Shaq Uncut: My Story

by Shaquille O’Neal

  Somehow Kobe and I made it through the rest of the year without any major issues. BShaw managed to get us back on track. It’s kind of funny when you think about it. All these supposed Lakers leaders who care so much about the franchise, all these Lakers legends, none of them ever had the courage to say anything to Kobe and me. Not Kareem, not Magic, not Mitch Kupchak, none of them. Only Brian Shaw took us on. Yet when the Lakers job came up in 2011 they didn’t give Brian Shaw a chance by looking right past him. Go figure.

  Anyhow, Kobe and I put a lid on our little differences. Even if I don’t like you, if you’re open I’m going to get you the ball anyway.

  Even though we backed off each other, we were still dealing with a divided team. You were either a Kobe guy or a Shaq guy. We even had two trainers. If Chip Schaefer taped me for practice, then Kobe wouldn’t go to him. He’d use Gary Vitti instead. Childish stuff. Juvenile. We all got caught up in it.

  Fun times with the Lakers. That gives you an idea of what my last season in Los Angeles was like.

  Somehow we still won fourteen of our final seventeen games. Our championship chances took a big hit when Karl Malone injured his knee. He played in the postseason but he wasn’t the same guy. We needed him more than we realized.

  We still managed to beat the Spurs in the playoffs. We were tied 2–2 in games with San Antonio, and Duncan hit a tough fadeaway one-legged jump shot with ten seconds to go. We couldn’t believe it.

  So now it’s our turn. We’ve got the ball out of bounds with 0.4 seconds to go, which leaves you barely any time to get a shot off. But we get the ball to a wide-open Derek Fisher and he drains the sucker. I saw the red light go on and ran as fast as I could before they could change the call. Lakers win. We go up 3–2 in the series and ended up closing them out. Everyone is asking me about DFish’s miracle shot and I told the truth: “One lucky shot deserves another.”

  We’re set to play Detroit in the Finals, and both Kobe and I felt we were the better team—we just forgot to play like it. Every time our offense bogged down, Kobe tried to take over. After the loss in Game 3, which put us behind 2–1 in the series, someone said to me, “They were going to you over and over again, and you were getting the ball down low and scoring every time, but then it seemed you guys went away from that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Story of my life, buddy.”

  The Pistons beat us in five games. It was a little stunning. Nobody was very happy about it. Right away I could tell something was up. We had a dinner/reception at the hotel after the game, and my wife, Shaunie, and I were sitting there and who walks in but Jerry Buss.

  He’s never usually around, but there he is talking and laughing with Kobe and his wife, Vanessa. We’re sitting just a few feet away but he doesn’t come over, doesn’t say a word to us all night, doesn’t even look at us.

  Nothing.

  A couple of days later I’m at home, and I find out Phil Jackson isn’t coming back. His contract was up and they didn’t renew him. I turned to Shaunie and said, “It’s over.”

  I was told by Mitch I was going to get an extension and be a Laker for life. The next thing I know I’m sitting in my kitchen eating my Frosted Flakes, and he’s on television saying they’d consider trading me.

  We had an agreement with the Lakers. The agreement was we would have no discussions with the media at all about my future from either side—them or us. If they were asked about whether they were going to extend me, they would say, “We’ll leave that to ourselves.”

  Instead, there’s Mitch telling everyone they definitely want to re-sign Kobe, but with me, they’re looking at all their options.

  That was it. That was the end of me in a Lakers uniform. Mitch broke our agreement. How could I trust him again? I called my agent, Perry, who was in London at Wimbledon. I told him what Mitch said.

  Perry called Mitch right away. Mitch conceded he was trying to finesse his way through the press conference without lying to the media. He said since we didn’t have an agreement he knew I would be asking for a trade. “I know what we agreed to,” Mitch said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Perry told him. “We’re done.”

  “What does that mean?” Mitch said.

  “Well, Mitch, in ten minutes we’ll be on the phone with the LA Times, and in fifteen minutes we’ll be on the phone with the Orange County Register, and in twenty minutes it will be scrolling at the bottom of your screen on ESPN.”

