Shaq Uncut: My Story

by Shaquille O’Neal

  I may have been “old,” but the Big Shark still had the moves.

  Somehow, in spite of everything that went wrong, we still managed to win forty-four games during that 2006–07 season. When DWade went down I stepped up and tried to keep us above water. We won nine games in a row at one point but were swept by the Chicago Bulls in the first round of the playoffs. It’s one thing when Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen take you out in four games. It’s something else when it’s Luol Deng and Ben Gordon that do it to you.

  DWade and I put up decent numbers, but we didn’t get a whole lot of help. Antoine and Zo had a couple of big games here and there, but we were too beat up to pull it off.

  It was the first time in fifty years the defending champion was swept in the opening round. Not the kind of stat you want on your résumé.

  Gary Payton had somehow landed in Pat’s doghouse, and he played in only two of our playoff games. He retired after the 2006–07 season, and I just felt he deserved a better send-off than that.

  The whole feeling around the team had changed. Everything started to go sour. The “15 strong” had been replaced by “1 Mistake and You’re Gone.”

  Like Posey. He was a big part of why we won our championship. Pat wasn’t crazy about him, though, because he was a partier and he kept missing his body fat requirements.

  So one night Posey was out and he parked his car in front of the club and he had too much to drink. He got into his car but he never actually started it up and drove it. They arrested him for something called driving under suspicion. He got to the police station and he called me because I’m friendly with a lot of the law enforcement people, but I got there too late. They had already fingerprinted him and booked him, so there was nothing I could do.

  The next day Pat called us all in and gave us a lecture about drinking and driving. I knew what it meant. I knew Posey was on his way out. He finished the season with us but signed with Boston as a free agent in the summer of 2007.

  I always suspected that Pat must have had some spies down on South Beach watching us. He always seemed to know what we were doing. I’d be out having fun, and the next day I’d show up for practice and he’d say, “Shaq, why were you at this club at two a.m.?”

  I wasn’t really that big of a club guy in Miami, but I liked to drive around the beach in my Crown Victoria with the police lights. Some nights I’d drive by and see Posey’s or Antoine’s car out front and I’d say, “Damn,” because I had a feeling they would pay for it the next day.

  They weren’t the only ones being watched. We had a young fella on our team named Dorrell Wright. He had a ton of talent but he was your classic New Age player. A lot of guys come in, and you can tell right away they don’t have the same focus as we did when we were eighteen years old. When I was eighteen, I was scared of coaches.

  Not Dorrell. That guy came in and did what he wanted to do. He had about a hundred tattoos. My father would have absolutely killed me if I had that many. I got my first tattoo at twenty, in Hawaii. It was a little Superman tattoo. I didn’t let Sarge see it for the longest time because I knew it would set him off. My mom hates them, too. Over the years I’ve collected a few more tattoos, but I keep telling my mother, “When I’m done you’re going to see me in a suit and tie anyway, so don’t worry.”

  Anyhow, Dorrell was very athletic. He could have been so much more effective if he just listened once in a while. But he was pretty sure he had it all figured out. Classic case of a young guy getting too much too soon without really earning it. But I’m not rooting against him. He had a really good season for Golden State in 2010–11, so maybe he’s grown up a bit.

  We liked Dorrell, so he came along sometimes for our “team meetings.” He loved the nightlife and South Beach and the whole Miami scene. However, I had a sense that Pat was keeping tabs on him, and that wasn’t a good thing for Dorrell Wright.

  So now when we played bad it was because we weren’t in shape and because of the nightlife. Obviously since I don’t drink, I can’t say from experience if alcohol ruins your game. All I know is Jason Kapano didn’t drink and always stayed home, and if you kicked it out to him, sometimes he made the shot and sometimes he didn’t. And, if you kicked to Antoine, who was out partying all the time, same thing. Sometimes he’d make it, sometimes he wouldn’t.

