A Father First by Dwayne Wade misses a layup

I’m a dad that is not a sports fan.  I know the big names, but I don’t have any idea what position they play or how their last game was.  Dwayne Wade is a superstar basketball player with the Miami Heat.  If you’re like me you thought that he was a character from A Different World.  “A Father First” is his life story that takes readers from his impoverished beginnings in Chicago to living the high life in Miami. 

Dwayne Wade grew up in a poor neighborhood in Chicago with his mother who was addicted to drugs for most of his childhood.  He’s got a very tight relationship with his sister, Tragil, had a distant relationship with his father and loves his grandmother very much.  Dwayne is also a father and had a long divorce battle replete with a slightly shorter custody battle for his two boys.

To people that are not sports fans I just summed up the majority of the book in those four sentences.  If you enjoy basketball or the NBA you’ll like “A Father First” much more than I did.  The title of the book and the content of the book do cross paths, but this isn’t wholly a book about being a dad.

In A Father First, I expect to hear about epic parenting decisions and good or bad things that led you to where you are today.  Is the title of the book merely a mistake, bad PR or a case of bait and switch?  If the book were given another title it could’ve easily been marketed toward another demographic.  The skeptic in me says that Mr. Wade’s divorce settlement was a leading candidate for writing A Father First.  The skeptic in me then starts to scream and jump up and down when you look at the timetable for the writing of the book and its alignment to the NBA lockout in 2011.

Was the book produced merely as a fluff PR piece for Dwayne Wade during the NBA lockout?  That certainly is possible, but only he and his handlers know for sure.  As a book, A Father First is entertaining to basketball fans, but even they may tire of it.

Mr. Wade certainly seems like a nice guy and the fact that he has sole custody of two young boys endears him in the category of Dads.  However, there are millions of nice people, some of them Dads and most of them don’t have a story that translates well into print.

Bottom line:  A Father First by Dwayne Wade has a couple moments of inspiration, but those moments are too few between to make this a book that’s worth your time.

We received a complimentary copy of the book from the publisher for review purposes.