I’m well over six feet tall at this point, but I’m still awkward, still haven’t grown into my body. My footwork is good, and I’ve got my “Magic” moves, but I can’t jump that well and I can’t dunk. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s ever going to happen for me.
So one day the officers on the base are all excited because this basketball coach from Louisiana State University was coming to put on a clinic. His name was Dale Brown and I had never heard of him, but I liked him right away. He had a lot of energy and his message was “Discipline and hard work are both great gifts. If you use them properly, you can be anything you want to be.”
I wrote that down and memorized it. I went up to him afterward and asked him if he had any drills for me. I explained that even though I was big and tall, I was clumsy and had trouble jumping. He was very nice.
He said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, soldier. When I get back to Baton Rouge I’ll send you a weight-training program. How many years have you been in the service?”
I answered, “I’m not in the service. I’m only thirteen years old.”
Dale Brown’s eyes opened real wide when he heard that. He said, “Well, son, I’d like to meet your parents.”
My dad, I knew, was in the sauna. I could go get him, but what the hell would he say to Dale Brown? I never knew what my daddy was going to say to anybody. Sarge came out and I introduced him to Coach Brown, and he was trying to tell my dad that if I ever developed into a player he would be interested in coaching me, but Sarge cuts him off and says, “That’s all fine and good, the basketball business, but I think it’s damn time blacks started developing some intellectualism so they can be presidents of corporations instead of janitors, and generals in the army instead of sergeants like me. If you are ever interested in developing my son’s academic future, then we’ll talk.”
I was thinking, Well, that’s the end of it. We’ll never see this guy again, but Coach Brown seemed really pleased with what Sarge said.
Sure enough, when he went back to LSU, Dale Brown sent me a weight program. I started doing it, and when I became a freshman in high school, I tried out for the high school basketball team on the base in Germany.
I got cut.
At the time I was probably six foot eight, but they didn’t care. There was another guy named Dwayne Clark who was also about my size, and he was better than me.
They matched me up against Dwayne, and he could do everything. He could dunk, hit fadeaways, dribble. He was an upperclassman and he used to laugh at me. He’d do simple stuff like throw me an upfake, wait for me to jump, then go around me like I wasn’t even there. That guy abused me.
The coach of the team never even acknowledged me. He never looked at me, never bothered to learn my name. I don’t blame him, I guess. I was terrible. My knees were really bad at that time, and I had one of those brown knee braces with the hole in it on one knee and metal braces on the other because of my Osgood-Schlatter disease. I couldn’t do anything. It hurt too much.
Here’s the other problem: I was lazy. I liked to do it my way and I didn’t use my size. I just didn’t know how to play mean. I was going at half speed and everyone else was going a hundred miles an hour.
They had a junior varsity team, but I was too embarrassed to be on it. I came home and told my dad I got cut and I thought he’d be really mad, but he said, “Go back up to the gym and keep working.”
I was crushed that I didn’t make that team. I pretended it was no big deal, but it was. I didn’t cry, but I was devastated. I went into my room, looked at the ceiling, and said, “I’m never going to make it.” I was really down on myself.
After a while I tried to put my own positive spin on it. I’m telling myself, Maybe I’ll be a deejay, maybe I’ll be a rapper. But those were long shots. I knew that.
Almost all of my friends made the team, which made it worse. I laughed it off, made a joke about the coach. I was still a funny guy, a great dancer. I was still JC—Just Cool.
My father wouldn’t let me quit. He had me play on the base with the enlisted soldiers. He threw me in there with these military guys who were grown men. They banged me and knocked me down and messed me up. If nothing else, I was going to be tough.
I wrote to Coach Brown to tell him about getting cut. He sent me back a nice letter about how I should keep trying, keep working.
Shortly afterwards, this guy named Ford McMurtry, who was the assistant coach of the high school team, quit that job and started a team on the base. He said to me, “Come play for us.”