  Antoine was supposed to be at 10 percent body fat. One day he weighed in at 10.6 percent and Pat fined him two thousand dollars. Antoine told me he was docked over fifteen thousand dollars his first year with Riley. He filed an appeal with the Players Association, and they agreed on a deal where he got half the money back and donated the other half to charity.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out that Antoine’s days were numbered, too. The day before the 2007–08 season started, he was shipped off to Minnesota.

  One by one, my boys were leaving. The white-hot Miami Heat had gone stone cold.

  Things weren’t so great for me at home, either. My wife Shaunie and I were having some problems. A lot of it was my fault. I was young when I got married. I’m not making any excuses, but because I was so focused on basketball all the time, I really wasn’t putting enough time into being a good boyfriend/husband.

  I went from this big kid who nobody wanted to a big man that everybody wanted. One day no girls would even look at me, and then all of sudden every girl wanted me. I never had to court a girl—they courted me.

  It’s hard to be married to a professional athlete. We’re locked into this one thing—to win a championship—and when it doesn’t work out, well, we’re not all that fun to be around. We’ve also got people pulling at us all the time and sometimes we forget to push them away.

  Besides, I was moody around the house. If I read a bad article that someone wrote about me, I’d take it out on my wife. I admit I was a male diva.

  Eventually, Shaunie and I split up. These days she lives in LA with our five kids. I miss not seeing them every day. They have their own distinct personalities and they are changing so fast, and I hate to miss that. I always tell Taahirah (she’s my daughter from a previous relationship), Amirah, Me’arah, Myles, Shaqir, and Shareef what my father told me: Be a leader. Not a follower.

  The hardest part for me is opening the door to my house and not hearing six different voices when I walk in. Yeah, we have holidays and summers together in Orlando, but it’s not what I planned for my children. It’s not what I wanted for them. They will realize as they get older that relationships are hard. They take work. And even with all that work, sometimes it’s best to move on.

  When all of my kids were young, I loved to lie on the couch and let them fall asleep on my chest. I did such a good job of calming those little babies down that I’d be out at the gym working or doing some business and I’d get a phone call saying, “Come home, the baby won’t fall asleep!”

  My first child, Taahirah, is my original princess. Every macho guy will tell you they want their first baby to be a boy so they can name them “Jr.” after themselves. All I can tell you is that when little Taarihah came out, I just wanted to hold her all day.

  Taarihah is a very intelligent young lady. She has a lot of good ideas, and I’m very proud of her. She’ll probably be working with me when she gets a little older.

  My son Shareef is an athlete. I’m very jealous of him. He was doing things on the basketball court at the age of eight that I couldn’t do until I was sixteen years old. I was his coach last summer and we were undefeated. He’s very, very funny and very sensitive. Sound like anyone you know?

  Then we have Amirah, my second princess. She’s my protector. She gets very on guard when we are out and people start walking up to us. She doesn’t like big crowds and she doesn’t like to share me. When she sees a mob of people coming she says, “C’mon, Daddy, let’s go get some ice cream.”

  My youngest son, Shaqir, has many of the same athletic qualities as Shareef, but he’s my mean, ferocious guy. He’s got that fiery streak in him that both my father and I have. One day my mom c
ame over and Shaqir did something crazy, and she put her fork down and said, “That’s you right there, boy.” So I tell Shaqir he’s my twin.

  Little Me’arah is just a sweet, sweet child. She likes to kiss, kiss, kiss her daddy on the cheek. She’s the most affectionate one of all. She’s very motherly, always herding everyone together. She’s going to grow up and do something really special for people.

  Myles is a teenager now. My ex-wife, Shaunie, already had Myles when I met her, but he’s one of mine, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a very smart kid, a reader, a real thinker. He’s been the ultimate big brother to his younger siblings.

  Both Shareef and Shaqir really love basketball. They are like little sponges. They want to know everything. They love the NBA, so I get some tape of Allen Iverson and we watch that, and then some of Tracy McGrady, and they can’t believe how great TMac was before he got injured. They love seeing highlights of their uncle Kobe, too.

