Shaq Uncut: My Story (24 page)

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.

T
he 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 on 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.