Shaq Uncut: My Story (6 page)

After a while, when your best player is sitting with four fouls and your team is getting two points every time down and the other guys are getting three every time down, you are in trouble.

Still, we had a chance to win the game in the final minutes. I was at the free-throw line, and if I hit a couple and we went down and got a defensive stop, there was still time
to pull it out.

I missed them both.

And that’s when it started—the whole free throw thing. Maybe it was some kind of omen. I don’t really know, but I’ve been dealing with it ever since.

Everyone has their theories on why I can’t make free throws: my hands are too big, it’s all in my head, I’ve changed my form too many times, I don’t extend my arm enough, I need to say a prayer before I shoot,
I need to eat three peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Crazy stuff.

My mom has her own ideas on why I can’t shoot them. When we lived in Germany, I was goofing around and I was climbing a tree and fell out and broke my wrists. I think I had a couple of casts, but I’m not even sure. They just kind of healed on their own, only now I can’t bend my wrists back at all. Anyway, Mom thinks
that’s the root of the free-throw issue.

By my senior season at Cole, we were having problems in practice because there was nobody to match up with me. Coach Madura hired Herb More, a former ballplayer from Cole who still held the single-game scoring record at the school. He was my geometry teacher and the guy I battled in practice. He was about six foot five or six, and he put a body on me,
roughed me up a bit. He taught me a little jump hook.

Before long, I am dominating. My senior high school season is about to start, but I’ve got to pick a college first.

People have always written that it was a slam dunk that I would go to LSU because of my long-standing relationship with Coach Brown, but that wasn’t entirely true. I felt I owed it to myself and my family to look around.

My
parents didn’t come with me on my college visits, even though I’m sure my father wanted to be there. He was worried about the under-the-table payments we kept hearing about.

There was plenty of illegal recruiting going on, but I can honestly say I didn’t see too much of that on my college trips. A few guys tried to slip me a hundred-dollar bill. They put it in my hand when they shook it and said,
“Here, put this in your pocket,” but nobody came at me with a big bag of money or a car. Good thing. If they had, Sarge would have killed them.

I visited five schools. The first one I went to was North Carolina. Rick Fox, who later became my Lakers teammate, picked me up and he was cool, but Coach Dean Smith kind of rubbed me the wrong way. He sat down with me in his office and basically told
me, “I’m Dean Smith. Here’s what I’ve done. I’m pretty great and have you ever heard of Michael Jordan? I coached him.” He was telling me how much he had won, but I already knew all that.

I also knew something else—Dean Smith liked this other seven-footer from Texas more than he liked me. He had just signed this kid named Matt Wenstrom, and I was UNC’s backup choice.

The last thing Dean Smith
told me was, “If you come here, you can be like Michael, James Worthy, Sam Perkins.” I nodded my head politely but I was thinking, “No. I’m going some place where I’m going to be the first.”

And it really bothered me they liked Matt Wenstrom better than me. I didn’t like that guy at all. I didn’t know him, but I hated him because everyone said he had more upside than I did.

Wenstrom ended up
going to North Carolina, by the way. I think he averaged two points a game. Then he went to the pros and played for the Celtics for about five minutes. I’m guessing Dean Smith never told any of his recruits, “Ever heard of Matt Wenstrom? I coached him.”

The next weekend I visited NC State because I wanted to see how my idol Charles Shackleford was doing. He came and picked me up, and we got along
great. We had the same size shoe. We swapped some funny high school stories. I was liking the “original” Shack and I was liking NC State. But that night Shack got with a girl and left me behind. I ended up hanging with a guy named Avie Lester. He
played the four spot and could really jump. We went out and tried to find ourselves some girls but we didn’t have any luck.

NC State coach Jim Valvano
was very energetic, very enthusiastic. A couple of weeks before I visited, he came to my parents’ house and broke our glass table. He was kind of nervous and fidgety, and he had this briefcase and a book, and he dropped it on the table and it broke. He was so horrified. He was saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll pay for it, I’ll pay for it.”

Sarge told him, “You are not going to pay for anything.
That’s a violation.”