Ford was nice to me. He raised my confidence level. He worked on my conditioning and my footwork. When I got discouraged with my clumsiness, he was patient. “Try it again, Shaquille,” he said without ever raising his voice. We got lucky because my friend Mitch Riles didn’t play on the high school team, either, because of bad grades, so the two of us were together again, Magic and Larry.
My sophomore year I didn’t even bother to try out for the high school team. By then Coach McMurtry had put together such a good team we could have beaten Dwayne Clark and those other guys. He was determined to make me a player.
I got some help from another guy who worked on the base. His name was Pete Popovich. He was watching me in the gym one day and he said, “Why aren’t you dunking the ball?” I told him, “I can’t jump. It’s my knees, I think. I just can’t get off the ground.”
Later on, when I went upstairs to lift some weights, Pete said to me, “I can help you with your vertical leap.” He showed me how to do calf raises and told me do them every day. I did those damn things until my legs felt like they were going to fall off. From the end of my freshman year to the end of my sophomore year in high school, my vertical leap went from eighteen inches to forty-two inches.
In 1987 my father was transferred again, so we moved back to the United States. I was fifteen years old and halfway through my sophomore season in high school with Coach McMurtry, and I just hated to leave. I thought I was finally getting somewhere with the basketball.
We stayed in New Jersey for a few weeks visiting family before we reported to our new base, Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. My uncle Mike Parris came by. He hadn’t seen me for a couple of years. He took me to a park down in South Orange, New Jersey, to play some pickup. There weren’t a whole lot of guys around, but there was this one fairly big dude who played a little one-on-one with me. His name was Mark Bryant. He later became a big star at Seton Hall and played eighteen years in the NBA. I didn’t have the skill that Mark had at that point, but now that I could jump, I held my own.
Uncle Mike was impressed with how I improved, I could tell. Whenever we played before, he could shoot over me all day. But now all of a sudden when he pulled up for that jumper, I could actually contest it. My wingspan was always pretty impressive, but I had never used that to my advantage. I was discovering how to block shots. I figured, If I’m not scoring much, then nobody is going to score on me.
We were leaving the park that afternoon, and my uncle Mike put his arm around me.
“Something has happened, Shaquille,” he said.
He was right. Something had happened. I was finally becoming a baller.
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, 1989
Shaquille O’Neal was lacing up his basketball shoes when Cole High School coach Dave Madura and his assistant, Herb More, approached him.
Both men were agitated. They told Shaquille about a conversation they’d had with the referee moments before.
“We just heard the funniest thing,” the official told Coach Madura. “Those guys from Southside just informed us we’re about to witness the biggest upset in high school basketball.”
O’Neal didn’t even look up. He merely nodded.
In truth, Shaq didn’t need any additional motivation. Minutes earlier he had walked into the gym, ducking under the door as a pretty young cheerleader smiled at him. As Shaq grinned in return, her face contorted into a look of disgust.
“Freak!”
She shrieked so loudly, he wanted to cover his ears.
He had grown accustomed to verbal assaults, but he still couldn’t fathom why people were so cruel. Did they think because he was so big and so strong that he had no feelings?
O’Neal said little in Cole’s pregame huddle. He pointed to his chest and said softly, “Get me the ball.”
The first time down, he grabbed it on the block, wheeled and jammed so hard the rim bent forward. When he got it again, he slammed it with such force the rim drooped to the right.
“By the third time he dunked,” More later recalled, “the rim looked like a roller coaster.”
The biggest upset in high school basketball would have to wait another day.
NOBODY KNEW WHERE THE HELL I HAD COME FROM WHEN I showed up at Cole High School in San Antonio, Texas, in 1987. I wasn’t an AAU lifer or a summer camp gym rat. I was a military kid coming from Europe who had some size but wasn’t sure what to do with it. That was my self-published scouting report.
I moved there too late to play basketball in my sophomore year. I even wanted to play football at my new high school, but Sarge wouldn’t let me. He was worried I’d get hurt. He was planning on my basketball skills paying for my college.
