Shaq Uncut: My Story (29 page)

Pat hears me so he starts going ballistic on me. Now, JWill was my guy. I kind of brought him there, so I felt responsible for him.

I tell Pat we’re a team and we need to stick together, not
throw guys out of the gym. Pat is screaming at me and says if I don’t like it, then I should get the hell out of practice, too.

That’s when I said, “Why don’t you make me?”

I start taking a couple of steps towards Pat. Udonis Haslem steps in and I shove him out of the way. Then Zo tries to grab me. I threw him aside like he was a rag doll.

Now it’s me and Riley face-to-face, jaw to jaw. I’m
poking him in the chest and he keeps slapping my finger away and it’s getting nasty. Noisy, too. He’s yelling “Fuck you!” and I’m yelling back, “No, fuck you!”

Zo is trying to calm us both down and he has this kind of singsong panic in his voice. He keeps saying, “Big fella, no big fella, big fella!” I finally turn around and tell him, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hit the man. Do you think
I’m crazy?”

At that point Pat decides that practice is over. He walks out and goes to his downstairs office, and everyone just kind of stands there. Nobody is sure what to do. I think they were pretty shocked because it was the first time they ever saw anyone stand up to Pat like that.

Everybody was kind of backing away from me because I had that murderous “Shaq is about to go off” look on my
face. They knew better than to mess with me at that point.

Obviously that was the end of me in Miami. Pat knew and I knew it. I called my uncle Mike and my agent, Perry Rogers, and told them, “Let’s ask for a trade before he can control the story.” I knew because Pat was such a control freak he’d want to spin it his way.

In the end, I was kind of sad about the whole thing because Miami was a
city that was very nice to me, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful to their fans. I also loved Miami’s owner, Mickey Arison. He was the best owner I’ve ever been around. He was friendly, gentle, generous, and kind. He supported us but never interfered, which is what every owner should do.

I’m not a big schmoozer, but when I first got to Miami, Mr. Arison invited me on this beautiful yacht.
He told me, “I’m glad you’re here. Tickets sales are up, and I think we can win a championship. If you ever need anything, just call me.”

That was really the extent of my relationship with him. I’m not the kind to hang with the owner, but whenever I saw him I always enjoyed it, even if all we did was say, “Hey, how are you doing? Shalom.” I’m sure Pat complained to him about me. I’m sure he told
him that I was faking my injury, and Mickey probably wasn’t too happy to hear that.

Of everything that happened, that was what upset me the most. I still can’t believe Pat questioned whether I could play. They wanted me to do all this rehab and then threw that in my face when I left because I didn’t do what they wanted me to do, but I didn’t trust them anymore. How many times was I going to fly
to California to have somebody stick needles in my legs before someone said, “Hey, maybe this isn’t working”?

Soon after my little incident with Pat, he called Perry and told him, “It’s over. We’re trading Shaq.” Perry said: “Let me fly out there and talk this over with you.” Pat said, “No, we’re done.”

He told Perry they had a deal to trade me to Phoenix. Perry called me and said, “What do
you think?” I said immediately, “Let’s go.”

By the time I left Miami things weren’t really all that good between me and DWade. It wasn’t bad, but it just wasn’t good, either. I’m sure someone got in his ear and said, “Stay away from Shaq, he’s trouble.” People ask me if I’m disappointed DWade didn’t stand up for me, but I wasn’t, because you can’t stand up to Pat. If you do, you’re gone, and
DWade wants to stay in Miami for his entire career.

He’s a bona fide star now. Very talented kid. Am I sorry we didn’t stay friends? I don’t know. It’s not really about that. The job is to win championships. We got one championship together, so that’s what I’ll remember about Dwyane Wade.

When he traded me, Pat denied we were having any problems. He told the media, “I loved Shaq when I got him
and I love him today.”

