Shaq Uncut: My Story (13 page)

After I finished
Kazaam
I get a call from the legendary Quincy Jones, who wants to turn me into the first black superhero. So I did a movie called
Steel
. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone at the time, but I did all my own stunts, which included
running through fire and jumping across a couple of buildings.

I’m not even twenty-five years old and I’m a basketball star, a rapper, a movie star, and an endorsement king. It happened so fast, sometimes I couldn’t believe it.

Ahmad Rashad has this show called
Inside Stuff
, so my first summer as a pro he asked me to come on. We’re at the Sports Club in Los Angeles, and Dennis Tracey is with
me and Ahmad is playing me one-on-one and he’s barking at me, “Let me see your best. Let me see your best!” So I blow past him and dunked that thing so hard and the whole backboard shattered. It knocked me right on my ass. For a second, I wasn’t really sure what happened. I got up and I had some blood on my elbows. Dennis looked like he was going to pass out. He was petrified that his meal ticket
had just shredded both of his arms! I waited a second and then I started smiling. It’s cool, dawg. I’m fine.

Pretty soon everyone is watching that dunk on the Internet.

They hadn’t seen nothing yet.

O
rlando shooting guard Anthony Bowie dribbled the ball down the left side of the floor, aware that Shaquille O’Neal was filling the lane on the weak side and advancing to the basket. As he released the pass to his rookie big man, he noted, “They’ve lost track of him. What a mistake.”

Shaq took one hard dribble to the hole past Nets forward Derrick
Coleman, then rose up to dunk the ball. Seven-footer Dwayne Schintzius grabbed his arm as he rose up to slam it through, requiring O’Neal to drag New Jersey’s big man along for the ride.

Shaq hung on the rim for a split second before he realized what was happening. The entire backboard was collapsing and the shot clock was about to drop on his head. He ducked as the shot clock grazed his shoulder,
and the rim broke free from the stanchion and crashed in a heap.

Orlando president Pat Williams, watching from home,
winced as his prize player narrowly missed serious injury. “He’s lucky he wasn’t killed,” Williams said.

Across the country in Los Angeles, Leonard Armato, Shaq’s agent and marketing guru, couldn’t contain his glee. “This is perfect!” he exalted.

Shaq feigned indifference over
his show of strength, yet inside, he was seething. The dunk was a message to Coleman, who had been talking trash to him all night and threatening to dunk on his head.

“When Shaq pulled that backboard down, it was all about respect—and one-upmanship,” explained his friend Dennis Scott.

Within days Armato and Pepsi were on the phone, concocting ways to capitalize on the big man’s demonstration
of dominance. Pepsi drew up a commercial that would feature a bigger-than-life Shaq reaching through the roof of an arena, grabbing the basketball rim, and tearing it off.

When apprised of the story line, O’Neal rejected it immediately.

“I only do what’s real,” Shaq explained. “Like tearing down rims and playing with kids.”

W
HEN I FIRST GOT TO ORLANDO, I WANTED TO ESTABLISH
myself as a dominant force. I felt it was important to intimidate the other big men out there with my size and my strength. I wanted them to think twice about coming after me.

I was Superman, just liked I had dreamed about when I was a little boy in Newark, New Jersey. The Magic was an expansion team and needed some credibility. It was my job to bring it.

But first I had to get settled in my new community. Lester found me a house that he thought was just perfect for me. Wrong. When I sat down on the toilet my knees were up to my ears. The shower had to be ripped out
because I couldn’t even stand up in there. That house was a temporary holding tank for Superman. I had much bigger plans for myself.

That was my mentality back then. Buy something, then make it bigger and better. I went to a place on Lee Road in Orlando and bought a Ford Fairlane convertible. I turned it into what Dennis Tracey and I called my first Hoop-D. I put about sixty thousand dollars
into it to get it the way I wanted.

By the time I was done with that car, it could jump up and down and shake side to side. There were speakers inside every available panel. That car was literally rocking.

I saw it at this little old used-car lot one day when I was driving by. The guy wanted ten grand for it. I walked out of there having paid $3,800. Even then I was a good businessman.

There
was this fairly new community called Isleworth sprouting up in Windermere. It had a gate and that was good, because it was becoming obvious I needed some place where people couldn’t just ride up and hang with Shaq. It was a beautiful spot, right on the
water. The house was furnished, and when I went upstairs to look around I saw this amazing round bed in the master bedroom. It was huge. It fit
thirty people.

I told Lester, “I gotta have this house.”

It was the bed. I wanted that bed.

We made an offer and I told them I wanted it furnished. The guy wanted three hundred thousand dollars extra for the furniture. Now I was so in love with that bed I would have paid that much just to get it, but I’m a businessman, so I got him down to seventy-five thousand. As soon as that bed was mine,
I had a custom-made black comforter with a Superman logo for it.

We had to throw in a couple of signed jerseys, some tickets, and a signed picture with me after a game. It was amazing how the price dropped if I would just stop and take a picture with someone.

Of course, if you were a kid, I was going to do that for free anyway. I did just about anything for kids. Now those pushy grown-ups? That’s
another story.

Once Dennis and I moved into Isleworth, we used to tell our friends, “Welcome to Disney World.” It felt like it. I had everything I ever wanted. But the minute I walked outside those gates I’d say, “Well, here we are back in the real world again.”

Years later someone asked me why I insisted on living my life like I was still a little kid. I told him, “Sometimes I feel like the
Tom Hanks character in the movie
Big
. But my life is not a movie. I never have to go back to Coney Island to find the fortune teller machine so I have to grow up again.”

