The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  The host spent most of the night bopping among a crowd of his friends in the middle of the dance floor, head and shoulders and most of a torso above everyone around him. Halfway through the evening, the music was turned down, and O’Neal was summoned to the stage, where he sat in a chair and, along with everyone else, watched a video tribute devoted to the greatness of Shaq. There was O’Neal playing basketball at Louisiana State University, a spindly version of himself, breaking the hoop from the backboard. There was home-video footage of him on a beach, and playing with his kids, and dancing—to one Dr. Dre tune, he dropped to his knees, kicked his legs in the air behind him, and humped the carpet. There were also innumerable shots of him mooning the camera. The final image was of O’Neal, shirtless and sweaty, at the turntables; he unzipped his pants, shifted them gradually down his ample hips, hoisted his underwear up above his waist, and finally turned around and dropped his pants to show the camera his glistening rear. After the show was over, O’Neal stood up, unzipped his fly, zipped it up again, and said, “I never knew I had such a good ass until I saw that film. Damn, I’m sexy.”

  The reason O’Neal dedicated himself to the pursuit of excellence in basketball, he says, was to impress girls. “I was always the class clown, and always wanted everybody to like me,” he told me recently. “Everyone else had a girlfriend, and how come I couldn’t have a girlfriend?” We were at the Mondrian Hotel, in Los Angeles, where he was being photographed by ESPN while perched on top of a six-foot-tall flowerpot, a design feature of the hotel’s pool area. When we sat down at a table to talk, O’Neal smashed his head against the light fixture hanging overhead. “I had to learn around age fifteen to accept my size,” he said. “My father told me, ‘You are going to be someone. Just keep playing and you are going to be a football player, a basketball player, or even a baseball player.’ Around the age of thirteen, I got my name in the papers for basketball and the girls started liking me, and ever since then it’s been nothing but up.”

  O’Neal gets his height from his mother’s side of the family. Lucille O’Neal Harrison is six feet two inches tall, and her grandfather, who was a farmer in Georgia, was about six-ten. O’Neal met his great-grandfather once before he died, and says he is one of the people from history he’d most like to know. The others are Walter Matthau, because of the movie The Bad News Bears (“He was a drunk coach who got a bunch of misfit kids together—black kids, Chinese kids, girls—and they played baseball and won the championship”), and Redd Foxx, “because I used to watch Sanford and Son all the time, and laughter is the best stress reliever.”

  He credits Phil Harrison, his stepfather, actually, with having given him the emotional impetus to succeed in basketball. (Harrison married O’Neal’s mother when Shaq was two. His biological father is Joe Toney, who, in 1994, appeared in the National Enquirer claiming paternity and thereafter did the talk-show rounds. O’Neal’s response was to write a rap song called “Biological Didn’t Bother.”) Harrison, who was a sergeant in the Army, was a disciplinarian, the kind of father who wouldn’t let O’Neal keep trophies in the house for fear that he would become conceited. O’Neal still gives all his trophies to Harrison, and he tends to treat older men with the utmost respect.

  O’Neal’s earliest years were spent in Newark, but when he was in the sixth grade the family was transferred to an Army base in Wildflecken, Germany. There O’Neal started to play basketball seriously, and though he was not a prodigious talent, he worked hard and was unfeasibly tall. As O’Neal recounts in his autobiography, Shaq Talks Back, he was scouted by Dale Brown, the coach of LSU, who had come to Germany to give a basketball clinic. Brown asked how long the six-foot-nine-inch O’Neal had been in the Army; O’Neal replied that he was just fourteen. By the middle of O’Neal’s sophomore year in high school, when he was six-eleven, the family had moved back to the United States, to San Antonio, where he was on his school’s basketball team. From San Antonio, O’Neal went to LSU, and after three years there he opted for the NBA draft and signed, in 1992, with the Orlando Magic for forty million dollars over seven years, which was then the most lucrative contract in NBA history. O’Neal spent four years in Orlando, long enough to earn a reputation as a weak playoff player and to endure an ugly falling-out with his teammate Penny Hardaway. And yet there was no doubt that he had the potential to be one of the most formidable centers to play the game since Abdul-Jabbar, and even Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. In 1996, Jerry Buss, the owner of the Lakers, and his general manager, Jerry West, lured O’Neal to Los Angeles, at a salary of $120 million over seven years—the biggest contract in the game.

