‘Without him we would not have won’: Wade’s 2008 Beijing Olympics journey

Dwyane Wade was in Chicago in 2007, working out after suffering an injury earlier in the year while playing for the Miami Heat.

There to meet with Wade and his trainer Tim Grover was Jerry Colangelo, then-managing director of the United States men’s basketball national team program and current chairman of the Naismith Hall of Fame.

Time was running out for the United States to select its team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Whatever the squad, the US couldn’t let a repeat of 2004 happen again, where the national team picked up its third, fourth and fifth Olympic losses and settled for a bronze medal.

Colangelo needed to see Wade play to evaluate if he’d be ready to represent the stars and stripes the next year.

“He wasn’t ready, quite honestly,” Colangelo said Friday.

A few weeks after seeing Wade play, Colangelo sat him down to talk, and after a quick talk about Chicago — Colangelo and Wade are from a similar area — he got blunt with his questions.

“Can you get ready? Because you’re not ready now,” Colangelo told Wade. “He (Wade) said, ‘I’ll be ready.’ So we actually selected him without knowing whether or not he would be.”

Wade was officially on the team. It was now up to him to determine if he’d be playing or not.

After recovering, and missing the first two weeks of the 2007-08 NBA season in the process, Wade was back on the court.

Eight months later, he was on the plane to Beijing, ready to represent his country and reassert the United States as the dominant force in the world of international basketball.

The United States ended up winning the gold medal, beating Spain 118-107 in the final. Wade ended the tournament as the red, white and blue’s leading scorer, averaging 16 points per game.

“Without him we would not have won,” Colangelo said. “It’s as simple as that.”