  For months, I kept waiting for Mitch to come to me and say, “Shaq, you’re getting older, we need some new players. Mr. Buss doesn’t want to pay you and Kobe doesn’t want you here.” But that conversation never happened.

  So that was when I demanded a trade. I couldn’t trust Mitch anymore, and it was clear Kobe was now the one with all the power.

  Right away my phone started ringing. Everyone had their own idea of what happened. A couple of my friends believed Buss never got over the “pay me” comments in Hawaii and the “hurt on company time” stuff after my surgery. Jerome figured it was economics. They didn’t want to pay the money to keep me. Others were convinced Kobe wanted me and Phil out. Maybe Kobe had a hand in it, maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. If I wanted to fix it, I could have, but my ego and my pride were too strong, and my business style was even stronger. A big pay cut like that and a short contract after all I’d done for them? Nope. Not gonna work.

  Deep down I knew they were making a choice between the old and the young, and in that case they always choose the young.

  It was the same old lesson that I had already learned in Orlando—there is no loyalty in sports. None. They use you up, then they dump you.

  Luckily for me I still had value. Luckily for me I was used to being a moving target. We had to quickly figure out where we wanted to go.

  Larry Bird was running the show in Indiana, and he really wanted me to come there. He offered the Lakers anyone they wanted from his roster. Milwaukee and Atlanta were interested, too. LA could have their pick of their guys. Isiah Thomas was running the Knicks, and he offered up his whole roster, too, but he didn’t have very much.

  It came down to two teams—Miami and Dallas. Mark Cuban flew in and sat down with us, then he went back to the Lakers and said he’d trade anybody for me except for Dirk Nowitzki. Dirk was his guy.

  Miami put together a great package that included Lamar Odom, Caron Butler, Brian Grant, and a first-round pick. Their owner, Mickey Arison, was very professional, very proactive. The idea of going back to Florida was very appealing to me. I thought I would be a Laker for life, but I was wrong.

  So am I taking the blame for that? No way. I was the CEO. I was in charge. I had been there eight years, so it was my team. Was I being tit for tat with Kobe? Probably. Should I have handled that differently? Possibly. But every CEO has their own style. My style worked. We won three out of four championships in the Finals.

  Do I regret how it ended? Not really. If Kobe doesn’t ever want to talk to me again, I can live with that. But he knows and I know that won’t erase the greatest one-two punch of our time.

  Before the trade went down, Shaunie and I cleaned out the house in Los Angeles and packed our stuff and shipped it to the house at Isleworth in Orlando. The kids were kind of confused. They were like, “Dad, Dad, where are we going?” but we always ended up in Orlando for the summer, so we kept them from getting too upset. We put the LA house on the market and had it sold by the end of July. The Chinese Rod Stewart bought it.

  He paid cash, too.

  JULY 21, 2004

  Miami, Florida

  The 18-wheeler cab with the inscription “diesel power” snaked down Biscayne Boulevard to approving honks from passing cars and delighted squeals from the fans assembled along the sidewalks in the blazing sun.

  Inside the cab, Shaquille O’Neal reviewed his mental checklist:

  Edict Number One: display no bitterness. It was paramount that the newly minted Miami Heat savior concealed his crushing disappointment at the way he
was dumped by the Lakers after delivering three titles to them.

  Edict Number Two: embrace the Miami community, just as he’d done in Orlando and Los Angeles.

  The big man’s destination was his introductory press conference, with keys to the city and a red carpet awaiting, but not before Shaq leaned out of the cab and sprayed stunned but delighted onlookers with an oversized water cannon.

  “I’m here for one reason only,” Shaq declared. “When I was playing with the Lakers I was tired of hearing Coach Stan Van Gundy yelling, ‘Three seconds, three seconds, get him out of the lane—three seconds!’ So now I’ll get to hear Coach Van Gundy yell, ‘They are fouling him! They are fouling him!’ ”

  Shaq seamlessly moved on to Edict Number Three: publicly embrace team president Pat Riley’s rigid conditioning program, in spite of his own reservations.

