Shaq Uncut: My Story (27 page)

Of course when we got back to Miami we were South Beach royalty. Everybody loved us. We ate free at every restaurant.
We were offered free condos, free cars.

Everything I had promised the city of Miami had come true. We won a championship, we owned the city, and I had proven I could win anywhere—not just with some shot-happy guard in Los Angeles.

I wasn’t the only one who had Laker baggage. On the night we won the championship, Pat Riley, who had won all of his championships in LA, grabbed me and hugged me
and thanked me and then said, “We’re back.”

As I watched him dancing all around, this man who is all about being cool and staying cool and never letting his guard down, I remember thinking,
I guess Pat Riley isn’t so bad after all.

Like I said before, my mistake.

S
haquille O’Neal surveyed the thousands of Beijing citizens clamoring to get closer, craning their necks upward to steal a glimpse of his imposing seven-foot-one frame. The Chinese had dubbed him “the Big Shark” and consistently requested two things during his tour of their country: to touch him once, and to snap a photograph.

“It is almost like you are not real,” confessed
his translator.

Still basking in the glow of his championship with the Heat, O’Neal signed a deal with the Li Ning Company to sell his own brand of sports apparel.

Much like NBA Commissioner David Stern, Shaq had been looking to capitalize on the globalization of the game of basketball. Asia, Shaq determined, was a lucrative, untapped market. “As usual,” noted one league official, “Shaq was
one step ahead of his peers.”

The Big Shark bowed respectfully to the swelling crowd in Beijing and announced, “Hello. I’m Shaquille O’Neal and I love China.”

Clearly the feeling was mutual. Olympic gymnastics
legend Li Ning, for whom the apparel company was named, chose O’Neal as his spokesman after studying data from a poll that showed Shaq was not only one of the most recognizable stars in
China but also boasted one of the highest favorability ratings.

This was true in spite of a major faux pas by O’Neal three years earlier, when, in an attempt to be humorous in answering a question about the beloved Chinese basketball hero Yao Ming, he said, “Tell Yao ching-chong-yang-wah-ah-so!”

Shaq’s Chinese gibberish was immediately condemned as disrespectful and racially insensitive. Yao
graciously tried to diffuse the controversy by joking, “Chinese is hard to learn. I had trouble with it when I was little,” yet the furor persisted. Shaq had caused an international incident.

Within minutes of Shaq’s blunder, his father, Philip Harrison, called him in a rage.

“I thought I taught you better than that!” he thundered. “That stuff isn’t funny! Don’t you do that to Yao Ming. He’s
your brother. Show him the respect he deserves.”

“Shaquille, shame on you,” his mother scolded him. “You owe that nice young man an apology.”

The apology soon followed. Three years later Shaq also extended his regrets personally to Yao’s parents in a private meeting.

Yet the people of China had clearly already forgiven him. Li Ning announced he had commissioned a fifty-foot-tall statue of O’Neal
to be built just outside Chaoyoung Park to enthusiastic roars of approval.

In subsequent years, Baron Davis and Evan Turner would follow Shaq as spokesmen for Li Ning, which aimed to be the Asian version of Nike.

Yet neither would have the same impact as the big man in the summer of 2006. Chinese journalists peppered him with questions, then posed for pictures afterward. One admiring reporter
asked, “Can you win more rings with the Miami Heat?”

“I hope so,” Shaq answered. “My body is a little beat up right now, but it’s nothing a little rest can’t cure.”

More than 7,500 miles away in Miami, Florida, coach Pat Riley caught wind of the comments and grimaced.

W
HILE I WAS ROLLING OUT MY NEW CLOTHING LINE IN CHINA,
Pat Riley was busy sending us letters about our body fat. He had come up with some new and improved threats, but I didn’t even open my letter. I knew I wasn’t going to make
my number.

Pat was concerned winning it all would make us too comfortable. And, to be honest, he was right. It did.

We celebrated a little too long and a little too hard. There were too many parties, too many commercials, too many celebrations. We lost our edge.

My trip to China was business, but it was also a chance for me to make things right. I felt so bad about what I had said about Yao.
It was meant as a joke and it was wrong because the Chinese people are so honorable. It bothered me for a long time afterward. Yao was such a nice guy, and even though I was doing my usual thing by building up our rivalry in the media, I should have left it alone.