He didn’t mean it. He hated the way I called him out. He didn’t like to be challenged. I’m sure he thought I was trying to destroy the culture he created. He was probably right. I thought his “culture” needed some tweaking.

The sad part is, a little communication could have fixed all of it. As long as I know what’s going on, it’s cool. Be straight with me and we’ll be
fine. Don’t tell me, “We love you, we love you, you put our franchise on the map,” then turn around and trade me a few days later. Just be honest with me. Talk to me like a man.

I can still hear Pat telling me, “I’m going to take down that 6th Man Michael Jordan jersey we have up in our rafters and put your number 32 uniform in its place. You have done so much for this franchise. Your jersey
will be the first one up there, the first one ever retired by the Heat.”

And then, just like that, I’m gone.

S
haquille O’Neal positioned himself in the post and waited for the double team to come.

It never arrived.

“Coach,” he said to the Suns’ Alvin Gentry as he jogged by the bench, “single coverage.”

Gentry grabbed point guard Steve Nash and instructed him, “Give the big fella the ball.”

He was one week shy of his thirty-seventh birthday, but Shaq had jumped into
his time machine. As a series of Toronto players, Chris Bosh among them, tried to stop him, the Big Cactus kept sticking them with dunks, jump hooks, and putbacks. When he was finished, he’d scored 45 points in 20-of-25 shooting, his most prolific output in six years.

“I think I’m the only player who looks at each and every center and says, ‘That’s barbecued chicken down there,’ ” Shaq said afterward.

The Suns won 133–113 on a day Toronto coach Jay Triano conceded his team had “no match for Shaq.”

It was evidence, Shaq would later say, that although he was old, he could still get it done given the proper touches.

Bosh begged to differ. He sniffed O’Neal was “camping” in the lane all night.

“I mean, if they’re not calling three seconds—I thought it was a rule, but I guess not,” Bosh groused.

“That’s a big statement coming from the RuPaul of the NBA,” Shaq shot back. “Chris Bosh? How would he know about three seconds? He’s afraid to go inside.”

With the Big Shaqtus waiting for him in the lane, it was hard to blame him.

I
WENT TO PHOENIX IN PEACE, ARMS UP IN SURRENDER. I WENT
from punking Penny to fighting with Kobe all the time to chilling out with DWade and banging heads with Pat Riley. I was burned out. I didn’t want to fight with anybody.
My motor was shot. So I wasn’t about to punk Steve Nash. It was “Okay Steve, do whatever you want, let me know what you need from me.”

But it never really worked out for us. Of course in my line of business that falls on me. My fault again. They said I slowed Phoenix down. I don’t really think that was true, but people are certainly entitled to their opinion.

You won’t hear anything negative
from me about Phoenix. I loved it there. The guys were great, and Mike D’Antoni was excellent. The training staff was phenomenal. They saved my career and they helped me understand my body, and I will always have their backs for that. Athletes are spoiled. They do amazing things, and then when their body breaks down, they go to the medical people and say, “Fix me.” We don’t care how or why, just
do it. I learned a lot from Aaron Nelson and Michael Clark on how to take care of myself while I was playing, but also techniques I could use after I’m done playing to keep myself healthy.

Phoenix was a good fit for me at that point of my career because they were an up-tempo team that ran all the time. Mike D’Antoni was careful not to burn us out in practice. Our practices lasted something like
twenty minutes.

We’d go out there, play a game to 7, and then we were done. We’d watch some film, talk about what we should have done, and go home.

That was why they were able to run all the time. Mike was smart enough not to overdo it. He could do that because he respected his
leaders, Steve Nash and Grant Hill. He knew they would always come into camp in shape.

Those guys were true pros.
I have never met a single person who doesn’t like and respect Grant Hill. He’s a great guy. He’s also one of the hardest workers I’ve ever seen. If he didn’t have the
if
next to his name, he would have been one of the greatest ever. He was stuck with the
if
because he had a foot injury that got all messed up and misdiagnosed, and it cost him a huge chunk of his career—the prime of his career,
really.

