I didn’t like that. I never really forgot it. I was voted in as the starter. Not Ewing. The fans wanted to see me. So give the fans what they want, right?
Ewing wasn’t the only guy I was stealing moves from in high school. One night I was grounded and I was watching some ACC basketball, and there was this dude named Charles Shackleford, a forward for North Carolina State, tearing up everybody in his path. I’m watching him play and I like what he’s doing, and he’s wearing these big knee pads, so I say, “Yeah, I’m going to take that.” They called him “Shack,” so I show up the next day and I’ve got big-ass knee pads and I’m “Shaq.”
So me and my boys on the base keep watching all the college games we can, and I see Sherman Douglas at Syracuse serving up lobs for this cat named Rony Seikaly. I noticed that every time he dunked he pulled his legs up. I’m watching and I’m thinking, That’s me. I’m taking that.
One day I’m at the house and these military guys are talking about somebody named David Robinson, so my father goes out and gets a tape and sits me down and I got to watch film of David Robinson. I’m watching him run the floor and I say to myself, I’ve got some work to do, so I go out and I try to learn Robinson’s spin move.
My dad is working with me and I’m getting better. I’m in between my junior and senior season of high school when my dad comes home from work one night and punches me square in the face. He’s got a program in his hands and grabs me and says, “It’s time for you to get serious. See this guy right here? We’re going to watch him play basketball tonight, and I’m going to teach you how to destroy him. You know why? Because he makes 15 million dollars—that’s why. See how much money you could make if you’d just stay out of trouble?”
The guy he was talking about was Jon Koncak. He was this huge, slow white dude who really wasn’t that good, but he signed this contract for $15 million with the Atlanta Hawks. They nicknamed him “Jon Contract.”
My dad has two tickets to the Spurs game, so we go to watch Jon Koncak. We are sitting way at the top, the worst seats in the place, but I’m watching this guy and I’m thinking, I can be better than him.
So now I’ve got something to shoot for. And that’s when I started to turn it around. When the boys came around looking for fun I told them, “Sorry, I can’t mess with y’all right now.” Even the girls—I cut back on that, too.
Up to that point I still managed to find trouble just about all the time. One spring I played on an AAU team with Charles “Bo” Outlaw, and we went to Tempe, Arizona, for a tournament. We were playing a team from the state of Washington, and this guy kept fouling me really hard. I told him he shouldn’t do that again but he did, so I turned around and I punched him in the face.
The AAU people didn’t like that so much, so they kicked me out. Permanently. I messed up that kid pretty bad, so they sent me home. Luckily for me, my father wasn’t there. He was in training for a couple of months, so he was out of town for a while and he never found out about it—until now. Sorry, Sarge.
Since I couldn’t play AAU, I went to the army base and played with the enlisted men. My dad was running the gym at the base then, and I could always see him in the window watching. He never butted in when those big guys were pounding me, but later that night he’d tell me, “Don’t let those men push you around. Stand up for yourself, son.”
Ever since I was nine, Sarge taught me all the basics, then told me, “Go play.” If I went to the park to work on things, he wasn’t trailing along with his head up my butt. It was up to me to get better.
I was going into my senior year, and Bo Outlaw was still playing with my old AAU team. He was probably the best player in San Antonio at that point. They now see how good I’ve gotten and they figure they have a chance to win the whole thing, so they bring me back.
I have to stay out of trouble because I want to play on that team. I’m getting letters from almost every college in the country, and this whole basketball thing might work out after all if I can just learn to keep my cool.
Sarge is there for almost all my high school games, and he’s not very hard to miss. He’s riding the officials so hard my coach doesn’t ever have to bother. After a bad call, you could hear my father in the stands yelling, “You stupid ref!”
My dad was going to make sure I didn’t blow it. Everything had to be done right. Once, in the middle of a game, he stood up and started hollering at me because my uniform shirt was untucked. That kind of stuff drove him crazy. They practically stopped the game so I could get my shirt tucked in. You could have heard a pin drop in that gym. Everybody knew not to mess with Sgt. Philip Harrison. He spent most of my high school career screaming, “Take it to the hole!”
We played in Class 3A, and everyone was jealous of the Cole Cougars. I was getting all the attention, all the press. Other schools wanted to beat me and our team in the worst way.
There was nothing fancy about our high school program. We dressed in the band room because we didn’t have a locker room. I was big into rap at that time and I knew all the lyrics to every song. Plus, we’d make up our own songs. One of our best was when we remixed the school song. It started out like, “Hail to our alma mater, hail to thee, colors green and gold.” We added our own beat, threw in a few swear words, put on our plastic Mercedes-Benz necklaces, and had them rolling in the aisles.
Coach Madura was straight country. He’d hear my rap music and yell, “Turn that garbage off!” Coach Madura handled us just right. He was very tough on me, but on the court he let me do a lot of things, which I appreciated. He used me to break the press. They’d throw the ball up to me and I’d bring it up the floor. My ball-handling skills were pretty good. But mostly, I could score.
Besides Doug and Joe, who was all-state football and all-state baseball and had some real speed, we had this kid named Darren Mathey who could handle the ball pretty well. Our other football player was Dwayne Cyrus, another real athlete who added muscle. We had Jeff Petress, who could shoot the ball.