At the time I said it, my father was in charge of my fan club mail. He called me up and chewed me out, then he told me that Yao had
been sending me Christmas cards for years. Every one said the same thing: “You are my favorite player.”

Damn. I can be such a jerk sometimes.

When I met Yao’s parents, they were so gracious. They brought me gifts, treated me like a king. I spent five hours with them. Before I left, I told them I thought their son was a warrior. They told me he was only trying to live up to his idol.

I felt
even worse after that.

I showed up to training camp without any chance of making my target of 13 percent body fat. I wasn’t the only one. Antoine and Posey both missed their target number and were suspended.

The body fat crusade was on overdrive and I was tired of it. Tired of walking around drinking water twenty-four hours a day. Tired of eating food for rabbits. I told the guys, “Do you honestly
think Riley was doing this in LA? Do you really think he was pinching Magic Johnson’s waistline every day?”

Pat was pissed that we didn’t come back in top shape, so that meant he needed to crank things up.

The workouts were longer and more intense. After a hard practice we’d have to get on these exercise bikes around the court. They hooked us up to heart monitors and had these television sets
with everyone’s name on it so they could measure our heart rates. Each one of us had to keep it at a certain level depending on our age, weight, and height. Pat would pace back and forth checking the numbers, and if they weren’t what he wanted, he’d yell, “Shaq, pick it up. Pose, pick it up.” Each bike had a chip in it, and it recorded everything.

The idea was to embarrass you into keeping your
heart rate at that level. It was demeaning, but we figured out to a way to rig it. Me and GP realized if you kept tapping and rubbing the monitor on your arm it would speed up the heart monitor even if you weren’t pedaling that hard. DWade and Posey knew about it, too. Some days, we actually were smiling while we were on those bikes. I’m sure Pat was suspicious. He was probably wondering,
What
the hell are they up to?

Our team got off to a terrible start. On the night we raised our championship banner, Chicago crushed us by 42 points. We lost eight of our first twelve games.

Pat wasn’t handling it well. He was big on suits and ties on the road, but after we won a title we got him to relax a little bit and go with jeans and sports coats. But once those losses starting piling up, we
were back to suits again.

DWade had a bad wrist, so he wasn’t 100 percent. Absolutely everyone was gunning for us because we had just won the title. On top of that, I hurt my knee against Houston just six games into the
season. At first we thought I had hyperextended it but it turned out to be torn cartilage. I had arthroscopic surgery and missed thirty-five games.

I was only back for three
and a half weeks when DWade dislocated his shoulder. Even Pat was hurt. He took a short leave of absence because of hip and knee problems.

Honestly? I think he really just needed a leave of absence from us.

We were a mess.

The media was having fun writing “I told you so.” We were too old, too “fat and happy,” too spoiled. We betrayed the discipline that got us there in the first place. Blah
blah blah blah. I had to tune it out so I didn’t haul off and punch somebody.

I resorted to what I call my SHAM strategy. SHAM stands for Short Answer Method. That’s when I start talking in very low, soft tones with one-word answers so the sound bite is practically useless. Note to media: when I do that, it means I’m sick of the same old questions. It means I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
It means I’m SHAMming you.

Even though I had been injured for a big chunk of the season, the fans still voted me as the starting center for the 2007 All-Star Game. Some reporters were squawking that I didn’t belong there, but once again I will say it: give the people what they want. They wanted Shaq. They always have. I tried not to get mad about it. When someone asked me how I felt about making
the team even though I missed so many games, I told them, “I’m like President Bush. You may not like me, you may not respect me, but you voted me in.”

As usual, the NBA was counting on me to provide some All-Star entertainment, and I didn’t let them down. We were having a “practice” at one of the All-Star jam sessions, and I started doing my break dancing at center court. I was spinning and turning
on my head and doing my thing, and then I made my way over to LeBron and challenged him to a dance-off. Next thing you know the two of us are jamming together, wiggling and moving and shaking our booties.
Then I shimmied over to Dwight Howard and challenged him. He answered with a few lame moves of his own, but there was no doubt who the crowd was digging the most.

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.