My father was real clear with everybody about violations.

I really liked NC State and I really liked Coach Valvano. He told me, “We love the way you play. We’re going to put you right next to Shack.”

That sounded great, but I’ll tell you the truth: I had gone from a nobody to a star almost overnight. I liked being a star and I still wanted to be a star, and they already
had their own star.

My next stop was Texas University in Austin. Tom Penders was the coach. He was a crazy dude, did the tanning thing, but I really liked him, too. He came to a lot of my high school games. We played our state championship in Austin, so I already knew about the city and Sixth Street, which was where they had all the bars and restaurants and clubs.

The only problem with Texas
was it was too close. I needed some space. I needed freedom.

I needed to get away from my father.

From nine years old to twelve years old, I was in the penitentiary—Sarge’s penitentiary. Then, from twelve to fourteen, I was in Sarge’s halfway house. When I got to be about fifteen and the basketball started working out for me, I was on parole. So, by the time I was seventeen and bigger than my
father I was thinking,
I’m a man. I need to strike out on my own
.

Of course, I was still crazy in love with my mother, so I wasn’t going to go too far.

The fourth school I visited was Illinois. I got off the plane and Nick Anderson picked me up. He ended up being my teammate and good friend on the Orlando Magic. So Nick grabs me and he takes me to the Maxwell Street Market. It’s this big flea
market and it’s kind of fun, except when we went down there someone picked my pocket. My wallet got stolen. I’m sure if Coach Lou Henson knew about that, he would have crapped in his pants. I never told him. I just smiled and shook his hand and told him my visit was going just fine.

Coach Henson didn’t talk with me much. He was friendly, but he wasn’t giving me the hard sell. I wasn’t confident
I could play at Illinois. They were so good back then. They had Nick Anderson and Kendall Gill and the Snake (Kenny Norman) and Kenny Battle, too.

My final trip was to LSU. I’d been writing letters back and forth with Coach Brown for three years, so I already knew him a little bit. I went for my visit and he took me to his home, and I’m looking at this really nice house with a pool in the backyard
and I’m saying, “Wow.” I had never seen any place that beautiful.

So Coach Brown said to me, “Son, you think this house looks really, really nice? If you listen to what I’m going to teach you, this house is going to look like a ghetto next to the one you can own by the time we’re done together.”

Hmmm. That sounded good to me.

Coach Brown said, “I’ve been watching you a long time and I’ve enjoyed
how you’ve improved. I know you probably aren’t going to come here, but I’d love the chance to coach you. You might be able to start here, I’m not really sure.”

I was only half-listening until he said that. I was like, “What? He’s not sure if I can start here?” I was kind of upset the rest of the day. Everyone else was telling me I was the greatest, and this guy was telling me I may or may not
start for his team.

The LSU players took me to TJ Ribs for lunch. It’s a restaurant off campus where they have all sorts of LSU stuff, including the Heisman Trophy that Billy Cannon won in 1959. The owner of the
restaurant came over and told me if I came to LSU he’d keep an eye on me.

The one mistake the other four schools made was they didn’t take me to a football game. Coach Brown had one
of his LSU players, Vernel Singleton, take me. I’m sitting in this big football stadium with all the people and the noise and the lights, and then all of a sudden the lights go off and they put a spotlight on me. The PA announcer starts shouting, “Say hello to the number one high school player Shaquille O’Neal! Make some noise if you want him to come here next year!”

The crowd starts going crazy.
I’m sitting in the stands and there’s about twenty thousand people just going wild and I’m thinking,
Damn, these people know me!
So I start looking around and I’m seeing some of the baddest girls I’ve ever seen and they’re waving at me. I say to one of them, “So if I come here you and I are going to be friends, right?” She winks at me, blows me a kiss, and says, “Definitely.”

That’s it. I’m signing
with LSU.

Coach had me sold—but he still had to deal with my father, who has his own set of very strong opinions. When they sit down Sarge is giving Dale one of his best death stares, but Coach Brown isn’t intimidated at all. He tells Sarge, “I’m obviously here because your son is a talented player. Now all the programs are going to tell you about their facilities and how they’ll get to the Final
Four and all the money they can make for Shaquille.

