Dwyane Wade interview Kobe Bryant, Netflix’s “Redeem Team.”

One day, the tears of retired NBA superstar Dwyane Wade had no audience. The only people around him as the memories flashed across his face were his former teammates on the 2008 United States men’s Olympic basketball team in unedited Netflix footage Buy a team documentary ahead of its October 7 premiere. For the first time since retiring from the NBA in 2019, Wade’s redemptive journey to the 2008 Summer Olympics — the self-doubt, the failure, the heartache — was stared back. And seeing the late Kobe Bryant and his daughter Janna Bryant’s celebratory embrace after the U.S. won the gold medal brought tears to his eyes.

Kobe tragically passed away on January 26, 2020, just over a month before Wade sat down for his interview for the doc, so Bryant’s inclusion has been reduced to archival interviews, highlights and recollections from his former teammates. IN Buy a team red carpet in New York City, Wade was excited to share this commemorative look at his first and only gold medal Olympic experience, but he couldn’t help but wish there was one more person in the audience to take it all in with him.

“It would be great to be able to watch that with him and just be able to go back and think about that time,” Wade says. Men’s health. “It would be great to be able to sit down and laugh and talk about those moments. We shared many moments that were not in this documentary. I can’t say you’ll never see those moments because you never know, but we shared a lot of moments.”

At first glance, Netflix’s 98-minute encapsulation of America’s basketball’s four-year journey back to international supremacy is just a sports documentary. Executive produced in part by Wade and his Redeem Team teammate LeBron James, the doc mythologizes the time period without portraying the players as one-dimensional avatars of infallibility. Before we bask in the glorious glory of the Redeem Team’s clearly destined victory, we take a deep dive into American basketball, which has been lulled into a false sense of superiority thanks to the continued dominance of the Olympics before back-to-back bronze medals in 2004 and 2006. The Olympics put the sport (and the country) in an existential crisis.

We hear the stories of Kobe working out at 4 a.m. while his teammates are coming back from the club. We discover how Olympic coach Mike Krzyzewski assembled a team of alpha males under one ‘ego umbrella’. We relived the highlights of their historic run. We see a clean-shaven 26-year-old Wade training his body back into Olympic shape after his left knee was surgically repaired months before the Olympics. But basically, Buy out a team is the story of people in motion.

All these men were competing for the same professional goal. Yet, at the same time, their different personal lives pull them in different directions that could destroy the closest of relationships, not to mention a collection of ego-driven alpha males who were nothing less than the center of his elementary school team. Until Buy out a team, we never saw the team listen to the story of wounded American soldier Scotty Smiley, who lost his eyes in combat but still serves his country. We have never seen Wade has been candid about his uncertainty about fitting in with the NBA’s elite following a season-ending injury. We never saw them as people with lives, only as players on a mission.

“A lot of personal things happened and we all had to help each other deal with those things. Obviously I was going through an injury, but I was also going through a divorce at the time. The guys were helping each other through those things.”

If you ask Wade who he became close to during his time on the Redeem Team, “Kobe Bryant” will come out of his mouth before a question mark leaves your lips. “I could sit and have conversations with him. I was able to understand his way of thinking. I was able to laugh with him. [meant] lots of laughs with Kobe. He was no joker; he didn’t talk to you We all shake hands; Kobe didn’t shake anybody’s hand,” Wade told Jemelle Hill on a live taping Jemele Hill isn’t worried podcast.

The world at large will forever remember the Redeem Team as the restoration of American exceptionalism on a global scale. This narrow view of team impact imposes Buy out a team documentary. It helps to refocus on the life lessons that the scoreboard doesn’t count, and the gold medal isn’t an award. Wade will always love bringing the gold back home. But the growth the experience brought him as a man is what stays with him to this day and brings tears to his eyes when he remembers the missing building blocks of his maturation.

“It really just showed me that no matter how great you are as individuals, it doesn’t matter if you’re not united as a team,” Wade says. “The world could learn a little from this documentary about unity.”