Shaq Uncut: My Story

by Shaquille O’Neal

  The season was winding down and I still hadn’t played, and I was getting really uneasy about that. We had five games to go, and I told them I wanted to try and play against the Pistons on April 3.

  I knew they’d have to give me a cortisone shot or I’d have no chance. They didn’t want to give me the shot. They didn’t want me to play, but I hadn’t touched a ball and I felt like we were running out of time. I told them, “Just let me get in, let’s see if I still got it.”

  The adrenaline rush of being out there and playing after so long was amazing. When I went into the game the crowd just exploded. They gave me a standing ovation. That got me pumped. I was flying. I was flying and feeling good. I hit my first three shots, including a little up-and-under move that no one was expecting.

  And then just like that, I felt another pop. They called it my calf, but it was really the area around the Achilles again. It felt like somebody had shot me with a gun. I was running along and I felt it and I was like, What the hell was that?

  So now I’m worried. Really worried. I’m calling everybody I know. I’m getting stim machines flown in, I’m having double massages. I call my boys from Phoenix, who helped me so much when I was there.

  They fly in and help me loosen up my hips and I’m starting to feel a little better. Doc was great. He wasn’t putting any pressure on me. He was telling me, “We don’t need you in the first round of the playoffs.” I still had some pain back there behind the heel so our trainer Eddie Lacerte was saying, “Give it one more week. One more week.”

  We knock out the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs, and we get to the Miami series and I’m not ready, but we’re out of time. I understand that. So I tell them, “Shoot me up. Let’s go.”

  Dr. Brian McKeon, the Celtics team physician, was really against that. We had a couple of pretty big blowouts over it. But I told them, “If you don’t shoot me up, I’ll find someone else who will.” I ended up getting about fifteen shots before we were done.

  Dr. McKeon kept telling me, “Shaq, this is no good. I don’t want that thing to rip.” I said, “You’ve been so nice to me, so hospitable. I need to do this. If it rips, it rips.”

  I played in Game 3 against Miami and I couldn’t move. I played eight minutes and got my two fouls in, but I was having trouble. It upset me because I had worked hard to get in great condition, but that heel really limited my mobility. And there’s Magic Johnson on television telling people I’m not in shape. Wrong, Magic. It’s called an injury.

  They shot me up again and we gave it one more try in Game 4, but I lasted only three minutes. Doc came to me afterward and said, “Shaq, we want you to stop. We appreciate all that you’ve done, but it’s over. I won’t play you.”

  He could tell I was completely bummed out. I could barely look at the guy. The next day he told the media I was done and said, “The guy is devastated. None of you have any idea how hard he’s worked to get back.”

  It was brutal to sit there and watch Miami beat our team. I was crushed. I hated it. The Celtics were the best. People don’t realize how physically screwed up Kevin Garnett was all season. His legs and his knees were all messed up. He was in pain all year. If you ask him, I bet he’ll tell you he thought about retiring, too.

  I’m watching that series and Miami has no inside presence, and it’s just killing me. In the game I did play, the Miami players thought about driving the lane, but when I touched them up they never really came back in. LeBron, DWade, Chris Bosh, they were all thinking twice about going in there because they knew I had every intention of using all six of my fouls.

  I felt bad for Paul Pierce in that series. He struggled. It all started when he got tossed in Game 1. I didn’t understand where the referee, Ed Malloy, was coming from on that. The referee kind of panicked and was moving too fast. Paul had picked up a technical earlier in the game, and then a few minutes later DWade nailed him with a moving screen, so Paul said something to the official but he wasn’t real demonstrative when he said it. It wasn’t like he was showing the guy up. Everybody talks. We all do. Ed Malloy should know that. But he’s new and young, and he panicked and he tossed Paul Pierce. Even though we all sympathized with him, he still got an earful from Doc. “You’ve got to be smarter than that,” he told Paul.

