelphia. "But when you get a chance to sit back and reflect, I wouldn't change my story for nothing because it makes it that much more gratifying knowing that I was not supposed to be here."

He was peeling back the years to an 8-year-old Wade, dropped off at a South Side doorstep after one parent passed him to another.

His sister Tragil, also his best friend, had sent him off that day after swearing she'd come back, another promise unfulfilled. It was a trick to get the drugs and crime of his mother's household out of his life. But a boy that young still needed something to fill it with.

He turned to basketball.

He had games with no whistles in the backyard, where older brothers beat him to the ground. He had nightly shooting sessions in the dark, where his father only let him shoot with his left hand. His reward was a dollar a day to save toward school physicals. If he spent any of it, he wouldn't be able to play.

Basketball in those days was sometimes a leather ball but other times a rubber one, or a piece of paper, or whatever he could get his hands on. It was a morphing fixture of a dream.

"We had amazing athletes come through Robbins, and I've seen so many come back, not make it, go to college and come back," Wade said last year. "I've seen my older brother do it. He was very good, went off to college and he just came back, and it was like, this is it? This is all you do, you just come back?

"And I didn't want that for myself. I wanted different. I wanted to be one of the first ones. I wanted to show other kids that it can be done."

Of all the promises that filter in and out of a young boy's life, this one had to last. The alternatives filled the alleyways and trash bins around him, and he quickly realized basketball could take him to doorsteps all around the world.

Through the game, he'd go to Milwaukee and to Miami, to Athens and Beijing and so many places in between. He ultimately would leave Chicago for 16 years, with temptations tugging at his jersey all the while.

He had the newfound bond with his mother, Jolinda, who turned herself in for a prison sentence to prove she could fulfill an obligation. She then became a pastor in Chicago, at a church called the Temple of Praise that Wade bought for her.

He had the memories of basketball on the South Side, on those burning blacktops with weeds poking through the cracks. In them live a skinny, under-recruited shooting guard playing in a Bulls jersey as Michael Jordan ruled the court up the road.

And he had the free agency meeting with Chicago in 2010, just as his good friend LeBron James was looking to team up.

They could have come to Chicago. Instead, Wade stayed away.

In the six years since, the utterance of the name "Wade" has evoked bitterness from basketball fans in Chicago. Some questioned if he understood the value of home. Wade was their boomerang, and he and they held very different ideas of how far he needed to go before he came back.

In Wade's mind, he'd spent seven years trying to make a name for himself, ever since he was approached by a reporter at the Rookie-Sophomore Challenge and asked who he was. He still wanted to raise that bar.

So he formed the Big Three with James and Chris Bosh, the NBA's evil empire, and reached four NBA Finals in four years with two rings.

It wasn't all beaches and parades. He sacrificed money to enable it to happen, going 13 seasons without once being the highest-player on his own team. He handed floor space and limelight to James, the player who angered him their rookie year by stealing the thunder at the all-star weekend and at the draft and everywhere else they crossed paths.

He ended a marriage with his high school sweetheart and continued raising two sons, Zaire and Zion, as well as nephew Dahveon. He did what he could to give them a childhood that was better than his own but not wholly different.

"My son (Zaire) loves to play the game, but we have a lot. We're very fortunate. So now his struggle is different than my struggle," said Wade, who married actress Gabrielle Union in 2014. "But he has a struggle because he doesn't have the same hunger or the same want that I had or the same way that I had it.

"So how, as a father, do I pull that out of him? Because I know how to pull it out of a kid that's in the inner city that never has anything. But how do I pull it out of a kid who has a lot?"

Now, with Zaire ready to enter high school, he will find out in Chicago.

It will be different from what Wade dreamed it would be. He's 34 now. Doug McDermott was nice enough to give the 12-time all-star his No. 3 jersey, but it's Jimmy Butler's team for the time being.

Chicago's Big Three of Wade, Butler and Rajon Rondo isn't quite the trio he could have had back in 2010.

The difference now is how it feels.

"There's always a lot of negative pointed toward that childhood, right? … And the negative parts are the negative parts. You can't run from it," Wade said last year. "But I like to tell the kids too that there's so many positives in this that one day you're going to look back at and you're going to say, 'Man, I miss that.' "

For Dwyane Wade, that day has arrived.