  By that time, O’Neal had started to make rap records for Jive—for example, Shaq Diesel, which included songs with titles such as “Shoot Pass Slam” and “(I Know I Got) Skillz”—and had played a genie in the movie Kazaam, one of a handful of films in which he demonstrated the limitations of his acting ability. He had not, however, helped Orlando win an NBA championship, and critics suggested that his proximity to Hollywood would lead to similar results for the Lakers. But O’Neal’s performing career failed to take off; and his game improved when, in 1999, Phil Jackson, the former coach of the Chicago Bulls, took over the job of coaching the Lakers. Under Jackson, O’Neal started to play more of a team game, passing to other players rather than bullying his way to the hoop. In 2000, the team won its first championship since 1988, the era of Magic Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar.

  Jackson is well-known for applying the principles of Zen to the game of basketball, and O’Neal says that Jackson’s methods meshed with his own strategies for victory. “I control my dreams,” O’Neal told me. “So-called educated people call it meditation, but I don’t. I call it ‘dreamful attraction.’ The mind controls everything, so you just close your eyes and see yourself dribbling, see yourself shooting.” Contrary to some reports, O’Neal says that Jackson has not induced the team to practice yoga. “We tried Tai Chi one year, but the guys didn’t like it, because, even though it was stretching, it would make us tight,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t stretch. I just play.”

  O’Neal is regularly described as the league’s most dominant player: There is no other single player who can match him physically, and there is no defensive strategy that another team can devise that will decisively shut him down. Jerry West told me, “If you could construct a basketball player physically, Shaq would be the model. He has this great size and incredible strength, but on top of that he has unbelievable balance, incredible footwork, and a great sense of where he is on the court.” Most dominant isn’t synonymous with best, however; the players who usually win that accolade are smaller, faster men like Kobe Bryant or Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets. And O’Neal’s weaknesses, for all his power, are transparently evident. His free-throw average has been only around 50 percent for most of his career.

  His detractors say that he is dominant only because of his size. Whenever Slam, whose readers are the young fans upon whom the game depends, puts O’Neal on the cover, the editors receive letters complaining that Shaq is just big and fat and boring. O’Neal’s weight is given in the official statistics about the team as an implausible 315 pounds. (People close to Shaq claim that he sometimes hits 350.) When, in mid-March, I asked O’Neal what he weighed, he told me 338 pounds, though he said it in the slightly hesitant tone of a kid asserting that he has done his homework. “I’m just a big-boned guy,” he said. “Muscle weighs more than fat, and a big guy has big muscles. People look at me and see this big guy and they think it’s fat. How can I be fat and out of shape and do what I do? You could put me up against any athlete in the world, you could put them on a computerized diet, and on a treadmill and all that, and I will bust their ass.”

  Being called the most dominant rather than the best is fine with O’Neal. “They’ve changed the game because of me; other organizations whine and cry because of me,” he said. “Being the best is too easy for me.” His free-throw failings are spurs to his ambition, he says. “If I played the game I pl
ay and shot eighty-eight percent from the line, it would take away from my mental focus, because I would know how good I was and I wouldn’t work so hard.” (In fact, O’Neal has been making about 65 percent of his free throws during the current playoffs.) “I’m not allowed to be as dominant as I want to be,” he told me. “I would probably average fifty points a game, twenty rebounds, and the opponents would foul out in the first or second quarter.” O’Neal suspects that his game is being reined in by the NBA referees. “I guess they have to keep it even so that the viewers won’t get bored,” he said. David Stern, the NBA commissioner, recently acknowledged to the Los Angeles Daily News that it is difficult to know when to call a foul on Shaq, and said, “We used to get the same calls on Kareem and every other big man that’s been as great as Shaq is.”

