Sunday would be one of the best days of Dwyane Wade’s life. In January, former Miami Heat president Pat Riley announced the team’s plans to honor Wade with a statue, and now it might finally be unveiled. This wouldn’t look 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 monument befitting the greatest player to ever wear a Heat uniform. It would dominate the entrance to the Kaseya Center, where the Heat play home games. Wade recognized its 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, images like this are reserved for all-time greats, guys, even casual fans, know them by their first names: Kobe, Magic, Michael.

During the ceremony, Wade sat in the front row with his family and smiled warmly as his teammate of 15 years, Udonis Haslem, and then Riley, paid tribute to him. The Heat’s home games may be packed with South Beachers, Haslem said, but Wade brought joy to all of Miami. He controlled Liberty City and Overtown, historically black neighborhoods. Wade’s adult son took the stage and said that Wade had always prioritized fatherhood over basketball. They hugged each other. Wade wiped away 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 blast of mist obscured the figure’s face, adding to the tension.

Tension is what the focused viewing audience has learned to feel during these revelations. Some have been well received. The naturalistic bronze statue of Michael Jordan at the United Center in Chicago is like a Jumpman logo made of flesh and blood and then made of metal. It looks elemental, as if it could be worn out for millennia and still retain its basic character. But there have also been misses. Earlier this year, the Lakers unveiled a statue of Kobe Bryant with strangely stretched proportions and an overly angular face. It made Bryant look like a second-stringer Terminator villain, and to make matters worse, the inscription at the base was marred by spelling errors. In 2017, fans of Cristiano Ronaldo were so baffled by a sculptor’s cartoonish bust of the legendary footballer that they hounded him to create a new one.

It gives me no pleasure – and indeed great pain – to report that the Dwyane Wade 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, we’re told. And yet, as a likeness of Wade, it doesn’t even rise to the level of Madame Tussauds wax figures. Amid mounting backlash, one of the sculptors has said that no one else could do it better, a claim that flies in the face of the entire history of sculpture.

Wade asked the company to commemorate a moment from Miami’s 2008-09 season that appears to have deepened his bond with the city. Having just hit a buzzer-beater in double overtime against the Chicago Bulls, Wade jumped onto the scorer’s table and shouted, “This is my house” to a euphoric home crowd. He was 27 years old. The image gives him the thick, gray look of a man in his mid-fifties. He appears to be suffering from a rare elephantiasis, hyperlocal to the jaw. The eyes are all wrong. If Wade ever had to flee the country, and for some reason the detectives chasing him abroad had only a cast of this 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 outraged Louis XIV that he demanded it be destroyed. The Sun King was obsessed with his own image. Bernini depicted him as a Roman general on horseback, but at one point, for reasons lost to history, he chose to put a smile on the king’s face. Louis XIV must have found the smile that did not match the terrifying martial image he wanted to convey. He spared the statue, but had it moved to a remote part of the gardens of Versailles.

I kept playing the video of Wade’s revelation, to see if he could betray a similar flash of anger. I wouldn’t have blamed him. The Associated Press reports that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen it. He had visited the sculptors several times while the statue was being produced, and had seen an example of the head. Perhaps he had reacted violently then, before putting on a brave face for the cameras. Wade had to know that any wince or grimace would have exacerbated the social media circus that was sure to come.

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He took a few tentative steps toward the statue, his hands clasped in front of him. He stepped aside to take a closer look. He was polite enough. When his family joined him, he seemed moved. In his remarks, he asked about the statue: “Who is that guy?” Some news reports of the unveiling have reproduced this quote, but it is clearly made in a spirit of humility, as in: How did a man like me, from such humble beginnings, end up on a pedestal?

Some people believe that who you are on the basketball court is who 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 6 feet tall, he wasn’t one of the giants of the NBA. Wade was an everyman, albeit a crafty one who could fearlessly jump to the rim, pinball between bigger defenders and score. The best part was the way he almost always landed neatly on two legs, in the relaxed way you might unwind on the bottom step of the stairs in your parental home.

By all accounts and appearances, Wade is just as graceful off the field. He certainly has the grace not to sour an event meant to honor him. Yesterday, after the statue was nearly dead for 24 hours, Wade defended it and stood up for the sculptors. He said it doesn’t have to look like him because it’s just an artistic expression of a certain 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 stand still in bronze.