  The other day Shareef was trying to get down Ray Allen’s jump shot. Shaqir, he was working on Blake Griffin’s spin move. I can’t believe how sharp they are. I show them something once, and I come back to it a week or a month later and they’ve nailed it.

  Someday they’ll appreciate what their father did in his day, but right now the other players are more interesting. It’s okay. I’ve got some Shaq highlight reels when they’re ready to see ’em.

  Our 2007–08 season in Miami was off to an even worse start than the year before. We were playing Utah on December 22 when I slid into the scorer’s table chasing after a loose ball. I hurt my hip. Actually, my whole leg hurt—my ankle, my thigh, everything. I took a couple of days off, came back the day after Christmas, and reaggravated it. They took some X-rays, but nothing came up.

  We tried rest, ice, anti-inflammatory medication, some stretching, but nothing really worked. My back was starting to get locked up, too, and the training staff didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was getting really frustrated, but not nearly as frustrated as Pat. We were losing game after game and he needed me back.

  The team was in the middle of a long road trip—and, as it turned out, a fifteen-game losing streak—when they told my bodyguard, Jerome, and me they had booked us on an early-morning flight to Los Angeles to see another doctor. We were in Minnesota at the time, so we threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed a cab, and got on this tiny little plane to LA.

  By the time I got there after a few hours in that tin can, I was really hurting.

  Pat set us up with this doctor that performed something called prolotherapy. The idea is they shoot sugar water into your ligaments and tendons to help increase the blood supply and stimulate the tissue. Up to that point I was getting shot up with cortisone. Once I started seeing blood coming out of the syringe, I signed off on the idea it might be time to try something else.

  This woman that Pat sent me to stuck about fifteen needles in my leg, then shot me up with the sugar water. It was painful, but I didn’t care as long as it worked. I stayed out there almost a week and got four treatments.

  When I got back I was feeling pretty good for about two or three games but then everything went out of whack again, so I was back on a plane to California. I made that trip about three or four times. The problem was I’d come back to Miami and ask, “What’s the follow-up treatment to this?” Nobody knew. There was none.

  Our team was really slumping. I missed nine games and we lost all of them. Pat was angry with me, but I really don’t know what he wanted me to do. I went to see the sugar-water lady in California like he asked me to, but it was only a temporary fix. I was worried. I thought my career was over.

  In late January Pat had me undergo an MRI, which showed I had some soft tissue damage and some inflammation but nothing “structurally compromised.” They started calling it bursitis, but I could tell Pat thought I was dogging it.

  Pat tried to get me to talk to a psychologist. This guy came into our locker room and he was talking with a few players. I didn’t like all the personal questions he was asking, so I was totally disrespecting the guy. He finally got around to me and was trying to get me to open up about my feelings and then he said, “You are angry. What are you angry about?” I told him, “I don’t like people who don’t have any idea what’s going on and pretend like they do know. I know you’re Pat’s guy, so why should I talk to you?” That was the end of our conversation.

  The injury was getting to me. One day I was standing at my locker and I was in a lot of pain and I kind of broke down. Zo tried to talk to me. He knew I was frustrated with the way Pat was handling me. He told me when he was the Heat’s star and led the team in scoring, rebounding, and blocks, he was still Pat’s whipping boy no matter how good his numbers were.

  “Pat always gets on his stars,” Zo said. “That’s just his style.”

  Maybe Zo was all right with that style, but I wasn’t. I had this injury that we couldn’t figure out and Pat started telling people that he’s faking it, he’s getting a divorce, we’ve got a bad record, so he doesn’t feel like playing anymore. When I got to Phoenix, the general manager there, Steve Kerr, told me Riley said I was “faking” the injury. I heard it other places, too.

