Shaq Uncut: My Story (19 page)

We sat down and had a conversation, and he reminded me he expected me to concentrate on basketball and basketball only. Then his kids came to my
concert and that was it. I didn’t see Phil Jackson again until training camp.

I couldn’t wait. I wanted that ring, and I’d finally hooked up with the guy who could get me one.

T
he first person who got to Shaquille O’Neal was Kobe Bryant, leaping into his arms like an excitable little boy who couldn’t wait to celebrate with this big brother.

Their embrace was emotional, prolonged, and the big man didn’t bother to conceal the tears that streamed down his face. Shaq had just won his first NBA championship, yet his were
not tears of joy. They were tears of relief.

They were the by-product of eight years of frustration, criticism, and self-doubt, emotions one person in particular would completely understand. And that was why, in the biggest moment of his professional life, Shaquille O’Neal went looking for Lucille Harrison.

“Once that buzzer sounded,” he said, “all I wanted to do was give my mommy a kiss.”

Since he was eight years old his pregame ritual hadn’t wavered. He found his mother and pecked her on the cheek, a homage to the woman who had fortified him
with the emotional strength to withstand the withering disappointments that had clouded his career.

Lucille was the one who reminded him, “Michael didn’t do it the first time. Michael didn’t do it the second time. Stay with the mission.”

“Everything with Shaquille was, ‘He’s a great player, but…’ ” Lucille said. “After a while, what people say about you starts to influence your thinking. It can overwhelm you. And it started to overwhelm Shaquille.”

On the eve of the 2000 playoffs, Lucille corralled her oldest son and attempted to eradicate the doubt she knew was lurking.

“Turn your ear off to the naysayers,” she said. “Don’t
let them crush you with their words. You have to change your way of thinking. You were the happiest, most positive little boy I’ve ever seen.

“Now draw from that positive thinking as a grown man.”

He caught glimpses of her in Game 6 of the Finals against Indiana, resplendent in pink, the stress of her son’s journey etched in her face.

He scored 41 points in the final game against the Pacers
to smash an exclamation point on a truly dominant season. He was named the All-Star MVP, the regular-season MVP, and the Finals MVP, only the third player in league history to receive all three in one season.

All the past failures in Orlando and LA and LSU were washed away by a deluge of purple-and-gold Laker confetti and the impassioned chants of “MVP!” meant only for him.

A succession of well-wishers
embraced him: Phil Jackson, Glen Rice, Magic Johnson, his uncle Mike Parris, his bodyguard, Jerome Crawford. Yet Shaquille O’Neal, the most happy-go-lucky superstar in the league, remained stone-faced.

“I guess I just wasn’t sure it had finally happened,” he said.

He clutched the Larry O’Brien trophy with one of his massive hands and used the other to wrap it around his mother’s waist. He celebrated
with John Salley and Rick Fox and Ron Harper and Kobe, too, but they had not walked in his shoes. Although they were his teammates, they were not his confidants.

“Mom,” he whispered in Lucille Harrison’s ear, “this one is for you.”

T
RUST IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. WE HAD IT ON MY FIRST
championship team in Los Angeles. I admit I wasn’t always good about trusting my teammates in the past. I felt I had to get it done myself.

But we had made some big changes, starting
with Phil Jackson.

The first day of workouts he asked me, “What’s the most impressive thing about Wilt Chamberlain’s career?” I knew it was a trick question. I thought he wanted me to say scoring 100 points in a game, but I went with the fact that Wilt averaged 50 points and 27 rebounds one season. “That’s not it,” Phil said. “It was that he played almost every minute of every game. He averaged
48.5 minutes a night in 1961–62, when his team played in ten overtime games. Do you think you can average forty minutes a game?”

I hear myself saying, “Sure, I can do that.”

Phil was a smart guy. He understood me. He knew I liked to have fun and I liked to do things my way, but if he showed me respect and asked me to do something, I would do it.