Then we had Robbie, who we nicknamed the Duke of Juke. Robbie would get the ball, drive to the hole like a madman making all these crazy motions, then he’d kick the ball back out. So one time we’re playing and Robbie goes to the hole doing all his Duke of Juke stuff and he’s got a layup—I mean, no one is on him—and instead he kicks the ball back to me at the foul line.
I yell at him, “Rob, what are you doing? You had a layup. You gotta take that.”
So Rob stops right in the middle of the game and slams the ball down on the court. “Listen,” the Duke of Juke screams at me, “I ain’t getting no scholarship, bitch. You shoot the ball!”
He was right. I was the only one getting a scholarship. It was all on me.
I ran into some nasty people in Texas. There was a lot of racism. Places like Asherton, Texas, and Plugerville, Texas. Those places held up signs with apes when black kids like me came to town. When you are a kid, that stuff hurts. I was already kind of self-conscious about my size, and that sure didn’t help. I had no choice but to learn to deal with it.
When I was playing for LSU against Mississippi State, my teammate Stanley Roberts was shooting free throws and one side yelled “Magilla!” and the other side yelled “Gorilla!” If he was mad about it, he didn’t show it. I watched him and I thought, Stanley’s got it right. You can’t take it to heart. If you can’t learn to laugh at yourself, then you are going to have one long miserable life, especially if you are seven feet tall.
Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner, used to call me Fat Albert when I shot free throws. I thought it was hilarious the first time I heard it. Made me miss the free throw. Not really, because I miss free throws all the time, but it makes for a good story.
My junior year at Cole High we were undefeated and turning the Texas basketball world upside down. I would walk into practice and never know who would be there. One day, it was Dale Brown from LSU. The next day it was the Shark, Jerry Tarkanian from Nevada–Las Vegas. The day after that it was Jim Valvano of NC
State. I was eating it up.
I suppose it went to my head a little bit. I had gone from this clumsy kid who nobody thought could play to a real celebrity. Everyone in San Antonio was talking about me.
Coach Madura wasn’t going to let me get too cocky, though. One day we were in practice and he gave us a two-minute water break, and I wandered out of the gym and went to the bathroom and took my time getting back on the court. I was gone only about five minutes, but by the time I got back the team was on the floor running drills.
Coach Madura let me have it. “The rest of the world might think you are some kind of superstar, but we don’t deal with prima donnas around here,” he said.
I was hot. I was mad, but mostly I was embarrassed. I didn’t say anything, but when we started playing again, I started throwing down dunks. One after another. After practice, Coach Madura laughed and said, “Maybe I should yell at you more often.”
We made it to the state finals in my junior year. We were undefeated when we played a team called Liberty Hill. They didn’t have any post game. They were a bunch of skinny little white guys who ran a flex offense. They were shooting threes from all over the court. I picked up three fouls in the first quarter. I picked up my fourth foul pretty soon after that and had to sit the entire third quarter. It was so frustrating. Sometimes I legitimately fouled those little dudes, but other times those guys were taking a dive anytime I was within two feet of them. The refs didn’t know what to do with a guy my size so their solution was, When in doubt, call a foul on the big kid.
After a while, when your best player is sitting with four fouls and your team is getting two points every time down and the other guys are getting three every time down, you are in trouble.
Still, we had a chance to win the game in the final minutes. I was at the free-throw line, and if I hit a couple and we went down and got a defensive stop, there was still time to pull it out.
I missed them both.
And that’s when it started—the whole free throw thing. Maybe it was some kind of omen. I don’t really know, but I’ve been dealing with it ever since.
Everyone has their theories on why I can’t make free throws: my hands are too big, it’s all in my head, I’ve changed my form too many times, I don’t extend my arm enough, I need to say a prayer before I shoot, I need to eat three peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Crazy stuff.
My mom has her own ideas on why I can’t shoot them. When we lived in Germany, I was goofing around and I was climbing a tree and fell out and broke my wrists. I think I had a couple of casts, but I’m not even sure. They just kind of healed on their own, only now I can’t bend my wrists back at all. Anyway, Mom thinks that’s the root of the free-throw issue.
By my senior season at Cole, we were having problems in practice because there was nobody to match up with me. Coach Madura hired Herb More, a former ballplayer from Cole who still held the single-game scoring record at the school. He was my geometry teacher and the guy I battled in practice. He was about six foot five or six, and he put a body on me, roughed me up a bit. He taught me a little jump hook.
Before long, I am dominating. My senior high school season is about to start, but I’ve got to pick a college first.
People have always written that it was a slam dunk that I would go to LSU because of my long-standing relationship with Coach Brown, but that wasn’t entirely true. I felt I owed it to myself and my family to look around.
My parents didn’t come with me on my college visits, even though I’m sure my father wanted to be there. He was worried about the under-the-table payments we kept hearing about.
There was plenty of illegal recruiting going on, but I can honestly say I didn’t see too much of that on my college trips. A few guys tried to slip me a hundred-dollar bill. They put it in my hand when they shook it and said, “Here, put this in your pocket,” but nobody came at me with a big bag of money or a car. Good thing. If they had, Sarge would have killed them.