  Miami went on to beat us in that series. LeBron was a beast. I’ve never seen him play like that before. He sure as hell didn’t play like that against Dallas in the Finals.

  I’m just really upset and disappointed because I believe this was the Celtics’ year. This was the first time in my nineteen-year history that all the powerhouses were gone. They brought me in to bang Dwight Howard, and he was gone. They wanted me to rebound against the Lakers. They were gone, too. I thought it would be us and the Spurs, me and Tim Duncan, two guys with four rings going at it—but they were gone, too.

  I did everything I could to get back on the court. I have the holes in the back of my heel to prove it.

  What a great organization Boston was. What a great town. I had no idea the people there were so fantastic, so knowledgeable of the game, so appreciative of their stars. Everybody was so nice, so hospitable, especially in Sudbury. They let me be Shaq. I wish I had something left in the tank to reward them for how graciously they treated me.

  I had a meeting with Dr. McKeon before I left. The only way we could have gotten that Achilles right again was to go in and clean up the area all around it. If we did that, I’d be out nine months and then we’d be back where we started again, people waiting and wondering when and if I was ever coming back. I didn’t want to hold Boston up like that again. That city deserved better.

  Now, if it had been a two-month recovery, maybe that would have changed my mind.

  The tendon is actually in decent shape, but all the muscles around it are almost ripped in half. They are shredded. So, I can chill and let it heal with a ton of scar tissue, or I could have Doc McKeon go in and clean it up for me. Either way, it isn’t good.

  I feel like I let Boston down. I didn’t want to hold Boston hostage. That was why I announced my retirement. They want to go out and try to get younger. I would have loved to come back, but they say once your Achilles is damaged it’s never the same.

  Doc Rivers is right up there with Phil Jackson as one of the great coaches in the game. He commands respect because he is so consistent in how he approaches things. He also speaks our language. Phil spoke some kind of foreign zen “cousin of weed” language, but because of his great track record everyone listened.

  Doc was able to get down to our level. He’d say, “Hey, you’ve got the Big Three out there, so why the hell are you pulling up and trying for a three-pointer, Big Baby?” He knew our lingo, knew how we think.

  He never stopped preaching team. Ever. He expected us to act like professionals, and if we didn’t we heard about it.

  Let’s say Ray hit four or five shots in a row and then Doc called a different play. Ray would say, “Yo, Doc, I’m feeling it,” and Doc would say, “But it ain’t about you. It’s about the team.” He never stopped stressing that. He didn’t care how many points you had, how many rebounds, how many assists. As long as the team was playing well, as long as we were winning, that’s what it was about.

  Doc never believed in embarrassing or humiliating anyone. Take our film sessions. If Paul got into one of his stretches where he was taking the ball one-on-one too much, Doc could have put together a nice little film package of that and called out The Truth in front of his teammates. That’s not his style. Instead, he put together a tape of plays where guys were making selfish decisions and just ran it. No commentary, just the proof, right there on film.

  Sometimes the pictures speak for themselves.

  Paul was the leader of the Big Three, no question about that. He was the guy who was going to do things the way he thought they should be done, and you’ll never hear any criticism from me on that, because I was the same way. I respect Paul’s position. For years, it was all on him. If they lost, ev
eryone was pointing the finger at him. So Doc would have to call Paul out every now and then, but Paul always handled it like a pro.

  Ray had his moments, too, because he had to have everything a certain way, and you knew with a bunch of knuckleheads like us that wasn’t going to be possible. Paul liked to mess with him a little bit. I left it alone. Ray’s an interesting guy. I would tell him, “When I’m posting and your guy’s head is turned, just get to your spot and I’ll find you.” That was how I used to roll with DScott and Glen Rice. But some guys are stubborn in how they want to get the ball.

  I think Ray is more like Dirk Nowitzki, an off-balance type of shooter. He likes to come off the fly, catch it, and go up. He’s a hell of a shooter and an extremely nice guy. He and Derek Fisher are going to be general managers somewhere, because those guys are inside the system. They know the game, and they hang with the front office guys. Ray and Danny played golf together all season. Doc, too. Ray is almost like a front office guy already.