One of the things he told me was he was going
to mess me up if I missed free throws, so I started working on it five hours a day. When I was in Orlando, I worked with a guy named Buzz Braman, who preached routine. If it goes in, follow the routine. So my routine became bounce it one, two, three times, elbow straight, elbow at the rim, take a little deep breath, shoot it, then forget about it. I tried it, but I got the same results. Sometimes
it went in, sometimes it didn’t. It was mental with me—had to be. I often shot 80 percent from the line in practice.

Right before the season started there was an article in the paper quoting Phil saying, “If Shaq concentrates he can be the MVP of
the league this year. If he doesn’t, it will be like all the other seasons. We’ll win fifty-six games but we’ll go home early.”

I didn’t want to go
home early.

We added John Salley and Ron Harper to our roster, two guys who had rings already. They brought in Brian Shaw, my old teammate from Orlando. Suddenly we had veterans who had seen it all, who really truly cared only about winning. I had help all around me, and I’m not just talking about Kobe.

Take a guy like Rick Fox. He’s standing there in the corner and you know he’s deadly from
there, so I’ve got the ball and I’m thinking about muscling it in, but then I say, “Let me kick it to Rick and see what he can do,” or “Let me kick it to Glen Rice and give him a look. I’ve already got 25, so let’s get them involved.” It was my way of showing them “Hey, I believe in you.”

It worked. The triangle gave us ball movement and the trust gave us the chemistry we needed to succeed. That’s
not to say there still weren’t conflicts once in a while. But we had guys on that Lakers team who knew how to handle it, like Ron Harper. Harp won championships with Phil in Chicago and he commanded respect from everyone.

He was old school and I was old school and Harp knew Kobe was new school, so if Kobe and I were having a beef he’d have a conversation with Kobe then he’d come to me. He’d calm
us down. He’d tell me, “Shaq, meet me halfway on this. Kobe’s a young guy, you’ve got to understand that. And we need him. You know we do. You’re getting under his skin, so lay off a little bit.”

I won’t lie to you. That was hard for me. I was under so much pressure, and Kobe took so many bad shots I wanted to scream at him, “Miss another shot and I’m getting you traded!”

BShaw was another guy
who ran interference. He had no problem getting in Kobe’s grill and telling him, “Stop being so selfish. We’re playing team ball here.” BShaw knew how to get me the rock. Our Shaw-Shaq Redemption move was unstoppable. We had an eye contact thing. Brian wasn’t a traditional point guard. He’s not just
looking at where you want the ball, he’s looking at how the defense is playing. A defender might
be in one spot, but only a smart guy like Brian would know to throw it to a different spot. Once I saw his eyebrow go up I knew the lob was coming. And it was perfect, every time.

We were lucky to have Robert Horry on our side, too. Every coach has their whipping boy and Rob was Phil’s. He would mess with Rob all the time. He’d tell Horry, “When you hear me whistle, that’s the sound of your master
calling, so you better come.” Rob would say, “You ain’t my goddamn master,” but when Phil whistled, Big Shot Bob came running.

Man, Horry hit a ton of big shots. He was a guy who understood his role and didn’t worry about anything else. Hit game winners. That was what his calling card was. Everything else was gravy.

Phil Jackson knew how to treat us like men. If I went out and gave him a 29-point
and 20-rebound game, he’d come in the next day and say, “Hey, go find Danny. Get a massage.”

Danny Garcia was our massage therapist. He’s one of my closest friends, and he’s been with me ever since I went to Los Angeles. When I played in Boston during the 2010–11 season, he lived in my house in Sudbury with me. He knows the pounding my body takes. So I’d get my massage, and then Phil would put
me on the exercise bike for thirty minutes, and then he’d send me home. I remember thinking, “I love this dude.”

You know I was going to give my coach everything I had in the next game because I wanted Phil to believe this arrangement was going to work.

