In the last several seasons, Dwight Howard has seen a dramatic shift in the public perception of his image that has cast in more of a negative light.
This was only heightened by how things transpired with both the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets. Things had really begun to get quite messy behind the scenes in Houston as he and James Harden began to butt heads over the last couple of season with each other.
According to Lee Jenkins of SI.com, this was the time that Howard sought out mentorship from pastor Calvin Simmons to help turn things around.
Calvin Simmons has ministered to hundreds of professional athletes in the past decade, including Adrian Peterson, so he is familiar with dramatic falls from grace. “Dwight had gone from the darling of the NBA to the black sheep,” Simmons says. “He realized he had done some things wrong and needed to change, but at the beginning he just wanted to share.”
Howard started seeing Simmons for three hours a day, three to four days a week, in Houston and on the road. “We talked a lot about the difference between physical attraction and authentic love,” Simmons recalls. “When Dwight first got to Orlando, he was looking at teammates who were 28, with a wife and two kids, going off to dinner. That’s what he desired, an authentic relationship with a real girlfriend. But when you’re raised in the faith and you fall into something, there can be a tendency to feel like you’re not worthy of coming out of it. You can go into a dark hole and stay there. He got to a point where he thought, ‘I like sex and I don’t believe the heart really exists, because that’s not what anybody is reaching for.’ So he went through this process where he enjoyed something detrimental to him. Some of our best conversations were about why you put yourself in position to be devalued.”
Howard filled notebook paper with names—from Bryant to Harden, Skip Bayless to Stephen A. Smith—and used the pages to wallpaper a room in his house, so he’d remember to pray for adversaries and allies alike, a healthy substitute for blame. “I saw him cleanse everything,” Simmons says, “and cut away the clutter around him, from a business manager to a security guard to all these financial people.” The sweep included his parents, whom he didn’t call for nearly two years. “That was hard,” Howard sighs. “It’s really hard to tell your parents, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to back away from you.’ They didn’t understand. They were very upset. But I wanted a genuine relationship with them that didn’t have anything to do with money or judgment.”
This is a huge personal step that Howard took to straighten out his life well beyond the basketball court. He no longer had the control and stability in his life that he had during his years with the Magic. This was a necessary step in his eyes to get everything back in order.
For as much as he has deflected things publicly, it's clear that it had affected him behind closed doors more so than previously thought. It essentially was a move to get help from a pastor was something that has gotten back on the right path off the court. This is also something that only time will tell if it was the correct decision to make.
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