“I just want you to know I’m recruiting a human being first and a basketball player second, and twenty-five years from now, if your son is willing to listen to what I’m teaching him, I will still be in his life. I will be a big part of his life.”

That’s how he got Sarge to sign off. I can tell you that everything Coach Brown told me that day
came true. After I left LSU in 1992, I went straight to the NBA and made millions of dollars. I have a house in Orlando that is sixty-four thousand square feet and has an indoor gymnasium, a cigar room, a movie theater, and
a seventeen-foot-deep pool. And Dale Brown is still in my life. He’s part of my inner circle, and it’s a small, small group.

Once I commit to LSU I become a rock star at Cole
High School. I’m going to be a big college stud so I start acting the part while I’m still playing for the Cougars.

We lose Jeff Petress for a while because of bad grades, but it doesn’t matter. This kid named Eric Baker can score a little for us and we are undefeated again, and I’m getting a lot of press and I start thinking I’m The Man. Our games are sold out every night. Little kids are lining
up asking for my autograph. My teammates started calling me Shaquille the Deal, or sometimes just The Deal.

It was just an amazing feeling. I had spent so much time wondering if I would ever get to this point, especially after I had gotten cut from the team in Germany. But now, just like Sarge said, it was all coming together. I really thought I was something special, just like my mother always
said I would be.

So one day I get to school and I’m walking down the left side of the hall and I notice everyone else is walking on the right. When I sit down at lunch, everyone gets up the minute I put down my tray. I’m thinking, “What the hell is this?” It was Joe Cavallero that did it. He thought I was getting too big. He thought I was forgetting about the team and focusing too much on myself.
He was right. I had to humble myself. Joe was going to make sure I did, because if I didn’t, he knew we couldn’t win.

That shit went on for a week. It was kind of lonely, but I had my Walkman and my princess girlfriend, so it could have been worse. For a few days I was thinking, “Screw you guys. Who needs you? I’m going to LSU in three months.”

But I got the message. It was the same one my dad
taught me when I was a little boy named Shaun playing YMCA basketball in the championship game. My father was the coach, and the guys on the other side were working their asses off trying to beat me.

We got a pretty big lead, and my father called time-out and yanked me from the game and put in this kid who couldn’t play a lick. There
were five minutes left in the game and this kid was banging
around and just screwing up everything. Next thing you know we were down 10, and I had to go back in to save the game. I’m looking at my father like, “What the hell? Why did you do that? We’re trying to win.” He said to me, “It’s not always about winning at all costs. Everybody deserves a chance. You have to develop the players around you. That’s what great players do. It’s your job to make sure
it comes out okay.” ’

So now I’m a senior in high school and it’s my job to make sure it comes out okay. Every game I’d take over for the first seven possessions and we’d be ahead 10–2 or 14–4. Once that happened I’d dribble the ball up and start dishing to Darren Mathey or Joe. My job was to be the point center and get everyone feeling part of it. Instead of being a show-off and just scoring
every time down the floor, that’s what I did. It brought us closer together. My father always taught me team ball. “You can’t do it yourself,” he told me over and over.

I went through a lot of crap getting through high school. The jealousy was off the charts. People just hated me because I was big and I was good.

We played in Sabinal, Texas, a town about 90 ninety miles east of Del Rio, which
is on the Mexican border. We’re driving there on a team bus, and I’m looking out the window and I see this huge scarecrow. We get a little closer and I realize it’s a seven-foot scarecrow that’s supposed to be me. It’s got a jersey with my number on it and a noose hanging around its neck. Everyone is so shocked nobody knows what to say, so it gets real quiet on our bus.

Now I’m pissed. I’d never
really dealt with much racism in my life to this point. My first thought was,
Maybe they’re trying to be funny
. But there’s nothing funny about a noose. It was probably racist, but I just didn’t want to go there. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it.

So I decided I would take it this way: these people have a noose around my neck so they must want to kill me. So that meant I had to get into
my mode where I had my own killer stare going. I told my teammates, “These people are going to pay.”