Naturally we were going to run the triangle because that was Phil’s signature offense. I didn’t know anything about the triangle before Phil
got there. The good thing about Phil was we did the same thing every day. We did this little hip-skip-hop thing. He said “hip” and we went forward. Then it was “skip” and we hopped back.

We’d run through each option of the triangle seven times each.
We did it over and over so guys would memorize it, almost like muscle memory, only this was brain memory. After a while it became second nature.

He’s telling me, “Shaq, you will be like a point center in the triangle. You are going to touch the ball every time down.”

Phil was definitely a different sort of cat. He was into his Zen mode a lot. Being from the ’hood, I knew what certain drugs smelled like—weed, for instance. Phil wanted us to meditate, so he’d put us in a room and dim the lights and he’d burn sage. It smelled like weed. We’d
call him on it and he’d tell us, “No, it’s not weed. It’s the cousin of weed.”

We had this fifteen-seat theater at the practice facility, and he’d start pounding this Indian drum. When he hit that thing, it meant “Get your ass to the theater.” You could be anywhere, but when you heard that
doo, doo, doo
sound you better get moving—or else.

Once we got in the theater he’d turn out the lights
and it would be pitch-black. So here comes the weed—oh, sorry Phil, the “cousin of weed”—and then he’d tell us to lean back in our chairs and relax. Then he’d start talking to us about whatever was going on with our team.

He’d say, “Right now there’s some negativity going on, so let’s release that,” or he might say, “Tomorrow we’re playing a team that is going to be coming for you, so concentrate
on your safe place, your positive thoughts. Remember to share the ball, move the ball, trust each other.”

A lot of days you’d hear guys snoring, usually the ones who had been out late the night before. Certain days even I’d fall asleep because I was tired, and other times I’d try to listen to what he was saying, and other times I really would meditate.

When Phil was done, he’d tell us to take
ten deep breaths, then blow each breath out. As we blew those breaths out we were supposed to blow away our stresses. Some days it felt good. Some days I really think it helped me. Other days it was a chance to catch a good nap.

Either way, you knew Phil was dead serious about this stuff. No one dared make fun of it.

The other thing Phil did was after being there awhile and getting to know the
guys, he’d hand out books. It was his way of saying, “This is the type of person I think you are. You should read this.” Every year he gave me a book on Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who questioned the value and objectivity of the truth. Phil told me Nietzsche was a guy who was so brilliant everyone thought he was crazy.

So he’s giving me these books, but I’m a busy guy and I really
don’t have time to read, so I sent one of my assistants out to get me the CliffsNotes version. Hope you don’t mind, Phil.

People ask me all the time if Phil Jackson ever talked about Michael Jordan. I don’t remember him doing that a lot. He talked about the Bulls in general, but rarely about Black Jesus. I would have liked to known a little about MJ. He was the greatest player I had ever seen,
and it would have been kind of cool to hear what made him tick, but Phil didn’t go there. He wanted us to develop our own identity.

But there was a guy who was around our team a lot who did bring up MJ. His name was George Mumford, and he was Phil’s guy. Because of Phil’s résumé I listened to everything George said, even though I thought some of it was just wacky. George was sort of like a psychologist.
The craziest thing about him was every problem we had on our team the Bulls also had, so he had an answer for everything.

I’d say, “Yo man, I’m tired of people coming after me in the paper,” and he’d say, “Well, you know what Mike did in Chicago…”

He sat down with me one-on-one a lot. When I read something that some self-promoter like Ric Bucher or TJ Simers wrote, he would tell me, “Channel
that anger. Get rid of it.”

I would have liked to have gotten rid of Bucher and Simers, but that wasn’t an option, so I did the next best thing—I ignored them.

Because of George Mumford, I don’t read newspaper articles
anymore. I’ll glance through stuff now and then, but in order for me to react, someone will have to draw my attention to it. I sleep better at night now. That stuff bothered me,
so I eliminated it from my life. People say I’m too sensitive. Well, I’d like to see how all of you would deal with someone drilling you in the head every day, questioning your work ethic and intelligence and your manhood.