Shaq Uncut: My Story (35 page)

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.”

W
HEN 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. Bigger 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.

They called me down and Howard had a whole table set up with different coffees and
espressos. He was smiling and Lester was smiling, so I knew things were going well. He started serving everyone and he said, “Shaquille, what can I get you?”

I answered, “Nothing, thanks. I don’t drink coffee.”

Lester looked like I’d punched him in the gut. Howard looked kind of flustered, so I explained, “I’m sorry, I just don’t like the taste of it.”

The truth was, I’d never seen black people
drink coffee. I thought it was a white person’s drink.

So we get in the car and Lester says, “You know this deal is off, right?”

It will probably go down as one of my worst business decisions ever, but what can I tell you? I just don’t like coffee. Can’t fake that one, brother.

There was one other potential business deal I’d like to have back. When I first moved to Isleworth, someone approached
me about buying the orange groves across the street. All I could think of was
Kareem and his bad investment in the soybean fields, so I said, “I’m going to pass.” Now I drive by there every night in the summer, past the multimillion-dollar houses they built there.

Even though I left LSU after three years of college, I promised my mother I would graduate, and I did. Honestly, furthering your education
is important if you want to keep building your brand. I graduated from LSU while I was with the Lakers. I said a few words and told the good people of Baton Rouge that from now on LSU stood for Love Shaq University.

In 2005 I earned my MBA from the University of Phoenix. Now I’m working on my PhD at Barry University in Miami in Leadership and Education with a specialization in Human Resource
Development. The topic of my dissertation is “The Duality of Humor and Aggression in Leadership Styles.”

What that means is my alter ego, Shaq, is now on life support. In fact, by the time you read this, he’ll probably be dead. I’m killing him off. It will be Dr. O’Neal from now on.

That doesn’t mean I won’t have some silly moments. I’m still going to do jumping jacks naked if I feel like it.
I’m still going to have dessert before dinner. I’m still going to paint my toenails.

They’ve already got some things cooking in Hollywood for me. Adam Sandler called me in June 2011 and said, “I want you to be in some of my movies.”

I have a lot of opportunities. It makes me want to go back to LSU and find the marketing professor that told me “Big guys don’t sell” and ask him to revise his syllabus.
I don’t remember the guy’s name, but one day I was goofing around in class and he told me, “I hope you make a lot of money playing basketball, because big guys aren’t good spokesmen.”

Oh, really?

I’ve stayed fairly low-key about what I own. For instance, out of the fifteen twenty-four-hour fitness places I own, only three have my name on it. None of the Five Guys I own have my name on it. None
of the clubs I own in Vegas, either. I own Pure and Chateau and the biggest candy store in the Paris hotel in Vegas, but you won’t see Shaquille O’Neal plastered all over the Strip.

That’s just business. Now, even though I’m a businessman I’m still going to act like a kid, especially when I’m with my own kids.

I built my house in Isleworth so my children would have everything they need for the
summer without having to leave their house. We’ve got the gym, the movie theater, the video games, the swimming pool with the rock wall to jump off. They’ve got their own rooms and a big kitchen.

Now they are getting older they think it’s cool to leave the house, so I let them go to the YMCA to hang out with their friends. I love that! Here we’ve got this amazing house and they’re asking to go
to the Y. Makes me proud of them.

My kids have no idea what it’s like to be poor. They can’t possibly understand what it was like to walk through the streets of Newark ducking bullets and drug dealers. That’s a blessing.

But they will understand how important it is to give back to those who don’t have as much as you do. I’ll make sure of it.

One of the things I’d like to tackle is how to solve
the problem we have in this country with homeless people. There are too many of them in too many cities across the United States.

Every time I see a homeless person it bothers me. Once I was in LA and I gave a guy some money, and then I saw him go into the liquor store and buy booze with the money I’d just given him. I couldn’t be angry. It was my fault, really. Another time some homeless guy
asked me to help him out because he was hungry, so I give him a wad of bills. Then I’m driving around and he and some other guy are making an exchange, so clearly now I’m paying for this guy’s drugs.

At that point I decided,
You know what? I don’t want homeless people to go hungry, so next time they want money I’m gonna buy them food instead.

Now when I see a homeless person and he looks down
and out and smells kind of bad, I take him into a restaurant, put him in the
corner away from the other customers, and tell the manager, “Here’s a hundred bucks. Let the guy eat whatever he wants—but no booze.”