By S.L. Price

	Even Jordan didn't have a four-game Finals' drive like that of Wade, who averaged a shade under 40 points in Games 3 through 6. Bob Rosato/SI

Such praise is pleasant, of course. Wade likes it. If a coach, a league, even a city, can feel renewed through his actions, wonderful. But on that night in Dallas a woman stood wide-eyed as her son became a champion, and hers was the rebirth that mattered most. Jolinda Wade, recovering drug addict and onetime fugitive from the law, saw Wade scream and the ball come down and felt it very hard to breathe. How did I get here? she thought. How in God's name did we get here?

"No, you can't come with me," his older sister would say. This was 1988, on Chicago's South Side, and six-year-old Dwyane kept begging to come along. "Don't follow me, now," Tragil would say. "Stay home!" Then she would bang out the door of their first-floor apartment into the Englewood neighborhood's rough vibe, an 11-year-old girl wanting a little time on her own. Off she'd walk, sometimes down 59th, sometimes down Prairie, one block, two blocks....

"Hey, someone's following you," people would shout, smirking, and she'd whirl around and look: nothing. But she knew Dwyane was there. He was always there. Tragil had no say in that, not for a while; it was she who taught Dwyane to read and fight, she who wiped snot from his nose, she who often as not mixed the pork and beans with whatever was handy to make dinner -- if there were any pork or beans to be had. A welfare life they lived, surviving on food stamps and government-issued cheese. Every so often she'd try to leave him with their barely awake mother or the two older sisters who came and went, but little Dwyane would have none of that. He had to be with her. He had to be just like her. Soon after Tragil went out the door, he'd race outside, zip across the street, hide behind trash cans or parked cars whenever she checked over her shoulder -- until, too far from home to be sent back, he'd finally pop out behind her, all cocky. She had to take him with her.

"It became a joke; every time she'd leave she'd think I was following her -- even when I wasn't," Dwyane says. "That was my favorite: just the whole chasin', knowing that she loved me and knowing she was willing to have me around. She wanted to have fun with her friends, but I didn't have friends. I wanted to run with her."

The alternatives were going up to Granny's place on the third floor, his aunt's on the second or the apartment where Mom was sinking fast. Jolinda and Dwyane's father, Dwyane Sr., had split up soon after the boy was born, and though his dad would show on weekends and birthdays, Momma's new man was their fact of life. The man, Jolinda says, was "like from hell itself"; Dwyane saw her cowed and fearful and vowed to get him back someday. "I couldn't have him growing up around this, no," Jolinda says. "But I was caught. I was drowning."

In the years they had been together, Dwyane Sr. says, he and Jolinda "both had problems. Back in the '70s a lot of people were doing drugs, different kinds of drugs and smoking weed and stuff. We were too." But Jolinda spun out of control once she had Dwyane and left his dad; their two kids, Tragil and Dwyane Jr., knew enough to leave her alone when the bedroom door was closed and the music blared. When their mother wasn't out late drinking, the two kids would rustle up close to Jolinda to watch TV, Tragil staring at The Cosby Show and thinking, I want that. want to be in that life; Jolinda closing her eyes and hearing the voices of her children, sounding so far away. On other days Dwyane would have special events at school -- Momma, I'm having my first school picture tomorrow! -- but Jolinda was usually sleeping it off. Tragil got him dressed nice for that one.

"My addiction was heroin, cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes," Jolinda says. "Four of them beating down on me."