Dwayne Wade Has More Kobe Bryant Stories That Didn't Make Netflix's 'Redeem Team'
One day, retired NBA superstar Dwyane Wade's tears had no audience. The only people around him while his memories trailed down his face were his former teammates on the 2008 United States men's Olympic basketball team in unedited footage of Netflix's Redeem Team documentary before its October 7 release. For the first time since retiring from the NBA in 2019, Wade's redemptive journey to the 2008 Summer Olympics—the self-doubt, the failure, the heartache— was staring back at him. And seeing the late Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna Bryant's celebratory embrace following the USA's gold medal win pushed the tears out of his eyes.
Kobe tragically passed away on January 26, 2020, a little over a month before Wade sat down for his interview for the doc, so Bryant's inclusion is relegated to archival interviews, highlights, and remembrance from his former comrades. At the Redeem Team red carpet in New York City, Wade was excited to share this commemorative look at his first and only gold medal Olympic experience but couldn't help wishing there was one more person in the audience to take it all in with him.
"It would've been great to be able to watch this with him and just be able to go back and think about that time," Wade tells Men's Health. "It would have been great to be able to sit down and laugh and talk about those moments. We shared a lot of moments that were not in this documentary. I can't say you'll never see those moments because you never know, but we shared a lot of moments."
On the surface, Netflix's 98-minute encapsulation of American basketball's four-year journey back to international supremacy is simply a sports documentary. Executive produced, in part, by Wade and his Redeem Team teammate LeBron James, the doc mythologized the time period without portraying the players as one-dimensional avatars of infallibility. Before we bask in the exalting glory of the Redeem Team's manifest destiny victory, we dive deep into American basketball being lulled into a false sense of superiority thanks to continued dominance at the Olympics before back-to-back bronze medal showings at the 2004 and 2006 Olympics put the sport (and the country) into an existential crisis.
We hear the stories of Kobe working out at 4 a.m. while his teammates return from the club. We find out how Olympic coach Mike Krzyzewski brought a team of alpha males under one "ego umbrella." We relived the highlights of their historic run. We see a 26-year-old clean-shaven Wade train his body back into Olympic shape after having his left knee surgically repaired months before the Olympics. But, at its core, Redeem Team is the story of men in motion.
These men were all racing for the same professional goal. Yet, at the same time, their disparate personal lives pulled them in different directions that could fracture the closest bonds, let alone a collection of ego-driven alpha males who hadn't been anything less than the center of their team since grade school. Until Redeem Team, we never saw the team listen to the story of wounded U.S. soldier Scotty Smiley who lost his eyes in battle yet still serves his country. We never saw Wade candidly express his insecurities about fitting on a team with the NBA elite after a season-ending injury. We never saw them as men with lives, only as players on a mission.
"There were a lot of personal things going on, and we all had to help each other get through those things. Obviously, I was going through injury, but I was also going through a divorce at that time. Guys helped each other get through that stuff."
If you ask Wade who he grew closer to during his time on the Redeem Team, "Kobe Bryant" will leave his mouth before a question mark leaves your lips. "I was able to sit and have conversations with him. I was able to understand his mindset. I was able to laugh with him. It [meant] a lot to laugh with Kobe. He wasn't a laugher; he didn't talk to you. We all handshakes; Kobe had no handshakes with anybody," Wade told Jemele Hill on a live taping of the Jemele Hill Is Unbothered podcast.
The world at large will forever remember the Redeem Team as the re-establishment of American exceptionalism on a global scale. This narrow view of the team's impact necessitates the Redeem Team documentary. It helps recenter our focus on the life lessons a scoreboard doesn't account for, and a gold medal doesn't reward. Wade will always cherish bringing the gold back home. But the growth that experience brought him as a man is what stays with him until this day and brings tears out when remembering the missing building blocks of his maturation.
"It really just showed me that no matter how great you all are as individuals, if you don't unity as a team, it doesn't matter," Wade says. "The world can learn a little bit from this documentary about unity."
You Might Also Like