So he gets tagged with the
if
, the same way Alonzo Mourning did. If Zo didn’t have his serious kidney issues and the surgeries and if he didn’t miss all those years, he’d be another “greatest ever.”

Grant was able to reinvent himself as the ultimate role player after his injuries. He’d stand back and watch and absorb what was going on in the game and then adjust to it. His basketball
IQ was off the charts.

Steve Nash was a guy who liked to do things perfectly. I wasn’t used to his Amare Stoudemire one-step bounce pass. It took me a few games to catch on to that. I also wasn’t used to the way he ran a pick-and-roll. We never clicked on the court the way we should have. There wasn’t any negative vibes—we just didn’t have the time to develop any chemistry. We were both old-timers
used to playing a certain way.

Amare was a hardworking kid, very friendly. He had a lot of offensive weapons. He was young and wealthy and successful and just starting out on his own fabulous journey.

I ended up selling him my Lamborghini. It was a car I bought while I was in Miami. Whenever I have a lot on my mind, the first thing I do is jump in my car, crank the music, and go for a long,
long ride. I can think better that way. So I’m in Miami and Pat and I have a blowup, or me and my ex-wife have a fight, so I take a drive from Miami to Ft. Lauderdale. I sit there and watch the water, listen to the waves, calm myself down, and start to head home.

I was driving fast—way too fast—probably around 190 miles per
hour. So I’m flying down the road and this car cuts me off and I’ve got
to make a quick turn. I cut away from this other car and I go into about five different spins. My first thought was,
I’m going into the wall and flipping over into the water. This is it. This is how I’m going to die.
But I’m a lucky guy, and the car just misses that wall and keeps spinning, and when it finally stops I’m facing the opposite direction. I put the car in reverse and get out and try
to stop my knees from buckling.

Right then and there I decided, “I’m never driving this car again.” And I didn’t.

When I got traded to the Suns I brought it out to Arizona so Amare could look at it. He offered me $120,000 for it. I was trolling the
Robb Report
and found what would eventually be the Shaq-Liner for $110,000. I figured I’ll sell the Lamborghini to Amare for $120,000, buy the Shaq-Liner
for $110,000, and put another $10,000 into it and I’ll be even.

That’s being a Shaq-a-matician, except for one small little detail. The Lamborghini cost me $600,000 originally. So I lost a lot of money on it. The reason it cost so much was I bought a brand-new Lamborghini and then I bought an old, beat-up Lamborghini, and in order for me to fit into it, they had to chop them both in half and
then superglue it together. It was a beautiful car, hardtop, platinum silver.

I have to say, when I was driving that car around, it made me think about those rich drug dealers from my neighborhood in Newark. I can still remember one guy cruising around in his muddy-green Benz and the other one, tooling around in his souped-up Volvo. I wanted so badly to be driving around in a cool car, so I closed
my eyes, whipped up some happy thoughts, and put myself into some of the finest automobiles in the world. That’s the great thing about being a dreamer. It always works out exactly the way you planned.

That’s not always true in real life, but by the grace of God and some damn hard work, many of the things I wished for as a little warrior named Shaun have happened.

By the time I sold my Lamborghini
to Amare Stoudemire, I was done with it. The thrill was gone.

Amare had a certain flair about him that I could relate to. He wasn’t a big personality like I was, but he could pull off the Lamborghini thing. While I was there, he was having all sorts of problems with the media and the owner, Robert Sarver. Every week it was the same thing: “Is he getting traded? Is he signing an extension?” There’s
no question it got to him. You could see it on Amare’s face. It wore him down, and it affected the way he played. He’s only human. It would have bothered anyone.

He would ask me all the time, “What should I do?” I told him, “Do what’s best for your family.” Truthfully, I didn’t want to get involved. I didn’t want to hop on anyone’s emotional roller coaster. I had too many rides of my own like
that.