It’s not like I treated reporters badly. Hell, I was a quote machine for them. Had a lot of fun with them, too. Once a reporter asked me, “Let’s say a snake bit your mom right
here, in the chest area. Would you be willing to suck the venom out to win the title?”
“No,” I answered, “but I would with your wife.”
I got in the habit of creating “Shaqisms.” If you went on a glamorous vacation with me, it was Shaqapulco. If I was a painter, I was Shaq-casso.
Then there was the nickname game. After one stretch where I had completely dominated Vlade Divac, Rik Smits, and
Arvydas Sabonis, I started calling myself the Big Deporter. By January 2000 I was in the middle of the most incredible stretch of my career, so I told everybody my new name was The Big Stock Exchange. When they asked me why, I gave them my full-strength thousand-watt smile and said, “Numbers, baby, numbers.”
I was putting up some big ones. I dropped 61 points and 23 rebounds on the Clippers on
the night of my birthday in March. I was terribly disappointed by the Clippers, who refused my request of about twelve complimentary tickets, so after I destroyed them I warned them, “Don’t ever tell me no on the tickets again.”
The best thing about Phil Jackson was he didn’t give us any panic room. We’d have some games where we’d have five or six turnovers in a row, and we’d be looking to the
bench and he’d say, “I’m not wasting one of my time-outs on you guys. Play through it. Do what we do every single day in practice and you’ll be alright.”
Just like Phil asked me to, I was logging around forty minutes a game. I was getting pounded. The Hack-a-Shaq strategy, which was to foul me on purpose so I’d have to go to the free-throw line and,
the other team hoped, miss my free throws,
was in full swing a lot of nights. Whenever I felt like I needed a little break, I’d tell John Salley, and he’d go to Phil and say, “You know, Shaq is feeling a little run down…”
Phil had fun taking his digs at me. I didn’t mind, because I knew he cared about me and he did it to motivate me.
The two of us would get into it once in a while. He’d say, “Get over there sooner.” I’d say, “I’m trying,
man.” He’d come back with, “Well try harder, fat boy.” He called me that all the time. I’d get 39 points and he’d say, “That’s all you could come up with, fat boy?” Anyone else says that and I’m punching him in the face. But Phil had earned my respect.
The free throws were a constant topic of conversation with us. I had the key to the Mira Costa High School gym so I’d go there and practice after
the team workout. I usually went late at night. I told Phil, “Don’t worry, I’ll make them when we need them.”
Everything about the Lakers during our title run was fun. The guys, the team, the city.
We used to rap on the bus all the time. We’d freestyle. We’d see something and go off. It could be anything—a guy with a big nose walking his dog, a guy on our team with a zit on his cheek. Kobe wouldn’t
usually say anything, but he was sitting there observing. You could tell he wanted to join in, but he hung back. Maybe he was afraid he wasn’t a good enough rapper. Who knows? We spent a lot of time wondering what was going on under that retro afro he had.
Kobe was a very intelligent guy. One day we’re on the bus rapping, and he starts in with his own rap. He’s using all these big words, and
the damn rap sounds like a movie script or something. That was when we realized he was going home and writing stuff up, then memorizing it and coming back with it on the bus.
He would pretend to be freestyling, but he’d throw all this metaphysical and metabolical stuff in there, so we’d call him on it. We’d tell him, “That ain’t no freestyle,” and he’d get all defensive and say, “Yes it is. Yes
it is. It’s off the dome. It’s off the dome.”
We’d all just laugh and say, “Okay, brother.”
Kobe hated the triangle, but I never understood why. He got a ton of shots from running it. BShaw used to say the triangle was really just a way to take everyone’s attention away from what was really going on, which was me and Kobe running a two-man game. If they doubled Kobe off the pick-and-roll, then
here I am, rolling to the basket. If they don’t double Kobe, he comes off in a one-on-one situation and you can’t stop him. And, if you really want to make the mistake of concentrating too much on the both of us, then Big Shot Bob Horry or Glen Rice is going to knock down open shots.
Here’s what I didn’t like: when the media tried to climb inside my head and Kobe’s head and make something out
of nothing. Perfect example: at the 2000 All-Star Game I was warming up and goofing around, and I mimicked one of his next-generation dribbles and threw the ball into the stands. Some guys wrote I was taking a shot at Kobe, that I was dissing him over his turnovers.
