Shaq Uncut: My Story (32 page)

“Hey Mike,” he whispered. “C’mon here.”

“Huh?” said Longabardi.

“Let me pick you up. Right here in my arms, brother,” said O’Neal.

Without another word, Shaq scooped up the startled assistant, then refocused his attention
on Rivers as he lifted then lowered Longabardi in a fluid, curling motion.

Kevin Garnett, who had come to represent the very
essence of Celtics intensity, lowered his head to stifle a giggle.

“I was doing my best not to bust out laughing,” said KG, “but it’s not every day you see a guy bench-pressing your assistant coach.”

Rivers valiantly tried to press on, but as Shaq sat expressionless,
using a grown man as a free weight, his teammates collapsed in convulsions of laughter.

“Aw, Shaq,” protested Rivers, before grinning in spite of himself. “Okay, guys, let’s play.”

“Don’t worry, Coach,” the big man said, patting Rivers’s shoulder on his way to the parquet. “I’m nice and loose now.”

So were his teammates.

P
LAYING FOR THE BOSTON CELTICS WAS ONE OF THE GREAT
honors of my career. I only wish I could have finished what I went there to do—help them win a championship.

I don’t care what anyone says. If I could have stayed healthy, I
really believe we could have done it.

In the beginning, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work out with Boston. We were talking to a bunch of teams, including Atlanta, and I wanted to get the midlevel exception. The Celtics chose to give that to Jermaine O’Neal. That kind of bothered me. Danny said they gave it to Jermaine because he was thirty-one years old, a lot younger than me, and he was
coming off a great year—except for the playoffs. Danny said JO had an injury in the postseason and that was why he’d played bad. He said Kendrick Perkins told him to go out and get Jermaine O’Neal.

When Perk suggested it, Danny said, “But he played so bad against us in the playoffs.”

“Don’t hold that against him,” Perk answered. “Everybody plays bad against me.”

What it came down to was, if
I wanted to play for the Boston Celtics, I was going to have to take the minimum, which was about $1.5 million.

I was going to be thirty-nine years old, and it was obvious to me I needed to go somewhere that wouldn’t ask me to do too much by myself. I had already done it my way, I already had four rings, so where could I go to further my legacy?

I looked at all the contending teams, and Boston
stood out for a number of reasons. For one thing, Perk was out after knee surgery, so they needed help in the middle. The other thing was, I already knew
their Big Three very well. KG and I had been friends for years. Paul Pierce was a big-time scorer, and I was the one who gave him the nickname “The Truth.” Ray Allen’s mom and my mom have been real tight for a long time, so I knew what I was
dealing with in terms of those guys.

What attracted me most to Boston was they played like a team. They shared the ball, and you never heard about any personality conflicts on the team. My one year in Cleveland when they beat us in the playoffs, Rajon Rondo killed us in Game 1, then Paul Pierce killed us in Game 2, and then in Game 3 they decided to put me on KG, and then he killed us. I’m watching
them, thinking,
Nobody cares who scores the points. That’s pretty cool.

There was some talk about me going back to the Lakers. Jeanie Buss was pushing her dad to consider it, and Phil Jackson would have signed off on it, but Dr. Buss wasn’t gonna go for that.

Danny Ainge called me just after midnight on July 1. He told me he wanted to sign me for the minimum. Perry, my agent, said we’d take
the midlevel exception, but Danny was worried about my age and how much I had left in the tank. He said with Perk out he needed to make sure he had someone that could go every night. We decided to hold off until we looked into some other options. In the meantime, the Celtics and the Cavaliers talked about some sign-and-trade deals, including one that involved Anthony Parker, but they couldn’t agree
on the Boston player.

The summer went along after the Celtics signed JO, and I thought,
Well, maybe not Boston.
But I never really got them out of my mind. Paul Pierce was talking to me saying, “Come, big fella. We need you.” Ray was really pushing for me, too. The fans in that city had always been so fantastic to me and those veterans were really appealing, so I told Perry, “Go back at them.”

