Photo by Zulekha Pitts
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Dwyane Wade’s bronze likeness has officially reached legend status for all of the wrong reasons.
According to a new survey, the bronze statue honoring the Miami Heat legend and NBA Hall of Famer outside the Kaseya Center is one of the ugliest works of public art in the United States.
It was the bronze face seen around the world on October 27, 2024. On that fateful day, the Miami Heat unveiled the highly anticipated Dwyane Wade statue. And unfortunately, the internet could never forget its very un-D-Wade-looking face.
“The Dwyane Wade statue will haunt me until my dying day,” one user commented on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The statue quickly became a meme and drew comparisons to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kelsey Grammer, Laurence Fishburne, and a Darkseeker from I Am Legend. The bronze visage was even likened to a similarly brutal bust of soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo.
“Who is the guy?” Wade said when he first gazed upon his own likeness in bronze, in a pose meant to re-create the iconic “This is my house” moment that followed his game-winning three-pointer to defeat the Chicago Bulls 130-127 in double overtime on March 9, 2009.
The infamous statue came in at no. 27 out of the 90 public artworks on the list.
Public art enemy no. 1, according to the survey: the Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Alabama. That statue depicts a woman holding up a pedestal with an enormous boll weevil on top of it.
To compile the survey, art company Rivers Wall Art recruited 2,000 respondents “from a diverse, nationwide online panel to ensure balanced representation across regions, genders, and age groups.” The company ensured all participants were U.S.-based and reviewed every response for coherence and consistency.
Joining D-Wade on the list is the infamous Miami Marlins’ seven-story colorful “Homer” sculpture (no. 50). People also hate the $1 million flower sculptures in Coral Gables (no. 61), which some say look like they came from the set of Little Shop of Horrors.
At his Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremony earlier this month, Miami Heat owner Micky Arison admitted the statue doesn’t exactly look like the former Heat star.
“If you look at a variety of different statues when you really focus in on their face, it’s hard in bronze to really get a good, good, but that’s what Dwyane wanted,” Arison said. “And Dwyane liked that. I mean, to me, only if you look at a certain angle does it look like Dwyane. If you look at it straight on, it definitely doesn’t look like Dwyane. But if he’s happy, I’m happy.”
We are counting down the days until the unveiling of the Pat Riley statue outside Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
