O’Neal is one of the largest men alive. He wears size-22 basketball shoes, which are made for him by a company called Starter; they are all white and finished with a shiny gloss, reminiscent, in their sheen and size, of the hull of a luxury yacht. (When the Lakers’ equipment manager, a rotund man in the mid-five-foot range named Rudy Garciduenas, carries the shoes into the locker room before a game, he cradles them in gentle arms, as if he were the nursemaid of Otus and Ephialtes, the twin giant sons of Poseidon.) O’Neal’s cars must have their interiors ripped out and their seats moved back ten inches before he is able to drive them. (His most recent acquisition is a Ferrari Spider convertible, a birthday gift from his father that was, as he pointed out to reporters in the Lakers’ locker room one night, bought with his own earnings. O’Neal’s Spider has its top down permanently, since he’s too big for the convertible to convert.) O’Neal’s pants have an outside seam of four feet six and a half inches. He has never encountered a hotel-room showerhead that was high enough for him to stand under, an inconvenience for a man who spends months at a time on the road. When he speaks on a cellphone, he holds it in front of his mouth and talks into it as if it were a walkie-talkie, and then swivels it up to his ear to listen, as if the phone were a tiny planet making a quarter orbit around the sun of his enormous head.
O’Neal isn’t the tallest player in the NBA—that’s Shawn Bradley, of the Dallas Mavericks, who is seven feet six—and many teams have at least one seven-footer. But Shawn Bradley is seventy-odd pounds lighter than O’Neal, and when they are on the court together it looks as if Bradley would be well advised to abandon basketball and return to his former calling, as a Mormon missionary. O’Neal is daunting even to the most accomplished of seven-footers, like Dikembe Mutombo, of the Philadelphia 76ers, who is an inch taller than O’Neal but, at 265 pounds, a bantamweight by comparison. When the 76ers met the Lakers in last year’s NBA Finals, Mutombo and O’Neal clashed repeatedly under the boards, with Mutombo bouncing off O’Neal’s body—the hulking, barging shoulder, the prodigious posterior backing into implacable reverse.
Many centers move like articulated trucks on a highway filled with Mercedes SLs—they can’t weave from lane to lane or make sharp turns or suddenly accelerate. But O’Neal’s physical power is augmented by an unlikely agility: He is able to jump and loft his massive body above the rim, and his recovery when he hits the ground is such that should he miss the basket on the first try he can go up again, just as high and just as quickly, grab the ball, feint to fool the three defenders leaping around him, and hit his mark. On the official play-by-play reports that are given to reporters covering the game, O’Neal’s performance is condensed into a code: “MISS O’Neal Lay-up/O’Neal REBOUND/MISS O’Neal Lay-up/O’Neal REBOUND/O’Neal Slam Dunk”—all happening within the space of seven seconds. O’Neal was the second-best scorer in the league this season, with 27.2 points per game, after Philadelphia’s Allen Iverson, who scored an average of 31.4. And he has been the NBA Finals’ Most Valuable Player for the past two years.
O’Neal’s body isn’t as cut as he’d like it to be, and friends say that what he really wants is a six-pack stomach, but he takes pride in his solid muscularity. At one point while we were talking, he rose from his chair, hoisted up his yellow No. 34 jersey, and invited me to pinch his fat. A brief investigation revealed that there wasn’t any fat to pinch—though there was an acreage of belly, tattooed just above the navel with “LILWarrior;” and, glinting on the higher reaches of his torso, a gold bar piercing a nipple. “Sixteen percent body fat, baby,” O’Neal said.
It is perhaps inevitable that O’Neal is routinely described as having a huge personality, although his personality is probably the most ordinary-sized thing about him. Even when he is silent in the presence of reporters, which he often is, or when his public comments are restricted to mumbles, his importance on the court means that his pronouncements are invested with extra significance. When O’Neal does talk to reporters, after a game, they swarm around him, pointing miniature tape recorders up over their heads, toward his mouth. His voice can be so low that you don’t know what he’s said until you bring the tape recorder back down to earth and play the tape.