It was early August, and Danny was fishing with two of his sons on the Colorado River. There was no cell phone service on the river, but he had a satellite phone with him and that’s how Perry reached him.

They talked about the minimum, and Danny told Perry that Doc
Rivers wasn’t sure about having me come on board. He’d heard some stuff out of Cleveland that Mo Williams and I had some issues,
and he wasn’t too happy about it. He was a big fan of Pat Riley’s, too, so I’m guessing he got an earful from Pat about me.

I called Doc on his cell phone. He had just landed in Orlando, where he lived during the off-season. My house was about twenty minutes from his place. I asked him, “Can we talk?”

He agreed, so I went to his house and we sat down. He had this list of things he wanted to
go over with me. The first thing he said was, “Shaq, for the first time in your life you are going to have to be a role player. I’m not sure you can deal with that.” He told me he wouldn’t guarantee me any playing time. It could be twenty minutes some nights, fifteen minutes other nights. He wouldn’t guarantee me a starting job.

“And no perks,” Doc told me. “No bodyguards, no entourage. If you
want those people, you will have to pay for them yourself. No superstar treatment here. That’s not how we do it.”

I’m listening, and so far I can live with all of it. I told him, “Doc, I just want to win one more title. That’s all I care about. I want to help the Celtics get another ring.”

He said, “C’mon, Shaq,” and I looked him dead in the eye and said, “I’m serious. You won’t have any trouble
with me. I’m here to win.”

I told him, “Look, the breakups I had in LA and Miami, was I a bit of an ass? Yes, because they were putting all sorts of pressure on me, so it had to be done my way. My philosophy in those situations was if you don’t like me, move me. But with this team, I don’t have to be like that. I see how you guys play, how you move the ball. It would be idiotic of me to come
in here and mess it up. I want to get five rings. I’m on my way out either way. Whether I get one million, two million, ten million, it’s still coming down to the finish for me.”

I could see he was coming around to it. I had been working out all summer and I looked pretty good, and he made a comment about that.

Then he said to me, “I will cut you on the spot if I think you are messing up my
locker room.”

“It won’t happen,” I told him. “I promise.”

Next thing you know, I’m signing with the Celtics, and KG is calling me and he’s all juiced up, and I pick out number 36, and I’m ready to take over Paul Revere’s city by land and by sea.

Doc told me, “Jermaine O’Neal will probably start while Perk is out, and you’ll come off the bench.”

I said, “That’s cool.”

Now on the inside I’m
thinking,
We’ll see about that,
because I’m competitive and I knew I was going to come into Boston in great shape and they would realize pretty quickly they would want me in that starting lineup over JO. But I promised Doc I wouldn’t make any waves, so I kept all those thoughts to myself.

When I showed up at training camp, I could tell they were impressed. The training staff looked me over and
gave me two thumbs-up. The coaching staff went over some stuff with me and I picked it up pretty quickly, so now they are thinking,
Shaq’s a fast learner.
Right away the guys understood having me on the floor would open up all sorts of things for them offensively, so they were happy, too. JO had some problems with his knee, so I ended up in the starting lineup after all.

That was a good decision.
Turns out when I started and played twenty minutes or more, our team was 21-4. Not bad for a thirty-nine-year-old guy making the minimum.

The Celtics were a crazy bunch. I fit right in. They were loose, a little nutty. I’ve always said KG is one of the funniest guys in the NBA—he just doesn’t want to let the public in on that. I used to see it when we played in All-Star Games together. He does
great imitations, all in that rat-a-tat voice of his. He does a very good Shaquille O’Neal, actually. He’s got my mumble down.

