“Before we came out and talked about Zaya in the locker rooms, I started to, like, become a little different. I started listening a little bit differently,” Wade said.
Wade described the NBA locker-room environment he grew up in as a “masculine, toxic environment” and said he stopped participating in jokes and conversations that he had previously tolerated.
“I wasn’t in on the jokes no more. I wasn’t laughing. I was leaving out of the locker room when I would hear certain things,” he recalled.