Wrong. Kobe was in on it. We had this joke that every time anyone on the team committed some kind of crazy turnover, we used to
call him Tragic Bronson. It was a takeoff on Magic Johnson. In 1984, when he coughed up the series to Boston with some bad plays, they started calling him Tragic instead of Magic.
We were picking up on that and having a little fun with it. So when Kobe would drill Brian Shaw in the chest with one of his no-look passes we’d call him Tragic Bronson. Some days, when I tried to take it coast-to-coast
and lost it out of bounds, I was called Tragic Bronson.
It was becoming obvious the whole Shaq-Kobe deal was the biggest story in town. We were both smart enough to put that aside once we got inside the gym.
I wasn’t the only guy who got frustrated with Kobe. Very early in that ’99–’00 season, we were scrimmaging in practice and Kobe was being so selfish with the ball that some of the older
guys like Rick and Brian and AC Green decided, “Okay, Phil’s not saying anything to him, we’ve got to have a players-only meeting.”
Phil always said he was against meetings like that because he didn’t think anything positive ever came out of them, but we decided to do it anyway. So we get everyone in this tiny room, and naturally everyone is going off on Kobe, which is exactly what Phil didn’t
want to happen.
Next thing you know the coaches come busting in and Phil is trying to stick up for the Kobester, saying, “C’mon, now. This isn’t all on Kobe. Let’s not turn this into a witch hunt.”
DFish interrupts him and says, “Hold on, Phil, you’re new here. We’ve been putting up with this for three or four years. It’s time to get to the bottom of it.”
The weird thing about that meeting
was Kobe was sitting in the back of the room saying, “I love you guys.” Only he wasn’t saying it like that. He went into this street talk, saying, “Y’all my niggers, y’all like brothers to me.” I was looking at him and wondering,
What the hell is this?
Maybe he was trying to fit in. After all, the kid was only twenty-one years old. But if he wanted to fit in, he should have taken off his headphones
once in a while and tried to talk to us.
I asked Phil why he wouldn’t get on Kobe. He said it was because he wanted Kobe in attack mode all the time. That was how he was most effective, and if Phil was on his case all the time Kobe might start to hesitate, and that would be bad for our team. That made no sense to me, but really, it didn’t matter.
The way I was playing that season, Kobe wasn’t
going to mess up our chances.
We won sixty-seven games in ’99–’00, and I was named the Most Valuable Player. I called my father, Sgt. Philip Harrison, and when I told him I had won it, he broke down and cried. The guy who had told me my whole life “No tears—they are a sign of weakness” was bawling like a baby. Once he regained his composure, he reminded me I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my new big-ass
trophy unless we won a championship, too.
Nothing had changed since I was a kid. My father was still challenging me, still living and dying with every game. He still felt he
needed to stand up for me. Sometimes he went a little overboard. One night I swear I heard him yelling to Kobe, “Get it inside!” just like when I was at Cole High School in San Antonio.
Sarge was getting better about letting
me fight my own battles, but once, when we were beating the Spurs pretty easily, Phil Jackson left me in the game. The Spurs backup center at the time was Felton Spencer, a big dude who started hammering away at me. My dad was furious. He was screaming for Phil to take me out. “They’re going to break his arm!” Sarge was yelling.
After the game, I’m doing an interview on the court, and all of
a sudden I see him. He’s coming onto the court right for Phil Jackson. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t get there in time. It was like I was watching the whole thing in slow motion. Sarge goes up to Phil and starts jawing at him about leaving me in the game. Phil whipped around and said, “Get off this court. You don’t belong out here.” Jerome had the good sense to pull Sarge away.
My father
was right about that ’99–’00 season. It was championship or bust. We had a tough series with Sacramento in the first round, which back then was a best-of-five series. It went all five games. The two teams were developing a real dislike for one another. Vlade Divac was on that team, and he was the guy they traded to get Kobe, so I’m sure he had all sorts of motivation. Then you had Chris Webber, the
guy I convinced the Orlando Magic to pass over in favor of Penny, so there was some history there, too.
