Dwyane Wade says that telling Gabrielle Union that he was having a child with another woman was harder than competing in the NBA finals.
In 2013, the point guard confirmed that he had fathered a child with Aja Metoyer. Despite speculation that the basketball player had cheated, in statements at the time, he underlined that he and Union, whom he had been dating since 2008, were on a break. Still, it was a tough conversation, he says. Soon after, the basketball player welcomed his youngest son, Xavier Zechariah Wade.
On Sept. 21, the “ Club Shay Shay” podcast spotlighted a clip from host Shannon Sharpe’s nearly 2-hour long interview with Wade, in which the NBA player reflected on the moment he told Union he had fathered another woman's child.
Speaking to Sharpe about the complex period in his life, Wade said that he was deeply scared and that the birth of his son continued to have a powerful effect on his relationship with Union.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
Asked by Sharpe if the news was harder than competing in NBA Finals that year — Wade's team, Miami Heat, would go on to win — the basketball player said that it was “way harder to have a conversation with my now-wife.”
Wade noted that he and Union had not yet been married and wouldn't wed until nearly a year later, in August 2014.
“I mean, you’re thinking about it. All right. It’s all scary. The whole situation is scary enough,” Wade continued, noting that up until that point, he and Union had been building a relationship and a life. “And no matter what people say outside or what people think, it’s like, ultimately, like you got to sit with you. You got to sit with this person, this woman you’re gonna be with, right? And I had to sit with my wife about this. Well, my now-wife about this.”
Entertainment News
Sharpe expressed his doubts that Union would have stayed with him had the news of his pregnancy become public before he told her.
“I couldn’t have gotten through that moment without her sitting with me,” Wade replied. “I tried to pussyfoot around it. I tried to break up with her: ‘Hey, you know things has been bad lately. We’ve been having a look at this relationship.’ Anyway, I tried all that. She kept showing up."
Wade said the couple continue to work on their relationship: "It hasn’t been perfect. It will never be perfect. But that was nine years ago, and we still go to therapy. We’ve had shouts about it. We’ve had regular conversations about it. And so it’s been something that is going to continue to be something that I have to work at, and it doesn’t go away because years come or because ‘I say sorry.’”
Four years after Wade and Union married, they welcomed their daughter, Kaavia James, via surrogate.
Gabrielle Union has spoken about Dwayne Wade’s child with another woman in the past
In her 2021 memoir “You Got Anything Stronger?” Union expressed the pain she felt when she first learned that Wade fathered another woman’s child.
“It should go without saying that we were not in a good place at the time that child was conceived. But we were doing much better when he finally told me about the pregnancy,” she wrote in an essay from her book published by TIME.
“To say I was devastated is to pick a word on a low shelf for convenience,” she added. “There are people — strangers I will never meet — who have been upset that I have not previously talked about that trauma. I have not had words, and even after untold amounts of therapy, I am not sure I have them now.”
Union went on to describe how her struggle to conceive a child with Wade, enduring multiple miscarriages, ultimately took a toll.
“The experience of Dwyane having a baby so easily — while I was unable to — left my soul not just broken into pieces, but shattered into fine dust scattering in the wind,” she wrote. “We gathered what we could to slowly remake me into something new. There was no way to disguise where I’d been glued back together.”
Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union co-parent five children
Wade’s eldest children, Zaire Wade and Zaya Wade, are from his relationship with high school sweetheart and ex-wife Siohvaughn Funches-Wade.
The basketball player is also the legal guardian of Dahveon Morris.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