One of the first kids I met at Cole was Joe Cavallero, this little guy who was the sixth man on the basketball team and also the school’s starting quarterback. He was a very good athlete, a born leader. Joe saw me in the office when I was registering and he gave me a little crap and that was it—instant friends. Joe got me the job as football team statistician, just so I’d have something to do. I’d walk up and down the sidelines intimidating the hell out of the other team. They’d look at me and say, “Shit. When is that kid coming in the game?”
Even though I wasn’t on the team the football coach made me run all the off-season drills. I even did the log drill, which I absolutely hated. You had two logs parallel to one another with ten feet in between, and you had to do bear crawls across them. You were expected to zigzag across, then roll at the end.
I’m almost six foot ten at this point, and they have me rolling around in the mud. By the time I was done I was covered in dirt. I really did look like Sasquatch!
Of course I complained a lot about doing those damn log drills, but it really helped me with my agility and my footwork.
Joe introduced me to the guys on the basketball team, and I liked them right away. Doug Sandburg, who became my best friend, was a smart player, a good point guard who could shoot, too. If he had a little more size he probably could have gone on to play Division I. Robbie Dunn was funny as hell. He was a little guy with herky-jerky moves who didn’t get to play a whole lot, but he was still a big part of our group.
Our motto back then was “Fake it until you make it.” We used to go to the Eisenhower Flea Market, about two miles from the base. They sold all sorts of junk nobody really needed. Me and Joe would go around looking for the fattest plastic gold chains we could find, since we couldn’t afford the real stuff. We’d buy these big-ass plastic chains, then we’d troll around looking for a Mercedes and steal the emblem off the top of the car and paint it gold. Then we’d string the emblem through the plastic chains and there you go. What’s cooler than that?
I always wore a Gucci hat back then. Hey, I was already tall, so why hide it? I’d take that hat and make it sit high on my head like a shark fin. I swear, I was about seven foot eight with that thing on.
We used to do a lot of low-level juvenile-delinquent stuff. Outside the base we were surrounded by mayhem—guns, drugs, violence. We stayed on the base, for the most part, and did stupid things like knocking on people’s doors and running off. We used to egg people’s cars.
One of our favorite tricks was to have three guys on one side of the road and three guys on the other. The speed limit on the base was about thirty miles per hour, but people were always driving too fast. We’d have guys on either side of the street and pretend like we were pulling a rope. A car would come flying down the street and see us pulling this imaginary rope and they’d lock up their brakes. We got them every time with that one.
There was a pool on the base, and on weekends in the summer it would close around ten o’clock. We’d wait until the lights were out and the officers went inside to have their cocktails, and then we’d hop the fence and do cannonballs in the pool.
The officers would hear us splashing around and call the military police. The cops would then come and try to chase us, but they’d have their combat boots on. We were a bunch of athletes, and we knew they couldn’t catch us. We’d park Robbie’s car on the corner, sprint out of sight, and jump in the car and take off.
Most of the time, they knew it was us. I mean, there weren’t a whole bunch of six-foot-ten kids roaming around the base. But we were kind of famous for the athletic stuff we were doing, so they cut us some slack. If the other kids on the base did something like that they’d be lined up and paddled.
I got paddled a few times by teachers on the base in Germany, but not in San Antonio. By then I was too big. Nobody was brave enough to come at me with a paddle—except my father, of course.
The paddles were a part of life on a military base. If you screwed up by breaking a rule or failing an exam or getting in a fight, they’d call the whole school together and line you up in the middle of the gymnasium and have you straddle the line, and the principal or the athletic director would start lighting you up. It hurt, but mostly it just humiliated you. Plus, your parents always heard about it—and if your father was a commanding officer, then look out.
Cole High School was really small and had never won a championship in basketball until I got there. We had seventy-six kids in our class, and we were playing against schools three times that size. I was still learning the game of basketball, still developing my style. My coach, Dave Madura, was a no-nonsense guy. He had me do leg squats in front of a mirror until they were burning. He was trying to improve my flexibility, especially in my hips.