O’Neal’s on-court persona is ferocious, and his comments about his opponents are usually of the standard aggressive-athlete variety. “They ought to make those lazy-ass millionaires play some defense,” he told me one day. O’Neal aspires to a career in law enforcement after he retires from basketball, and his profile as a player is that of a crushing, point-scoring bad cop, with no good cops in sight. “He likes to enforce things,” Herb More, one of O’Neal’s high school coaches, says. But his disposition is fundamentally sunny, and if his sense of humor runs to the excruciatingly broad—he derives great pleasure from picking up a defenseless member of the Lakers’ staff, or a reporter, and manhandling him like a burly father with a squealing three-year-old—it is deeply felt.
These characteristics, along with his enthusiastic if less than triumphant excursions into the territories of rap music and movie acting, have made him a central figure in the popular culture. His affability is currently being harnessed to promote Burger King, Nestlé Crunch, and Swatch; and his endorsements have been estimated to earn him between eight and ten million dollars a year. He offers a combination of cartoonish playfulness and wholesome values. He has never taken drugs, unless you count a brief dalliance with creatine and androstenedione, the legal bodybuilding supplements. He never drinks in public, unless it’s a soda he’s endorsing. He is well-known for his rapport with children, and he does a lot of charity work with them. Every Christmas, he dresses up in a Santa suit and hands out gifts in an event known as Shaq-A-Claus, and he has granted twelve wishes through the Make-A-Wish Foundation over the past two years. He’s not the kind of player you’d expect to see slapped with a paternity suit. (O’Neal has four children: two with his girlfriend of three years, Shaunie Nelson, one daughter from a previous relationship, and a son of Shaunie’s whom O’Neal considers his own.) Nor is he likely to participate in any of those activities that advertisers most fear, and be charged with DUI, like Rod Strickland, who plays for the Miami Heat, or, like the former New Jersey Net Jayson Williams, have a chauffeur found shot to death in his bedroom.
O’Neal has had some misadventures in marketing, largely because he and his former agent Leonard Armato tried in the late nineties to sell Shaq as an independent brand, something that had never been done by a basketball player. They launched an online clothing-and-shoe company, Dunk.net, which never took off and went bust after the dot-com crash; another clothing line, called TWIsM.—“The world is mine,” O’Neal’s personal motto—was similarly unsuccessful. O’Neal and Armato parted ways last year, and O’Neal replaced him with Perry Rogers, a sports marketer who built his career on selling Andre Agassi; Mike Parris, O’Neal’s uncle and a former cop, has become O’Neal’s manager. “Shaq is a brand, and we are trying to match him up with companies that match his personality and caliber as an athlete,” Parris explained to me. (This realignment has yet to be entirely accomplished—O’Neal has until recently been associated with a health-club company called ZNetix, whose founder was accused of bilking investors of millions of dollars.)
Apart from Michael Jordan, who has made more than $425 million from the likes of Nike and Gatorade during the course of his career, the only other player whose advertising deals rival O’Neal’s is Kobe Bryant, his Lakers teammate. Unlike some Lakers before him, such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, O’Neal thoroughly enjoys being a celebrity. He considers it his duty to present a friendly face in public, even on occasions when he would prefer not to be badgered by autograph hunters, and he accepts the inevitability of being recognized. O’Neal was startled to discover, after being stranded on September 11 in Baton Rouge for several days, that he was expected to show ID when boarding the charter plane he’d hired. “I’m not prejudiced, but those pilots had better have some ID,” he told a friend.
O’Neal’s p
ublic persona could not be more different from that of Jordan, who was the dominant force in basketball throughout most of the late eighties and the nineties, and is still the world’s best-known athlete. Jordan, like the style of basketball he perfected, was transcendent. His athleticism resembled aeronautics, and he regularly evoked celestial comparisons: Larry Bird once described him as “God disguised as Michael Jordan.” O’Neal, by contrast, is solidly earthbound. (On the court, Kobe Bryant is Ariel to O’Neal’s Caliban.) Michael Jordan was a wise adult figure who invited aspiration: The elegant Nike commercials that urged fans to Be Like Mike encouraged an identification with his prowess, even as they celebrated his superlative capacities.
Being Like Shaq is demonstrably impossible, and more or less unimaginable. Instead, O’Neal, with his taste for souped-up cars, and his appetite for dumb jokes, and his tendency toward braggadocio, looks like a regular American guy, albeit a drastically oversized one. Shaq appears to want to Be Like Us.