One day we were hanging out and me, KG, Nate Robinson, and Glen Davis did a video in the locker room. We put on some Halloween masks, and I wore a wig with a ponytail, and we started dancing
to “Hard in Da Paint” by Waka Flocka Flame. KG was wearing some kind of evil
duck mask and a towel, and I’m telling y’all, that boy has rhythm. Everyone agreed it was vintage until Nate Robinson tweeted it, and Danny Ainge turned up the volume and started listening to the lyrics. They were kind of raunchy and they had a lot of words you shouldn’t say around kids, so Nate got fined.

That might have been my fault. When we were in training camp I heard Danny talking to Nate
and Glen Davis about tweeting. He was trying to tell them to be careful and to remember they were representing the Celtics, and the team had certain guidelines they were going to expect them to follow.

I’m listening to all this and after he’s done I go up to Danny and say, “You know, everything you said is right, but you’re not speaking their language.” Danny is looking at me kind of funny and
I said, “If you really want them to get the message you say this: ‘If you are irresponsible about tweeting, I’m going to fine you twenty thousand dollars.’ They’ll understand that.”

The next day we have a “social media” session where this expert comes in and talks to us about tweeting and YouTube and all that stuff. We have a pretty interesting debate about freedom of speech. The expert starts
giving us examples of athletes who have tweeted something and gotten themselves in a bunch of trouble. You can tell Nate and Big Baby aren’t even listening. The next thing you know, Danny stands up and says, “Okay, let me make this clear. It will cost you twenty thousand bucks if there is profanity, nudity, or bad language. Use the F word and it’s going to cost you.”

I swear, it must have been
four or five days later that we did the video. That was a private thing, something between the guys. We had a blast doing it, but it was never intended to leave our locker room. If it hadn’t, it would have been no harm, no foul. But once Nate tweeted it, that was on him. When Danny hit him with the fine, KG was saying, “Twenty thousand dollars! Hell! That’s the last video I’m doing.”

That kind
of stuff is one of the reasons Doc never really warmed up to Nate. I wasn’t surprised at all when he got traded.

Nate was always trying to get noticed by the public. He was always tweeting videos of himself punking his teammates. You’ve probably seen clips of him putting salt in my water or dunking on my head when I had my back to him in practice. He and Paul started throwing popcorn in my mouth
when I fell asleep in the theater. In training camp Nate put on my size 23 shoes and tried to do a wind sprint in under thirty seconds.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Most of those “punks” were staged. I came up with most of them for Nate. Some people are a little too focused on Twitter, and Nate was one of them. He was too worried about how many followers he had. He kept saying, “Shaq,
I need more people. Help me out.”

I made sure I didn’t go around telling any of the Celtics how to play or what to do. When you think about it, the star power we had in that room was incredible. Between KG, Paul, Ray, and myself, we had racked up almost 96,000 points, forty-four All-Star appearances, and seven championship rings.

What I did try to do with some of the younger fellas was talk
to them about marketing themselves and promoting their own brand. Just like Magic Johnson had done with me, I tried to explain to a kid like Rajon Rondo that he shouldn’t be satisfied with just endorsements. He should go beyond that. He should create his own Rondo portfolio.

I loved the guys. Almost all of them. They were a terrific group, very professional, but they loved to laugh and sing and
dance and keep it light.

They had their moments, like any team. Rondo was always a topic of conversation. I’ve been in a lot of leadership positions. I’m getting my PhD, so I’ve been reading all sorts of leadership books. The one thing you can’t do is this—a millionaire can’t change a millionaire.

People want to change Rondo. It ain’t happening. He’s a talented kid, but he’s a stubborn kid.
I love him. He has a great future ahead of him, but he probably needs to meet his teammates halfway once in a while.

The good thing about me is I speak everyone’s language. Always have. I can get gutter with Delonte West or I can raise it up and talk Harvard talk with Ray Allen.

The first couple of months with Rondo, I didn’t say anything to him. I just watched him. I was trying to learn what
made him tick, because the other guys had told me how important he was but how frustrating he was at the same time.