One of the things I invested in when I first got to Orlando was some coin-operated car washes. We were doing really well, making a lot of money, but one day Lester called me up and told me the numbers weren’t matching up. The
profits we should have had were not the same numbers that were being deposited in the bank.

“Don’t worry, Lester,” I told him, but he was freaking out about it. He even flew to Orlando to discuss it with me. He calculated we were missing almost a quarter million dollars.

It took me a while, but I finally came clean with him. I showed Lester my bedroom, where there were a whole bunch of wooden
rain barrels—full of quarters.

Lester said, “Shaquille, what the hell is this? Is this the missing money?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “Lester, I can’t help it. I like
seeing
my money. Come here, run your fingers through all these quarters. It’s awesome!”

Lester called the bank and told them he had $250,000 worth of quarters to deposit. It took weeks to put it all in there because they didn’t have enough
coin machines to sort it all out.

Even though I had all that money, I was determined to keep it real. I had two Rotweillers, Shaz and Thor, and I used to walk them all over town. I wasn’t going to be a shut-in just because suddenly I was famous. One day I was driving my new SUV and I had the music blasting and they could hear me coming from five miles away.
Boom da boom da boom
, must be Shaq.

I was driving past Turkey Lake Park and there were a bunch of guys playing some ball. I slowed down a bit and I was watching them play, and they weren’t half bad.

They looked like they were having fun, so I pulled over, and me and my Rotweillers got out and I shot around with those guys for about an hour.

I liked doing things like that. I liked talking with people. And once they put their tongues
back in their mouths and got over the shock that it really was me, Shaquille O’Neal, star of the Orlando Magic, we had ourselves a few laughs.

It’s hard for celebrities to get around. That’s what you always hear. Well, it’s only as hard as you make it. I’m a people person, so I like to be out and about. It’s what makes me happy. I’m not the guy who is sneaking out the back door. Never.

One of
the things I loved doing when I was in Orlando was riding the SkyCoaster. It was this skydiving and hang-gliding ride, all in one.

I always took the same route home every day and I was mesmerized by what looked like this upside-down triangle. I always wondered what it was. One day I’m driving and I see these people swinging back and forth up almost over the highway. I was so curious about it.
At first, I used to go at night and watch people do it.

So one night I finally got on it and I was hooked. I was addicted. I did it thirty times in a row. They put you in this harness and they tie you in and when pull this lever the cord springs you up in the air.

The last time I did it I was with my bodyguard, Jerome, and another friend. All three of us are big. There was a lot of weight on
it and when we started swinging up the damn thing buckled. We were up so high I thought we were going to tip over. I looked at Jerome when the ride was over and said, “I’m never riding this thing again.” Too bad, because that ride was a lot of fun.

One thing that got a little complicated was all the people who came out of nowhere once I signed my contract. All of a sudden everyone wanted a piece
of me. Old “friends” who I never liked in the first place. New “friends” who didn’t love me, only the sight of all my money. Even people I really cared about, all of a sudden everyone had an opinion on what I should do and how I should do it.

My first couple of years in the NBA, I tried to please everybody. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work. I wish it did, because I like to get along with people.
I was raised by the Sarge to respect authority and to never question the people in charge.

But that became hard to do after a while.

We went 41-41 my first season in Orlando, which was 21 wins better than the year before. I was still learning my way around the NBA, but I still managed to be the first rookie in eleven years to have 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds in a season. We missed making
the playoffs because Indiana, which had the same record as us, edged us out in the tiebreaker, but then the most incredibly lucky thing happened.

Even though we had only a 1 in 66 chance of winning the draft lottery, we did it again. We got the No. 1 pick. The Magic was going
to take Chris Webber, but I went in to talk to Orlando general manager John Gabriel and flexed my Superman muscles. I
told him, “Listen, I understand you want Webber, but this cat Penny Hardaway is the answer. I got to know him doing the movie
Blue Chips
, and if you put us together we could be like Magic and Kareem.”

I waited a second for dramatic pause. Then I told him, “If you don’t bring Penny in here, then maybe I’ve got to think about doing something else.”

So they bring in Penny and everything is great.
We’re cool, we’re playing ball together, we’re going to win the whole thing.

Penny was a lot of fun. He wanted to be a star, and he had some grand ideas on how to pull that off. I liked his style. We got involved in this little game of “anything you can buy I can buy better.” It was a competition, but not in a negative way. We were just two young, stupid, rich athletes showing each other up.

It went something like this. Penny would go out and buy a Ferrari, so I had to go out and a buy a nicer car. We were young and cocky, and we all wanted to be The Man in every category. Girls, cars, houses. I figured since I was single and had a lot of money and a lot of responsibility, I had to be The Man on the team. I’m a bit of a show-off, so if anyone tried to one-up me, I had to do something
outlandish to respond to it.

So Penny would come in with a Ferrari, and I’d go out and buy two Ferraris. I’d cut one in half and superglue it together with the other one, and I’d have a Long Ferrari.

When Horace Grant joined our team, he got this house with a really nice pool in the backyard, so I had to tear down my guest house and gut it and build an even more fabulous pool than his.

It was
all in good fun. No animosity. It wasn’t ever a negative thing. It was more like, “Yo, Penny. Check out my new Long Ferrari when you get to the valet.”

By the time Penny came on board, Matt Goukas had stepped down and Brian Hill was the coach. He was a very nice man, one of those basketball lifers. We gave him a run for his money.

Like a lot of teams I was on, the Orlando Magic had cliques.
It was me, Dennis Scott, Nick Anderson, and later on Brian Shaw. We always hung out together.