Heat unveil new face on Dwyane Wade statue after years of jokes. Here’s why

Dwyane Wade’s statue has a new head, two years after the internet decided the original looked more like Laurence Fishburne.

The Miami Heat unveiled the new face on the bronze statue Friday, Oct. 30, sharing photos on social media. The work was done over the last few days behind a plywood box so nobody outside the Kaseya Center – the Heat’s home arena where the statue stands – saw it until it was finished.

Advertisement

Only the head changed

The rest of the 8-foot statue still shows March 9, 2009. That night Wade scored 48 points, hitting a 3-pointer at the buzzer to beat the Chicago Bulls 130-127 in double overtime, before jumping onto a courtside table to tell the crowd whose house it was.

The face never matched the moment. Wade agreed, and on Friday he put it in writing in an essay titled “This is My House.”

“If people don’t feel that connection when they look at the face, why wouldn’t we try to make it better?” he wrote.

Two years ago, he defended it.

The Rotblatt Amrany Studio sculptors said they spent about 800 hours on the original, and Wade was involved the whole way. At the Oct. 27, 2024, unveiling, he called it “one of the best statues that’s been created because of that it represents for us and for me.” He said it was never meant to be an exact copy of his face. It was “the artistic version of a moment that happened.”

Advertisement

The memes kept coming anyway.

“When you know everything that went into creating something, it’s easy to defend the work,” Wade wrote Friday. “It also belongs to Miami.”

He said the Heat “listened and had honest conversations with everyone involved,” before they agreed to redo the head. He also made a point of not blaming the artists.

“It’s about being willing to listen,” he wrote.

(Below, a meme after the original Wade sculpture was unveiled in 2024)

Sculptors Omri Amrany and Oscar Leon told The Athletic that seeing the piece at full scale in its permanent spot showed them where the portrait could be stronger. Their studio also made the Michael Jordan statue in Chicago and Kobe Bryant’s statue in Los Angles.

Advertisement

Wade was the first Heat player to get one.

He’s the franchise’s…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/heat-unveil-face-dwyane-wade-003021675.html

Author :

Publish date : 2026-10-31 00:30:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.