I visited five schools. The first one I went to was North Carolina. Rick Fox, who later became my Lakers teammate, picked me up and he was cool, but Coach Dean Smith kind of rubbed me the wrong way. He sat down with me in his office and basically told me, “I’m Dean Smith. Here’s what I’ve done. I’m pretty great and have you ever heard of Michael Jordan? I coached him.” He was telling me how much he had won, but I already knew all that.
I also knew something else—Dean Smith liked this other seven-footer from Texas more than he liked me. He had just signed this kid named Matt Wenstrom, and I was UNC’s backup choice.
The last thing Dean Smith told me was, “If you come here, you can be like Michael, James Worthy, Sam Perkins.” I nodded my head politely but I was thinking, “No. I’m going some place where I’m going to be the first.”
And it really bothered me they liked Matt Wenstrom better than me. I didn’t like that guy at all. I didn’t know him, but I hated him because everyone said he had more upside than I did.
Wenstrom ended up going to North Carolina, by the way. I think he averaged two points a game. Then he went to the pros and played for the Celtics for about five minutes. I’m guessing Dean Smith never told any of his recruits, “Ever heard of Matt Wenstrom? I coached him.”
The next weekend I visited NC State because I wanted to see how my idol Charles Shackleford was doing. He came and picked me up, and we got along great. We had the same size shoe. We swapped some funny high school stories. I was liking the “original” Shack and I was liking NC State. But that night Shack got with a girl and left me behind. I ended up hanging with a guy named Avie Lester. He played the four spot and could really jump. We went out and tried to find ourselves some girls but we didn’t have any luck.
NC State coach Jim Valvano was very energetic, very enthusiastic. A couple of weeks before I visited, he came to my parents’ house and broke our glass table. He was kind of nervous and fidgety, and he had this briefcase and a book, and he dropped it on the table and it broke. He was so horrified. He was saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for it, I’ll pay for it.”
Sarge told him, “You are not going to pay for anything. That’s a violation.”
My father was real clear with everybody about violations.
I really liked NC State and I really liked Coach Valvano. He told me, “We love the way you play. We’re going to put you right next to Shack.”
That sounded great, but I’ll tell you the truth: I had gone from a nobody to a star almost overnight. I liked being a star and I still wanted to be a star, and they already had their own star.
My next stop was Texas University in Austin. Tom Penders was the coach. He was a crazy dude, did the tanning thing, but I really liked him, too. He came to a lot of my high school games. We played our state championship in Austin, so I already knew about the city and Sixth Street, which was where they had all the bars and restaurants and clubs.
The only problem with Texas was it was too close. I needed some space. I needed freedom.
I needed to get away from my father.
From nine years old to twelve years old, I was in the penitentiary—Sarge’s penitentiary. Then, from twelve to fourteen, I was in Sarge’s halfway house. When I got to be about fifteen and the basketball started working out for me, I was on parole. So, by the time I was seventeen and bigger than my father I was thinking, I’m a man. I need to strike out on my own.
Of course, I was still crazy in love with my mother, so I wasn’t going to go too far.
The fourth school I visited was Illinois. I got off the plane and Nick Anderson picked me up. He ended up being my teammate and good friend on the Orlando Magic. So Nick grabs me and he takes me to the Maxwell Street Market. It’s this big flea market and it’s kind of fun, except when we went down there someone picked my pocket. My wallet got stolen. I’m sure if Coach Lou Henson knew about that, he would have crapped in his pants. I never told him. I just smiled and shook his hand and told him my visit was going just fine.
Coach Henson didn’t talk with me much. He was friendly, but he wasn’t giving me the hard sell. I wasn’t confident I could play at Illinois. They were so good back then. They had Nick Anderson and Kendall Gill and the Snake (Kenny Norman) and Kenny Battle, too.
My final trip was to LSU. I’d been writing letters back and forth with Coach Brown for three years, so I already knew him a little bit. I went for my visit and he took me to his home, and I’m looking at this really nice house with a pool in the backyard and I’m saying, “Wow.” I had never seen any place that beautiful.
So Coach Brown said to me, “Son, you think this house looks really, really nice? If you listen to what I’m going to teach you, this house is going to look like a ghetto next to the one you can own by the time we’re done together.”
Hmmm. That sounded good to me.
Coach Brown said, “I’ve been watching you a long time and I’ve enjoyed how you’ve improved. I know you probably aren’t going to come here, but I’d love the chance to coach you. You might be able to start here, I’m not really sure.”
I was only half-listening until he said that. I was like, “What? He’s not sure if I can start here?” I was kind of upset the rest of the day. Everyone else was telling me I was the greatest, and this guy was telling me I may or may not start for his team.
The LSU players took me to TJ Ribs for lunch. It’s a restaurant off campus where they have all sorts of LSU stuff, including the Heisman Trophy that Billy Cannon won in 1959. The owner of the restaurant came over and told me if I came to LSU he’d keep an eye on me.
Shaq Uncut: My Story Page 4