  By now you know I always root for storybook endings. I’m not a fake dreamer anymore. I deal in real dreams. My dream of winning a championship with Boston came up short. I feel terrible about it. I probably won’t get over it for a while.

  But the Boston Celtics will move on, and so will the NBA. That’s how it works.

  Here today, gone tomorrow.

  Except for me: I’m not going anywhere.

  JUNE 2, 2011

  Windermere, Florida

  When the big dreamer fantasized how it would end, the scenario was always the same. Shaquille O’Neal danced at the victory parade, celebrating another NBA title in yet another city. The crowd was electric and squealed with pleasure at Shaq’s championship antics.

  When the moment was right, he grabbed the microphone and thanked them all, declared his latest zip code “Title Town,” then dropped the bomb:

  It’s over.

  I’m done.

  He thought this would happen in Boston. In June 2011, he expected to be rolling down Boylston Street on a championship duck boat with KG and Paul and Ray.

  Instead, he was in his Isleworth home with Michael Downing, the CEO of Tout, a new social video service Shaq planned to use to announce he was finally stepping away from the game of basketball. Tout was virtually unknown when it came to him looking for a boost that only Superman could provide. Shaq committed to breaking his big news via Tout in return for a spot on their advisory board and a small equity stake in the company. But, more importantly, it was a new way for Shaq to connect with his fans.

  The retirement announcement was devoid of confetti, duck boats, and championship rings, but not without fanfare.

  When he sent his fifteen-second video message, it drew half a million viewers to Tout over the next three hours.

  “We did it. Nineteen years, baby. I want to thank you very much, that’s why I’m telling you first, I’m about to retire. Love you, talk to you soon,” Shaq touted.

  With that, 28,596 career points, 13,099 rebounds, 3,026 assists, 2,732 blocks, 4,146 fouls, and 15 All-Star selections were frozen in time, a final stat line of a career that spanned six teams and four championships.

  O’Neal approached his subsequent interviews that day with his trademark merriment, yet when the sun set on his lakefront home and he put the finishing touches on the finality of his career, he was sideswiped by a wave of melancholy that followed him into bed and into his dreams.

  “I was sad,” Shaq admitted. “I hate it when I don’t get to write my own ending.”

  WHEN I RETIRED USING TOUT, I DECLARED MYSELF “THE emperor of the social media network.” It’s a new world out there and you’ve got to keep up. I remember my first few years with the Lakers, my advisors came to me and said, “There’s this new thing happening on the Internet. It’s a search engine, and you can type in almost anything you want and it will call up all the information about it.” That sounded really interesting to me, so I invested in this new company called Google.

  To be honest with you, I kind of forgot about it, but one day we’re at practice and our trainer, Gary Vitti, has a newspaper and he’s reading an article about Google and all the investors who made big profits from it, and he says, “Damn you, Shaq! You’re into everything!”

  That is correct.

  You have to be careful how you use the social network. I get really turned off by people who tweet every detail about their lives, even if they are superstars. “I ate a chicken sandwich. It was soggy.” Who the hell cares?

  If you handle it properly, the social network is a very valuable tool. You can use it to get your message out. You can use it to sell things. You can use it to communicate with people. If I have three million followers, I’m not going to jam it down their throats how cool I am, how rich I am, how fabulous I am. You’re not going to see me touting, “I’m in my $500,000 car right now,” or “I’m backstage with Beyoncé right now.” Some of the athletes who are out there tweeting are so self-centered it’s a major turnoff.

  Tout is a cool medium because now you can add video to your tweeting. And you know how I can light it up for the camera when I feel like it.

  As soon as I announced my retirement, both ESPN and TNT called. They wanted to hire me as part of their basketball coverage. I ended up going with TNT. Me and Charles Barkley, talking hoops together. Can’t wait. Because Turner also owns the Cartoon Network, we got to work talking about an animated show starring yours truly.