  NBA viewing figures are well down since their peak of 6.6 million at the height of Jordan’s career. Last year, an average of four million people watched the regular season games on NBC. But a game in which O’Neal plays can sometimes make for dull viewing. His strengths aren’t as thrilling to watch as those of a player who flies and leaps, and the defenses used against him slow everything down so much that a viewer’s attention can dwindle. The most notorious of these is the Hack-a-Shaq, in which opposing players make repeated fouls on O’Neal by throwing their arms around his waist, hoping to regain possession of the ball at little cost by sending him to the free-throw line. Phil Jackson agrees that O’Neal is expected to play by different rules from everyone else. “It’s totally unfair, but the referees have to be,” Jackson told me. “Everybody fouls Shaq all the time, because they know the referees can’t call every foul that is created against him. There isn’t a shot in which he’s not fouled except maybe twice a game. There are guys hitting him on the way up, hitting him at the top, knocking him around.” O’Neal says, “The beating that I take is like wrestling. It ain’t even basketball sometimes. I’m the NBA’s best WWF wrestler, and I’m the WWF’s best NBA player.”

  O’Neal has a tattoo on his right arm that says “Against the Law,” and, since he’s famously supportive of the uniformed services, I asked him what he meant by it. “It’s against the law to be this talented, this beautiful, this smart, this sexy,” he said. “I don’t mean penal-code law. I mean laws of nature.”

  Like a Hollywood movie or a mass-market paperback, every sports season needs a narrative of conflict and resolution, and in the 2000–01 season the story was the rivalry and animosity between O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The narrative is crafted by the Lakers’ beat reporters, who attend around a hundred games a season—hanging out in the locker rooms for their appointed forty-five minutes before the game—and show up at countless closed practice sessions. The structure of team coverage creates what a therapist would diagnose as a cycle of dependency and resentment on the part of the reporters, who are a group of mostly smallish men obliged to wait around grudgingly for a bunch of mostly huge men to stoop and speak to them. The reporters exercise their own power, of course, in making a drama out of the daily shifts in locker-room mood, which in turn earns them the occasional enmity of the players. O’Neal barely talks to the press for weeks at a time, or does what he calls “SHAM-ming them”—giving them the Short Answer Method. “They’re yellow journalists,” he said to me one day. “Don’t focus on whether Shaq is having problems with Phil, or whether Shaq is liking Kobe or not, or what Rick and Vanessa are doing—if we’re a great team, say we’re a great team. I think they get so bored with us winning all the time, they focus on that other stuff.”

  But the Shaq-Kobe feud was genuine, and it provided excellent copy. O’Neal and Bryant had never got along. Bryant, who came to the league a polished eighteen-year-old from a wealthy family, seemed to find O’Neal’s antic goofiness distasteful; O’Neal thought Bryant was a selfish player who was interested only in demonstrating his own virtuosity and was insufficiently deferential. O’Neal would say ominous things like “If the big dog don’t get fed, the house won’t get guarded,” after nights of what he saw as Kobe hogging the ball, and Kobe would say to reporters, “Turn my game down? I need to turn it up.” The whole affair culminated, happily enough for the team and its chroniclers, in a reconciliation sentimental enough for the most golden-hued of Hollywood dramas, with Bryant shucking off his natural aloofness both on and off the court—he started to laugh at teammates’ jokes on the bus instead of listening to his Walkman—and with O’Neal referring to the quicksilver Bryant as “my idol.” (The saga forms the basis of a new book, Ain’t No Tomorrow: Kobe, Shaq and the Making of a Lakers Dynasty, by Elizabeth Kaye.) This season, Bryant and O’Neal have been coexisting quite chummily. O’Neal took a few shots at Bryant while delivering an impromptu rap to the crowd at his birthday party, castigating him for not showing up (“Kobe, if you hear me, I’m talking about your ass,” and so on), but the razzing seemed good-natured.