The growth of professional basketball over the past twenty-odd years from a relatively minor spectator sport to a mass-cultural phenomenon is an example of the way in which all of American culture is increasingly geared to the tastes of teenage boys. Marketers hold that adolescent boys, with their swiftly changing appetites and their enormous buying power, are the most difficult and most critical consumers to reach. Basketball is a perfect game for teenagers: It’s fast, it’s energetic, it requires little equipment, and it can be practiced in driveways and on the playground without so much as an opponent; and it has been appropriated by products that have nothing to do with sports—Coke, milk—as an excellent way to reach that desired demographic. Teen boys function, in turn, as cultural emissaries to the global population: Nikes aren’t cool all over the world because Vince Carter wears them but because cool American teenagers wear them.
Basketball itself is marketed with teen tastes in mind. The theater of a Lakers game has an adolescent-boy aesthetic: goofy and overheated. There are the whirling spotlights when the players emerge from the locker room, high-fiving; the snippets of roaring rap music and of the teen-boy anthem “We Will Rock You,” by Queen; the absurd contests held between quarters, in which competitors do things like play musical chairs on a set of huge inflatable seats. Should all this hilarity be inadequate to the task of holding a young man’s interest, there is always the Laker Girls. The prevalence of teen-boy tastes in American culture is something that suits Shaquille O’Neal, since those are also his tastes. There are, of course, certain adult dimensions to his life. He talks of marrying Shaunie—she wears a big diamond engagement ring—although he says he’s not quite ready yet. And he speaks often of his responsibilities and the fact that he doesn’t go clubbing the way he used to. “When I was by myself, the only people I had to take care of were my parents,” he says. “But then I had my first child and I had to slow down; and now I’ve got four.” But in many ways his lifestyle is a thirteen-year-old’s fantasy existence. O’Neal has surrounded himself with cousins from Newark and old friends from high school, who share his interests in goofing off, breaking stuff, making noise, shooting guns, and driving a wide range of motorized vehicles, which include customized Harley-Davidsons and, on the lake at his house in Orlando, a fleet of Jet-Skis.
O’Neal has installed one of his high school buddies, Joe Cavallero, to look after the Orlando house, which also appears to mean wreaking measured destruction. “We have food fights, where Thomas, the chef, will come in from the grocery store with all these things, and Shaquille will break a whole watermelon over my head, and I’ll hit him with a pudding cake,” Cavallero told me. “Shaquille doesn’t really have many books, but he has got a big video collection: the whole Little Rascals series, and every kung-fu thing you can think of, and sometimes we play-fight like that, too. And every night he’ll get on his DJ deck and play for a couple of hours, and he’ll turn that thing up as loud as it will go, and everything in his house is marble, so it echoes through the whole house. And Shaquille likes to wake me up with a pillow smash to the face. You know how you get to being sound asleep, and someone smashes you in the face with a pillow? It is so funny.”
The house in Los Angeles is home not only to Shaunie and the children but to Thomas Gosney, Shaq’s chef, factotum, and close friend, whose loyalty is such that he responds to questions about O’Neal in the first-person plural: When I asked Gosney whether O’Neal was ever going to get around to marrying Shaunie, he said, “I think we will, but I think we need to get out of the NBA first.” In addition to feeding O’Neal lots of fruit and vegetables and preventing him from indulging his particular culinary vice of eating sandwiches late at night, Gosney provides round-the-clock companionship if necessary. “The night before that first championship that we won, O’Neal was up all night,” Gosney said. “He was stressing out, and I knew he needed a release. He came in and found me and said, ‘Are you sleeping?’ So we got up, and we rode go-carts, and then we rode motorcycles. He needed to get up and do these things in the middle of the night.” O’Neal depends on his friends not just for entertainment but for home management, and Gosney told me, “Before Shaunie came and lived with us, I would say that I was his wife, except for the sex. Shaquille has said to me, ‘If you were a girl, I don’t know what I would do.’”
O’Neal’s size gives him a storybook quality that also exaggerates the childish aspect of his nature. In myth, giants are primordial creatures, who are often beloved for their lumbering doltishness. O’Neal is much sharper than the typical fairy-tale giant, but the simplicity of his tastes and of his manner of expression has currency in a popular culture where childishness is valued above adult sophistication. “Kids like me because they see themselves in me,” he said. “I don’t speak with a Harvard-type vocabulary. I only wear suits when I need to. I don’t talk about stuff I haven’t gone through. I am just me. They like rims; I like rims. They like rap music; I like rap music. They like platinum; I like platinum.”
