Sunday was supposed to be one of the best days of Dwyane Wade’s life. Back in January, longtime Miami Heat president Pat Riley announced that the team planned to honor Wade with a statue, and now it should finally be unveiled. This wouldn’t be like the comically small statue of Philadelphia 76ers legend Allen Iverson that was erected outside that team’s training complex in April. According to Riley, this would be a memorial to the greatest player to ever wear a Heat jersey. It would dominate the entrance to the Kaseya Center, where the Heat play their home games. Wade saw the significance. A few hundred players have been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, he said Today Show before the event. But in the NBA, statues like this are reserved for the greats, the ones even casual fans know by their first names: Kobe, Magic, Michael.

At the ceremony, Wade sat front row with his family and smiled warmly as Udonis Haslem, his teammate of 15 years, and then Riley paid tribute. The Heat’s home games may be full of South Beachers, Haslem said, but Wade brought joy to all of Miami. He name-checked Liberty City and Overtown, historically black neighborhoods. Wade’s adult son took the stage and said that Wade always put fatherhood above basketball. They hugged each other. Wade wiped away his tears. The moment of revelation had arrived. The eight-foot-tall bronze statue was hidden behind large black panels. They slid open, flames shot out, and for a moment a gust of mist obscured the figure’s face, adding to the tension.

Suspense is what the attentive audience has come to sense in these revelations. Some were well received. The naturalistic bronze statue of Michael Jordan at the United Center in Chicago is like a Jumpman logo made of flesh and then metal. It looks elemental, as if it could be worn over millennia and still retain its basic character. But there were also failures. Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue with oddly stretched proportions and an overly angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-rate Terminator Villain, and to make matters worse, the inscription at the base was marred by spelling errors. In 2017, Cristiano Ronaldo fans were so horrified by a sculptor’s bust of the legendary footballer that they urged him to make a new one.

It brings me no joy – and in fact causes me considerable pain – to report that Dwyane Wade’s statue may be the worst of them all. Studio Rotblatt Amrany, the same company that made Kobe’s statue, put 800 hours of work into it, they say. And yet, as a likeness to Wade, it doesn’t even reach the level of Madame Tussauds’ wax work. Amid increasing backlash, one of the sculptors said that no one else could do it better – a claim that contradicts the entire history of sculpture.

Wade had asked the firm to recall a moment from Miami’s 2008-09 season that appeared to have deepened his bond with the city. After Wade had just hit a buzzer-beater in the second overtime against the Chicago Bulls, he jumped onto the scorer’s table and shouted in front of a euphoric home crowd, “This is my house.” He was 27 years old. The statue gives him the fat, grizzled appearance of a man in his mid-50s. He appears to be suffering from a rare elephantiasis that occurs hyperlocally in the jaw. The eyes are all wrong. If Wade ever had to flee the country and the detectives tracking him abroad for some reason only had a cast of that statue to identify him, he would likely remain at large forever.

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In the late 17th century, a statue of Bernini so angered Louis XIV that he demanded its destruction. The Sun King was obsessed with his own image. Bernini portrayed him as a Roman general on horseback, but at some point, for reasons lost to history, he decided to put a smile on the king’s face. Louis He spared the statue, but had it moved to a remote part of the gardens of Versailles.

I played the video of Wade’s revelation over and over again to see if he might reveal a similar outburst of anger. I wouldn’t have blamed him. The Associated Press reports that it wasn’t the first time he saw it. While the statue was being made, he visited the sculptors several times and looked at the head in advance. Maybe he had reacted violently back then, before putting on a brave face in front of the cameras. Wade had to know that any twitch or grimace would have made the social media circus that was sure to come even worse.

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He took a few hesitant steps toward the statue, his hands folded in front of him. He moved to the side to look at it in profile. He was polite enough. When his family came to him, he seemed touched. In his remarks, he asked the statue, “Who is this guy?” Some news reports of the unveiling have picked up on this quote, but it was clearly written in a spirit of humility, such as: How could a man like me, made like this came from humble circumstances, end up on a pedestal?

Some people believe that you are the same on the basketball court as you are in real life. That’s a child’s idea of ​​wisdom, but in Wade’s case there’s some truth to it. He was pure grace on the hardwood. At 1.90 meters, he wasn’t one of the NBA’s giants. Wade was an everyman, albeit a shifty one, who could fearlessly jump to the rim, flip between bigger defenders and score. The best part was the way he almost always landed cleanly on two legs, in the relaxed way one comes to rest on the bottom step of the stairs in his parents’ house.

By all accounts, Wade is just as elegant off the field. He certainly has the grace not to spoil an event meant to honor him. Yesterday, after 24 hours of near-death condemnation of the statue, Wade defended it and stood up for the sculptors. He said that it didn’t have to look like him because it was just an artistic expression of a particular moment. I think he deserved a better statue, but maybe it was all his fault in the end. Maybe his play was the problem. Perhaps Wade moved too fluidly to ever be brought to a stop in Bronze.