  “I just bought a house on the beach, and my wife likes me to walk around naked on the beach, so I’m going to be in very, very top physical shape,” said O’Neal. He wondered aloud about potential nude photographs, then deadpanned, “Don’t sell them to the Enquirer unless I get fifteen percent.”

  Edict Number Four: ingrain yourself into the fabric of the social scene.

  “Get your tickets now. Buy cable now. Get your jerseys now. Pull your boats up to the docking stations now. Bring your Sea-Doos now,” Shaq urged the fans. “If you can’t afford a Sea-Doo, get a raft. If you can’t afford a raft, go to Walmart and get a blow-up raft like I have at my house. You need to come, because it’s going to be very, very exciting.”

  He guaranteed a championship and promised to breathe new life into a young, fledgling franchise.

  “Sure I’m old,” said O’Neal, “but like toilet paper, toothpaste, and other amenities, I’m proven to be good.”

  The Diesel grinned. The cameras clicked. The fans swooned.

  And the Lakers were history.

  I’VE LEARNED NOT TO LOOK BACK. I HAD TO. I DIDN’T WANT to ever be hurt again like I was by what happened in Orlando. I promised myself I would never look at my career again as anything other than a business.

  So forget about LA. Forget about Kobe, Mitch Kupchak, all of it. Rearview mirror, baby.

  That was why I wore an all-white suit to my Miami press conference. Their slogan was the “white-hot Heat.” For me, it was a new, white, clean slate.

  That was why when we played the Lakers for the first time since I was traded, and they asked me beforehand about Kobe, my answer was, “Who?”

  When I got to town I told Pat Riley about my home in Orlando and my full-sized basketball court with the Lakers logo. I told him we could use it for shootarounds when we played the Magic. Pat said, “Okay, but you gotta change that logo.” I said sure—as long as the Heat paid for it.

  Which of course they did.

  Pat wasn’t the coach when I got there, but he was in charge. Everything that goes on in Miami even now, he’s in charge.

  I had always said I couldn’t play for Pat Riley. I had heard stories about his style from Alonzo Mourning, from Tim Hardaway, all the guys who played for him. The three-hour practices, the four-hour practices, the yelling and the screaming and always feeling the need to show how tough you are. That works for some people, but after the résumé I built I felt I knew what it took to win.

  After working with Phil Jackson—who would put us through forty-five tough, concentrated minutes, then look at me and say, “Okay, Shaq, get on the treadmill”—it was obvious to me that Gestapo conditioning twenty-four hours a day wasn’t the way to go. We responded so much better to Phil’s way, which sometimes meant giving the older guys a day off.

  So I had my doubts. But I figured since Riley wasn’t the coach—that was Stan Van Gundy’s job—he wouldn’t be the dominating presence on the team.

  My mistake.

  Even when Pat wasn’t coaching, it was definitely his team. He was there, all the time, probably drawing up plays in his office. His office overlooked the court.

  He had cameras everywhere. Cameras on the practice court, cameras in the locker room, probably even cameras in the bathroom. He wanted to know everything.

  No wonder DWade was so uptight when I got there. That was my first job. As soon as I arrived I thought, I got to loosen this brother up. DWade was just so afraid to do something wrong. I told him, “Hey, man, you’ve got to realize who you are and the power you have and stop tiptoeing around here so timidly all the time, because with your talent any team in the league would want you. So keep that in the back of your head.”

  I don’t want to call Miami a jail, but everyone was walking around on eggshells. They were all scared of Pat. I went in there hoping to give them some life. I wasn’t afraid of anybody—not even the great Pat Riley.

  So why did I go there if I knew it was going to be like that? Because I needed another guy similar to Kobe to get me over the hump. I realized after I first got to LA, before Kobe turned out to be Kobe and I was putting up all those big numbers, the days of doing it myself were over. You need help.

  Hell, I had already won three championships and I was looking to win three more. When I was thinking of moving on I looked at Vince Carter, wondering if he might be a guy that could work, but he was playing in Toronto and I didn’t want to go there.