A few years ago, O’Neal took up hunting, and one of his favorite activities is disappearing for the day into a game preserve in Florida with a few friends and a few guns. He is a bit defensive about this hobby. “It’s not like I’m just sneaking around and killing animals. I am a law-abiding citizen,” he told me. “What I like about it, first, is looking at the animals, and then I like getting the big ones. You can be out there all day, walking around, looking at leaves, looking at grass, looking at footprints.” Off the marble entrance hall of O’Neal’s house in Beverly Hills, there is a carpeted room, filled with his hunting trophies: Mounted heads of antlered creatures cover the walls and, because the walls are filled, cover the floor, too, their noses pointing quirkily up at the high ceiling. There are a few animals that O’Neal bought already stuffed: a polar bear, and a taxidermic tableau of a lion attacking a zebra. The scent of the room is a pungent mixture of the chemical and the irredeemably organic, and the door is usually kept closed, like Bluebeard’s bloody chamber.
A few days after O’Neal turned thirty, in March, he threw a party for himself at his house for a couple of hundred friends, family members, and business associates. An archway of red balloons had been set up at the foot of the driveway, which was covered with a red carpet upon which Superman logos were projected in spinning light. The red carpet led into a large tent behind the house, above the tennis court, which was decorated with long tubular balloons in red and yellow and blue, twisted together like something from a medical diagram of the lymphatic system.
Large Superman logos hung from the tent’s ceiling, and on either side of a DJ deck were two telephone booths with Superman logos on them. There were buffet tables piled with food: steaming lobster tails and a pyramid of shrimp; a birthday cake featuring a cardboard image of O’Neal in full Superman attire, swooping up through a basketball hoop. Guests could help themselves to Häagen-Dazs from a refrigerated cart, and order drinks from bars sponsored by Red Bull and E&J cognac. A cigar company had set up a table arrayed with different kinds of cigars,
each of them bearing a paper ring printed with the words “Happy 30th Shaq.”
O’Neal, who had a cigar clamped in his mouth, wore a gray leather suit with a three-quarter-length jacket. (The suit required 150 square feet of leather, the skins of about eighteen lambs.) He greeted his guests—his Lakers teammate Rick Fox and Fox’s wife, the actress Vanessa Williams; Ray Lewis, the Baltimore Ravens linebacker; the actor Tom Arnold, who lives across the street; the rap musicians Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz; and any number of Shaq service-industry members, including his masseur and the guy who installed the audio and video equipment in his house—with unflagging enthusiasm, hugging the men, bending down low to kiss the women’s cheeks. Guests wandered in and out of the house, past the triangular swimming pool on the patio, in which a surfboard decorated with an image of O’Neal’s Lakers jersey floated, and into the kitchen, which was filled with gifts that he’d received: sugar cookies, a big toy truck, a box from the Sharper Image. On the walls of the marble hallway leading out of the kitchen, there was bad basketball art—a painting of tall figures leaping around a basket, and another of an athlete’s back as he holds a basketball on his shoulders, Atlas-like. There were photographs of O’Neal’s children, and a framed clipping from the Star bearing the headline CAUGHT! SHAQ DATING UP A STORM WITH HALLE BERRY.
The living room, which has a view of the San Fernando Valley, is flanked by two fish tanks made from curving glass. The tanks are filled with brightly colored exotic fish, swimming flickeringly, and at one point in the evening O’Neal, coming into the house, found a few guests standing mesmerized in front of the tanks. He went behind a staircase that led off the hallway, where, hidden from view, was a smaller tank, filled with goldfish. He scooped into the goldfish tank with a net and filled a glass with slippery orange bodies. Then he climbed up a stepladder that was set alongside one of the big tanks, lifted its lid, and dumped in the goldfish. The angel fish and clown fish and puffer fish went wild, darting to swallow the flailing goldfish whole. A ruthless-looking barracuda snapped one up, and then went for the rebound and snared another. O’Neal looked extremely satisfied with the whole scene. “I love the sport of hunting,” he said.
The Only Game in Town Page 31
