Fans Mock Statue Of Dwyane Wade After Unveiling, Miami Heat Star Asks: ‘Who Is That Guy?’

Fans mocked the appearance of the eight-foot-tall bronze statue of former Miami Heat point guard Dwyane Wade after the team unveiled it outside Kaseya Center.

On Jan. 14, Miami Heat president Pat Riley announced the commencement of a project to build a statue to further honor Wade during a halftime ceremony in their 104-87 win over the Charlotte Hornets.

The Heat commissioned sculptors Omri Amrany and Oscar Leon to craft the statue.

The unveiling of Wade’s bronze sculpture, which honored his iconic “this is my house” celebration during the 2009 double-overtime win against the Chicago Bulls, took place on Sunday.

“This is crazy,” he stated during the unveiling. “I didn’t really prepare a lot for this moment.”

The former point guard then said that he did not “prepare much because [he] just wanted to feel this, [he] wanted to look at [the statue]. That’s crazy. I can’t believe that. Who is that guy?”

Wade stated he could not “think of anything because this is out of body.”

“This is nothing that you can dream of,” he declared. “This is nothing I ever thought I would experience.” 

“I didn’t play for this,” he noted. “I didn’t pick up the basketball for this. I picked up the basketball to change my family’s life. My dad put the basketball in my hand, and I kept going because I wanted to change my family’s lives.” 

“And I know that so many of you out here that are having that same dream daily that is waking up and walking in that same air of ‘I want to be the first. I want to do these things. I want to make my mom and my dad proud. I want to, one day, make my kids proud. I want to, one day, make my wife proud,'” the ex-point guard went on to say.

“I – what all the things is, we all – all of us have similar thoughts,” he stated. “And if you’re lucky enough and you’reblessed enough, you have similar experiences.”

Fans of the former point guard soon slammed the appearance of his statue on the social media platform X.

“This statue is so bad it’s making me forget what Dwayne Wade actually looks like,” the user @OG_Rad_Hatter wrote on X. “The longer I look, the harder it is for me to picture his real face.”

“How did someone approve that Dwayne Wade statue,” another user, @GallFAM4, said on the platform. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

During an interview with Rachel Nichols on a Headliners episode in May 2023, Wade stated that he and his family moved out of Florida to ensure the safety of his 15-year-old daughter, Zaya Wade, who came out as transgender in 2020.

He noted that, in addition to taxes and other reasons, policies enacted and enforced by state politicians against transgender people were a reason for his choice to relocate. 

He and his family are now residing in California.