When we lost Game 4 in their place to tie it 2–2, that meant we were looking at a winner-take-all Game 5 in our building. The Sacramento fans were all over us after the game, so Ron Harper turned around and flashed one of his championship rings at them to shut them up. Instead they started
chanting, “Not with Shaq! Not with Shaq!”
Ouch. That stung. I’m thinking,
Okay, dawg. You gotta make it happen in Game 5
.
My dad called me beforehand and told me, “You’ve never played well in Sacramento. Put it behind you.” That was good advice. We
went back home and I dropped 32 points and 18 rebounds on them. No sweat, right? If I tell you the truth, those guys worried me, and I was glad we
got past them. Good-bye, Sacramento.
We breezed past Phoenix in the next round, but then we got hung up in this killer series with Portland. That was the one where we found ourselves down 15 points in the fourth quarter of Game 7, the one where I went to that “safe place” in my grandmother Odessa’s lap, and we ran off the now-famous run to beat the Blazers and advance to the Finals. I had 9 points
in that fourth quarter, including the monster dunk from Kobe, but what I was the happiest about was hitting two free throws to tie it 77–77 with about two minutes to go.
Playing the Pacers in the Finals was almost anti-climatic. They were a scrappy team. Larry Bird was the coach, and he did a good job of preparing them, but we were just better. By that point, no one was getting in our way. Here’s
the other thing: I couldn’t believe they decided to try and stop me with single coverage. Please. You know better, Larry. In Game 1, I had 43 points and 19 rebounds. Afterwards they asked me, “How would you guard yourself?” I answered, “I wouldn’t. I’d just fake an injury and go home.”
In May of that season I coined myself the Big Aristotle, because, as I explained, it was Aristotle who said,
“Excellence is not a singular act, but a habit.”
My plan was to make winning championships a habit.
What I realized once we finally won was that title wasn’t just for us. After kissing my daughter, Taahirah, and sharing hugs with family, teammates, and friends, all of a sudden there’s Jack Nicholson and Snoop Dogg and Will Smith. All of sudden, all of LA wants to give me a hug.
Everybody loves
a winner. And nobody could say ever again that Shaq couldn’t win the big one.
There was one disappointing thing about that 2000 championship. When we won it, Jerry West was nowhere to be found. I asked about it and they said he was superstitious, that he was too nervous to go to the games. But I later found out the real reason—Jerry and Phil
didn’t get along. It was a power thing, I guess. We’d
have team meetings and Phil would ask Jerry to leave. That really hurt Jerry West. After all, he was the guy who built that team.
I’ve never been a brownnoser. Even though I loved Jerry West, the only times we really had any meaningful conversations was when he was giving me a hard time. He’d chew me out, tell me a story, then tell me to beat it. I loved that. Once in a while he’d say, “Good
game,” or “Do this and do that,” but I never hung out with him.
But there came a time when I guess Jerry Buss didn’t want to pay him, so I got on TV and said, “If Jerry West isn’t going to be there, I don’t want to be here.” I meant it. So Jerry West got his money, but eventually he left anyway.
To be honest, the day Jerry West quit was the day it all started going downhill.
He called me and
told me, “Shaquille, I’m leaving. Things just aren’t working out here for me.” I asked him, “Is there anything I can do?” He said, “No, it’s just time for me to move on.” He sounded kind of sad. If you go back and look at the championships that we won and the ones Magic won, Jerry West was the guy who put together all the pieces.
Mitch Kupchak took over for Jerry, and I just never felt like he
had my back. Once you deal with someone like Jerry West, you better come up with someone pretty special to keep my attention. Unfortunately, Mitch wasn’t that guy for me. We never got along. Mitch looked out for two people: himself and Jerry Buss. The rest of us were afterthoughts.
The Lakers were instantly the favorites to repeat in ’00–’01, and we weren’t backing down from that. I told everyone,
“We have to repeat. Anything else would be uncivilized.”
As hard as it was to win that first one, it’s even harder to repeat. Everyone who gets that ring thinks they’re special (including me). We all started thinking we were The Man.
Well, there could only be one Man and that was me, the big dawg.
Kobe missed the memo. He thought it was his time to take over our team.
Naturally that caused
some problems for us. Kobe still hadn’t warmed up to the triangle, and once in a while he’d get out there and freelance, and nobody was happy with it. The dude didn’t get it. So what if the shot went in? You busted the play, man.