  I held my retirement press conference at my house in Isleworth. My mom lives nearby, and my dad is still in Orlando and his health isn’t the best, so I wanted to make sure they could both make it.

  We had all sorts of people at the house beforehand, and I was a little jittery. My man Dennis Scott showed up, and we did a little interview for NBA TV before the press conference, and then I put on my suit and went out there and did my thing, kept it together, thanked all the right people, stayed away from tears and went for laughs instead.

  We opened it up for questions, and the first one was from my mother. She said, “It’s been a while since I’ve heard you talk that fast.”

  “I was nervous, Mommy, sorry,” I said.

  The reporters asked me a lot of questions, and one of them was if my retirement was permanent. So many superstars, even MJ and Magic, retired but came back again a few years later.

  I told them, “I won’t be back and let me tell you the reason why. Toward the end of my career I started getting a bit selfish. I’ve always heard the two most dominant players were Shaquille O’Neal and Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt is at 31,000 points and I’m at 28,000. If I had a hundred points fewer than him, I would come back to pass him up and that would put me as the most dominant player in the world.

  “Me and my father were talking the other day. He said, ‘How many points you got?’ I said, ‘Twenty-eight thousand.’ He said, ‘You dummy. If you hit them free throws like I taught you to, you would have had thirty thousand points.’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ ”

  Basketball has been such a huge part of my life, but I’ve got plenty of other ventures to keep me busy. I’ve got fitness centers in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Coconut Grove, and Orlando. I have twenty car washes in Houston, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, and Orlando. We also have eighteen self-serve outfits where you put the quarters in and wash the cars yourself.

  There’s my Dunkman shoe brand, which we created for low-income families who couldn’t spend a hundred dollars on a pair of sneakers for their kids. I’ve got a new watch bearing my name and a line of sunglasses. I’ve also invested in some Five Guys Burgers franchises. I have a wonderful relationship with the Kraft company, which makes those delicious Oreo cookies you see me eating on television.

  I have what you call FRA—Facial Recognition Advantage. Because of who I am and what I’ve done, I can have a conversation with anybody. I recently had a meeting with the CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts about owning a couple of franchises. Now, if I wasn’t Shaq, I probably wouldn’t have those opportunities. But I am Shaq. Bigg
er than life, brother. Bigger than life.

  So what kind of opportunities are out there for professional athletes? It’s up to them, how they market themselves. I can tell you what’s out there if you are Dwight Howard or Magic Johnson. There’s potential for a guy like Rajon Rondo—if he wants it. His personality is a little different, so he might not like being out front all the time.

  Now you take a guy like Big Baby. He wants it yesterday. But he’s not high enough on the FRA scale to get what he wants.

  When I looked to expand my portfolio, the first thing I did was buy my little self-serve car washes. The second thing I did was invest in Google. The third thing I did was invest in Vitamin Water. The fourth thing was the twenty-four-hour fitness centers. Then I invested in a jet company. So I’m an owner of all these things, but if you don’t have FRA it’s going to be hard.

  I own a piece of Muscle Milk. When the economy went in the tank I invested in a few real estate deals. Most of my investments have been very sound, very successful.

  But, like anyone, I had some that got away.

  One of my biggest regrets has to do with my dealings with the great Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. He was looking to bring Starbucks into the inner-city communities. He was talking to Magic Johnson about being his front man, but Lester Knispel, my moneyman, had a tight relationship with Howard, so he said, “Give Shaq a crack at it.” Howard said, “I’m pretty far along with Magic,” but Lester helped him get started with Starbucks, so Howard agreed to meet me.

  We went to his house in Seattle and had dinner. His wife was lovely and his kids were really cute. We had a wonderful time. At one point I excused myself from the table and took his kids upstairs to play video games.

  While I was gone Howard said, “Lester, you are right. He’s charming, engaging, and intelligent.” In other words, we had a deal.