Former Miami Heat NBA basketball player Dwyane Wade thanks the crowd during his statue unveiling ceremony outside Kaseya Center, on Oct. 27, in Miami.Michael Laughlin/The Associated Press
Over the weekend, the Miami Heat unveiled a statue of Dwyane Wade outside their arena. As tends to happen in these cases, it didn’t go well.
Statues are a sign of dissipation. A team (or civilization) that was once vigorous and thriving is no longer. Time to start erecting things. Arenas mostly. But too often, statues.
Unfortunately for Wade, he was at the unveiling. Cameras were able to catch the full horror of the moment.
Wade is a handsome guy. It’s not that his likeness isn’t, exactly. It’s that the life-size representation doesn’t look human. The face is somehow wrong. It’s internet meme face.
As the statue emerged from a burst of dry ice and fire, you could see Wade struggling not to grimace. He stutter-stepped nervously around the monstrosity trying to find its good angle, but it doesn’t have one.
His judgment of what passes for the pinnacle of a sporting life: “You all look at this? You all got videos, photos? Like, that’s crazy. I can’t believe that. Who is that guy?”
Wade gestured over his shoulder at the statue as he said it. Normally, a person would turn and look at what they’re pointing out. But Wade could not bring himself to see it again.
As the recent mania for tearing them down should have taught us, statues of real people are a pickle. Not just politically, but aesthetically and geographically. In museums, fine. In parks, maybe. In public squares, no.
If you want to make a statue of a giant spider (Louise Bourgeois) or a mermaid (Edvard Eriksen) or a child ballet dancer (Edgar Degas) that’s okay because it’s art and it’s abstract. Great art is forever. Abstraction works in every context.
But once you start glorifying specific individuals in bronze you are into religion, which belongs in a house of worship and few other places.
The high-water mark of this bad idea remains a bust of Cristiano Ronaldo unveiled at, and then removed from, an airport in Portugal. It resembled the soccer star reimagined as a character from Scooby Doo.
Ronaldo’s been on a long, slow journey down from the peak of his celebrity. That statue was the part of the hike that he went ass over teakettle and descended a few thousand feet in an hour.
“It’s not my fault,” the sculptor, Emanuel Santos, told the BBC. “All the sculptors in all the parts of the world just make the first step, you know what I mean? It’s the other guys.”
‘The other guys’ – I’ve tried this excuse, too. It’s harder to pull off as a writer.
As with any good rule, there are exceptions that prove it.
The statue of falling Bobby Orr in front of the TD Garden in Boston is wonderful. I’ve spent long moments walking around it, admiring it. But it’s great because it’s not about the subject. It’s about a moment.
You don’t need to know who Bobby Orr is, or understand what’s being represented, to appreciate its mastery. The same way I don’t need to know who the Burghers of Calais are or why they look so miserable.
The skill of makers is part of the problem here. The few great sculptors left work in huge hunks of metal or move dirt around with backhoes. Anybody who’s willing to take a sporting commission is, by definition, second rate.
The firm that did Wade’s statue has a whole business transforming the profane into the sacred. It has done Luc Robitaille, Curly Lambeau and A’ja Wilson, who is 28 years old.
I guess the Little League World Series champions need to really need to start pushing those fundraising chocolate bars if they want to live forever in bronze.
The most amazing thing about Wade’s statue is that he signed off on it.
“I spent a lot of time on my statue,” Wade said.
Is he being literal? Was he, Dwyane Wade, the person holding the chisel? This mystery is deeper than some oceans.
You kind of felt for Wade. This was supposed to be the shining moment of his life – greater than any of his championships or individual prizes. Instead, it’s a daylong ‘get a load of this’ moment in the news cycle, and a lifetime of online ribbing. It’s so bad that, in certain precincts of the internet, Wade’s unruly likeness managed to push the impending U.S. civil war to the background for a few hours.
Maybe that is the point of sports statues – to remind us of the vanity of man and its pointlessness. I can imagine a future Toronto in which a visitor stumbles upon the Legends Row in front of Scotiabank Arena and thinks, ‘This city sure used to have a lot of astronauts.’
After a couple of generations have passed, all statues of people look ridiculous. Here’s guessing sports statues – which tend to show the subject in some pose of athletic domination – will surpass all the guys waving swords on horses in that regard.
You’re standing in front of a likeness of some guy you’ve probably never seen in person, often dead, being told how great he was. Meanwhile, a few hundred feet that way, the people who are currently the world’s best are doing the same thing, in person, right now.
It’s like putting a statue of unknown soldier in front of a live missile battery.
Great athletes don’t require expensive memorials. Their work – captured in words and images – is the memorial. The legends among them will live long past their years in the stories told about them by people who were there.
Then they should fade. Maybe we just haven’t been at this long enough. The mass-media era of global sport began in the 1950s. Many people still alive have seen the whole breadth of it.
But if it keeps on at its current pace, parts of the sports story should fade, along with the people who were there. Any endeavour that spends too much time and effort looking backward is in the midst of failing. And failure is always hard to see coming until you’re right up close to it, looking it in the face.