There was only one problem: I still hadn’t dunked in a game yet. I was getting close, and physically I finally had the coordination to do it, but part of it was psychological. I just wasn’t sure about it. What if I missed? I didn’t want anyone laughing at me.
Joe was trying to help me out. We started out by dunking a sock. Once I got comfortable with that, I tried dunking a tennis ball. Next it was a softball, then a volleyball, and then, finally, a basketball.
But dunking in an empty gym with my friend Joe was a lot different than pulling it off in a game in front of fans and family—especially my father.
Early in my junior year we were trying to break the press, so Doug Sandburg threw the ball to me in the middle, and I decided to take it all the way. I’m dribbling up the floor and I lay in a nice little finger roll, only there’s a little too much spin on it, so it kind of falls off the rim. All of a sudden I hear my father in the stands yelling, “Call time-out! Call time-out!”
I refuse to look up at him. I know it’s him—everyone knows it’s him—but I’m not the damn coach, so how the hell am I going to call a time-out?
But Sarge isn’t taking no for an answer. Now he’s coming down out of the stands, and thank God the other team calls time-out. We’re about to get in our huddle but my father grabs me and says, “What’s with the finger roll?” I told him, “I’m trying to be like Dr. J.”
“What the hell did you say to me?” he screamed. He grabbed my uniform and hauled me through a side door out of the gym. My coach is standing there and all the players are watching, but no one is going to mess with my father.
We are standing in the hallway and the buzzer is sounding because the time-out is almost over but Sarge doesn’t care. He’s banging me in the chest. “The hell with Dr. J!” he roared. “You start working on being Shaquille O’Neal. Now you go out and dunk the ball!”
He knew. He knew I was afraid to dunk it. He knew the only way he was going to get me to do it was shame me into it.
I went back on
the court and I got the ball and I threw down a monster dunk. I mean, it was vicious. And then I realized, Man, this isn’t so hard. I can do this.
Once I started dunking I couldn’t stop. I loved the power of it, and I was addicted to the looks of terror on guys’ faces when I slammed that sucker over them.
It couldn’t be the only part of my game, I understood that—but it could be the part of my game.
My learning curve was still going up, up, up. When I wasn’t in the gym I was stealing a little bit of something from all the great players I was watching on TV.
One of the first guys I can remember paying a lot of attention to is Patrick Ewing. I just loved him because he was so mean. He ran around the court with a scowl on his face, and he always looked like he was ready to beat the crap out of everybody. You could tell people were afraid of him. I’d watch him and think, Yeah, I need some of that.
When I was in high school and stuck inside on punishment because I did something Sarge didn’t like, I’d sit back and watch Michael Jordan and Ewing and take all sorts of mental notes. Now when I closed my eyes, I wasn’t dreaming about the Hulk or Superman anymore. I was dreaming about Ewing and Jordan.
At this point people are saying I’m not going to make it as a basketball star, but they don’t know I’ve decided to kidnap Patrick Ewing’s mean streak.
I was a rookie with the Orlando Magic the first time I ever met Patrick. We were playing at Madison Square Garden, and my plan was to shake his hand and say, “Hello, Mr. Ewing,” but before I got the chance he punked me. I went to shake his hand, and he wouldn’t. So I went to put my fist out and he hit me real hard on my knuckles. Then he said, “I’m going to bust your ass, rookie.”
Ewing was mad because everyone was talking about me like I was the Next Big Thing (which I was). I led the All-Star Game in votes my first year in the NBA, and after that happened Ewing told some guys no rookie should ever be allowed to start in the game. Pat Riley was the coach of the East that year, but he was Patrick’s coach with the Knicks, and he told everyone it was “ridiculous” that I was the starter. So when we got to the All-Star Game Riley started me because he had to, but he played me and Patrick the exact same amount of minutes.
Shaq Uncut: My Story Page 3