Stronger Than Fiction

When you go deep, the small stories inside the big picture are always what get to you. This is what happened to senior writer S.L. Price reporting his piece about Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year, Dwyane Wade. As he peeled back layers of the life of the great Miami guard, Price got to a place he calls "a mean pocket" of Chicago where "gangs and drug dealers roamed the blocks; gunshots popped day and night." Dwyane was in kindergarten then, counting on his 11-year-old sister, Tragil, to get him ready for his first school picture while their drug-addicted mother slept.

"Both Dwyane and Tragil started telling of how they'd leaned on each other to survive as kids," says Price, "and how he kept supporting his mom through so many down years. He spoke of how, with all his success, the biggest thrill he gets is seeing his mom clean and sober. That's when I realized that Wade's biggest win didn't come last June in Dallas. It came over the last five years when, even as Dwyane was becoming the league's most accomplished young player, he and his mother and family finally broke through. They'd actually made it. They'd survived the worst that urban America can dish out, and through a tough devotion carved out for themselves a measure of peace."

To help you follow the NBA, SI.com has just rolled out new team pages as part of mySI--a free customizable, downloadable desktop application that brings sports fans the most relevant news from across the Web about their favorite teams.

SI.com's mySI NBA pages are your one-stop source for NBA information on the Internet. In addition, every day we'll be showing the latest and best pictures of your favorite team. Behind the exclusive photography, a newly developed aggregating tool (programmed by the editors at SI) pulls up the freshest information of the day and brings it to you in a clear format. We also include links to each team's best fan sites, and soon we will have links on each team page to video from the NBA and TNT. (For fantasy players, there is customized information including an injury tracker to give you an up-to-the-minute status report on your starting small forward.)

Modeled after our successful NFL pages, mySI's NBA pages will bring you all the news and notes on your favorite team, whether it be from local papers (most often) or other national sources. It's all about what you want as a fan; if one of our competitors offers up something you need to know, we're going to bring it to you.