  I’m not going to lie. It stung me. If he had just pulled me aside and said, “Hey, this isn’t working anymore. It’s time for you to go,” we could have talked business. We could have avoided all the ugly shit that’s gone down since then. I’m not trying to embarrass the guy, but I don’t like it when people lie about me. Don’t tell your owner I’m faking after all I’ve done for your city, for your team, for you.

  As soon as I got traded to Phoenix, the training staff there fixed me up. They recognized I had been getting the wrong treatment.

  The Phoenix trainer—Aaron Nelson—was the one who solved it. He and his Phoenix staff have done amazing things to bring back injured athletes through the years like Grant Hill, Antonio McDyess, and Steve Nash, who has been dealing with a chronic back problem for years.

  He also hooked me up with this dude named Michael Clark, who was the team physical therapist for the Suns, and explained to me that my body was breaking down due to a series of “misfires.” My surgically repaired toe wasn’t bending, which caused stress on my ankle and prevented it from rotating properly. That caused problems with my thigh, up to my hip, and even my butt muscles.

  Everything was traced back to my stupid arthritic toe. Because the toe wouldn’t bend, I was jumping off the ball of my foot. It changed my gait and the way I jumped, and it put a tremendous strain on the rest of my leg. It was kind of a chain reaction.

  Nobody in Miami ever made that connection. Aaron Nelson and Michael Clark were the first to do that. They did a thorough examination of me and started having me work on my core strength, my flexibility, my balance. They got my butt muscles firing properly again. It took a couple of weeks, but by late February I was ready to play again.

  As soon as I got back on the court Pat must have called up his boy Bill Walton, because the next thing you know Bill is on television saying, “Shaq’s running around there looking fine. Why couldn’t he do that in Miami?”

  I took great offense to that. Here’s Bill Walton, who was injured most of his career, who actually sued a team doctor because he thought they messed him up, talking about me and my injuries? No. Not a chance I’m going to sit there and listen to that bullshit.

  Of course the media asked me about it. I told them, “I heard Mr. Walton’s comments and I think Mr. Walton has broken the Big Man Pecking Order Code 225.7, which means his résumé isn’t quite good enough to speak on what I’ve done.”

  Bill Walton won two championships—and one of them was from hanging on tight to Larry Bird’s ass. I had four rings at that point. He’s going to tell me about winning? He scored something like 6,000 points in his career. I wound up with over 28,000. So I just didn’t feel he was authorized to talk about me like that. The first couple of times he said stuff, I let it go. I had always shown him the respect all big men deserve
. But when he kept doing it, I had enough.

  I said, “I look at what Mr. Walton has said and the one thing I hate is a hypocrite. So if I’m ‘faking’ an injury, his entire playing career is a fake.”

  People like Bill Walton bother me. You know the kind—the guy who rides on your team plane and sucks up to you and all your teammates, then the minute he gets on television he goes off on the whole damn team and starts talking about you like you’re some journeyman.

  Show a little respect, Bill. Don’t talk to me like I’m nothing. We’re in the same Big Man Club, Top 50 Players Club, Championship Club.

  There’s an unwritten rule among big men. We understand the physical toll our bodies take and the criticism we have to listen to because everyone thinks the game is so easy when you are seven feet tall. It’s not easy. You know that, and still you violated the code.

  Pat told everybody I didn’t get better because I refused to do the rehab they set up for me. I stopped doing their rehab because it simply didn’t work. Miami trainer Ron Culp had me doing electrical stimulation, and it didn’t help.

  My ticket out of town was punched in mid-February. There was a lot of tension between Pat and the players. So we’re about to start practice and Jason Williams comes in about ten seconds late.

  Pat being Pat, he starts swearing at him and screaming, “Get the hell out of here!”

  He and JWill start yelling at each other, and JWill turns to go and kicks over the training cart. He sends pieces of Wrigley gum flying all over the place. He’s walking away and I say, “JWill. Come back. Don’t go anywhere.”