  This season’s master narrative has been Shaq vs. Shaq—O’Neal’s battle with his own body and its ailments. Chronic pain in an arthritic toe and other injuries that have cropped up have been endlessly inquired after by the beat reporters. “We started out with the small toe on his left foot—that was getting to him early—and at some point in the season we all made the transition to the right big toe,” Tim Brown, who covers the team for the Los Angeles Times, explained. The paper has been running headlines like LAKERS’ BIG HOPES REST IN SHAQ’S BIG TOE, and reams of newsprint have been devoted to the orthotics that have been devised by O’Neal’s podiatrist, Robert Mohr, to alleviate the strain on the big toe. Last week, the papers reported that not only had O’Neal cut his finger while playing against the San Antonio Spurs in the first game of the Western Conference semifinals but he had also required stitches to mend a cut sustained earlier that day at home while he was pretending to be Spider-Man.

  This season, O’Neal has thought a lot about the toll the game is taking on his body. “I feel beat up,” he told me a few days after his birthday. “I’m probably one of the only guys in history who has taken a pounding night in and night out.” He was sitting on a massage bench after a practice session, and he rubbed his arms and slapped his biceps as if he were looking over a recalcitrant piece of machinery. “With the last two championships, afterward I just had to sit down for a week and do nothing, like this”—and he struck a catatonic pose, stiff-limbed and staring into space—“and let all the injuries go away. And then there’s another week to do this”—he stretched his thick, muscled arms above his head, exposing the spacious geography of his armpits—“and then, by the time my shit is all gone, we’ve only got another week until training camp.” He was worried, too, about the effects of the anti-inflammatory drugs he was taking. “They are the same drugs they say might have messed up Alonzo Mourning’s kidneys,” he said, referring to the Miami center who missed most of last season as a result of kidney disease.

  Rick Fox, O’Neal’s teammate, coming off the court after a practice in New Jersey a few weeks ago, said, “Shaq is dealing with injuries that he never thought he’d have to deal with. This is new to him. Even Superman had his kryptonite, but after ten years there are only so many hits of kryptonite you can take.” One day, O’Neal told me, mournfully, “When I was Kobe’s age, I could play a magnificent game and stay out all night, but now I am old, and my toe is killing me.” O’Neal, whose contract expires in 2006, has started to say that he may have only two more years in the game, though in 1999 he told Slam that he thought he might be out by the time he reached thirty.

  O’Neal will be under pressure to keep playing. Jerry West told me, “If I ever see him retire early, I’ll kill him. You play until you can’t play. This is a tough guy, and he can play through things that mortal people wouldn’t want to.” Sometimes O’Neal talks about himself this way, too. Toward the end of this year’s regular season, he was out for two games, with a sprained wrist, causing the reporters to shift their focus from foot to arm. The Lakers lost both games, and just before the next game, in which O’Neal was to retu
rn, against Miami, I asked him whether he felt responsible for being hurt or whether he felt as if his body were betraying him as well as the team.

  He rejected the premise of the question. “I don’t get hurt—I get taken out,” he said. “My wrist is hurting for a reason—it’s not hurting because I fell on it. My stomach is hurting for a reason. My knee is hurting for a reason. I don’t get hurt, baby, I get taken out. You can’t hurt this”—and, with that, he flexed his left biceps, like a bodybuilder, and, with one huge fist, banged on his Superman tattoo. Then he went out and scored forty points against Miami, leading the Lakers to victory.

  In other moods, though, O’Neal admits to his own mortality. “Everything hurts,” he told me. “A pinch is a pinch. If you pinch an elephant, it will hurt him. Pain is pain, and pain doesn’t care how big you are or how strong you are.” One day, he said, “You know who my favorite basketball player is? People might be surprised when they hear this. It’s Dave Bing.” I said I didn’t know who Dave Bing was. “I don’t know who he is, either,” said O’Neal. “Who did he play for? Detroit? He’s retired now, and he owns a big steel factory in Detroit.” Bing left the game in 1978, and subsequently became a Hall of Famer, and the winner, in 1984, of the National Minority Small Business Person of the Year and the National Minority Supplier of the Year awards.