  I was watching DWade on television one day and I said, “This kid could be special. He just needs somebody out there to give him some more room.” So that’s what I did—I gave him space on that court to operate, to do his thing.

  Off the court I tried to teach him some flash—talked to him about swagger, about walking and talking like a star, doing the commercials.

  The first thing DWade and I did when I got to Miami was go to lunch at a little place on South Beach. I told him everything that went wrong with Kobe and me, and then I said, “The reason I’m telling you this is because this can never happen to you and me.”

  I told him I was probably too hard on Kobe when he was younger and Kobe didn’t know how to take it. He was going to be a great player anyway—we all knew that. I think my anger pushed him a little bit more, and Phil’s anger pushed me a little bit more, and we got three rings out of it. My momma asked me once if I could do it over, would I do it differently? My answer is no.

  Sometimes I do sit back and say, “Did I lose a friend by the way I treated Kobe?” Maybe, maybe not. We were never really that close. Kobe was always an introverted kid. Anyway, friendships don’t matter much in professional basketball, because it’s all about winning.

  When you are a superstar and you get to a certain level in your career, it starts becoming all about how many championships you’ve won. Now, is that fair? Sometimes it isn’t. You are going to tell me that Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, and Dominique Wilkins aren’t great players? That’s just flat-out wrong.

  Before I won my championships, people talked about me as one of the great centers in the game, but some reporter would always say, “You can’t compare him to Bill Russell or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar because he hasn’t won yet.” I hated hearing that. Just hated it. But the more you hear it, the more you realize you are the CEO, and if you win you’ll get all the credit and if you lose it’s all your fault. So you want to know why I flexed my muscles during my time in the NBA? Because if it’s going to be my fault when we lose, then we’re doing things my way.

  By the time I got to Miami, I wasn’t the CEO anymore. DWade was going to have to be the CEO because he was young and hitting his stride. My job was to be his top advisor. But I realized pretty quickly I could not treat him the way I had treated Kobe. You couldn’t be too hard on DWade. He wasn’t as tough as Kobe, wasn’t the type to fight back and challenge you.

  I always tell people in terms of being tough on the young stars, I was a 10 with Kobe and a 4 with DWade and a 1 with LeBron. I didn’t say anything to LeBron—didn’t have to. He had it figured out at a very young age.

  DWade was a good listener. I wasn’t in his face like with Kobe. Instead of getting o
n him I’d say, “Hey, dawg, maybe you should try this.”

  I liked DWade. We always had a pretty good relationship, but I think toward the end Pat Riley probably put him in a bad position. He forced him to choose: Who are you loyal to, Shaq or me? I understood that. It was business. I didn’t take it personally.

  When I first got to Miami, Pat Riley was amazing. The two of us sat down and had a nice conversation. He told me all about the community in Miami, the team personnel, how great we were going to be, and how he had just fired all his marketing people. He fired them because he didn’t need them anymore. The minute they announced I was coming the ticket sales went through the roof.

  So Pat talked to me a little about DWade and how he saw the two of us working out and how he wanted me to take Wade under my wing. We were cool.

  Of course, I already had my own plan about how I was going to turn Miami upside down business-wise. And we were going to win a championship while I was there—I made that guarantee to Pat Riley privately and to the city of Miami publicly.

  Everything was looking great, except one thing: I didn’t have time to do anything but work out all day long because Pat was all hung up on this body fat program. He was very serious about it. He expected all the guards to have 6 percent body fat, the forwards to have 7 to 8 percent body fat, and the centers to have 10 percent body fat.

  It made no sense to me. I had been taking care of my body for twelve NBA seasons and we had won three championships, and I had never seen anyone from the Miami Heat even come close to winning anything. They may have been in the best shape, but I never saw any of them around when we were passing out rings.

  I mean, look at Alonzo Mourning. He is a machine. Really. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out he was a robot. The guy was always in amazing shape. He always looked ten times better than me, but I used to kill him on the court, which tells you that body fat don’t mean shit. It’s all about what’s in your heart and in your mind. Are you tough enough? Do you want it enough? You don’t need to be at 10 percent body fat for that.