SIDELINE CUT:Shaquille O'Neal's decision to call time on his remarkable basketball career robs the NBA of one of its most celebrated and colourful stars, writes KEITH DUGGAN
PEOPLE WITHOUT the remotest interest in basketball are familiar with the name Shaquille O’Neal. Through one of those mysterious combinations of osmosis and marketing, the gargantuan NBA star’s name became a metaphor around the world for bigness and for loudness.
Still, it was disconcerting to hear the big man being fondly discussed on Morning Ireland during the week, so much so I began to suspect there must have been another Shaq O’Neal knocking about for all of these years – maybe some wily political veteran of Tipperary South Riding who was bowing out after six decades in politics.
But no: it turns out the Morning Ireland crew were taking a time-out from providing us with gloomy dispatches from Europe in order to pay homage to the man known, among other names, as The Big Aristotle.
Ever on trend, O’Neal’s decision to announce his retirement to the fans via his Twitter was typically smart and offbeat. O’Neal’s last act was true to the way of life that he followed during his 19-year long career as the NBA’s cartoon big man.
O’Neal was always unpredictable, colourful and genuinely eccentric. His prime years will always be associated with the Los Angeles Lakers, where he won three championships on the hoof but he was a wanderer at heart, restless and never settling with one team for too long.
It was typical his last team should be the Boston Celtics, the nemesis of the Lakers – and there is no doubt O’Neal would have enjoyed the perversity of wearing the green. (He was quickly dubbed The Big Leprechaun). He announced his arrival in Boston with customary flamboyance, treating students and visitors in Harvard Square to an hour-long performance where he sat more or less still as a statue. In retrospect, he might have been trying to drop an oblique hint to Celtics’ coach Doc Rivers about how he planned to spend much of the season because too often, Boston fans saw their celebrity big guy taking up way too much room on the Celtics bench.
At 38, time combined with the ferocious physical toll the NBA exacts on its athletes (80-plus games in the regular season, maybe 20 more in play-offs and then summer leagues) meant O’Neal was not so much a shadow of his former self as a magnified parody. He could still do the fundamentals but the explosiveness was gone.
The main points of discussion about O’Neal involved his leg, calf, knee, hip and Achilles, all of which left him sidelined for long periods. By the time the Celtics reached the play-offs this season, Shaq showed up wearing his best suit and polished shoes. The wonder was he didn’t break out a big bag of popcorn and just resign himself to the fact he had the best seat in the house. So O’Neal’s decision to declare he was gone before he even informed his Celtics employers was pretty shrewd because the chances are he would have been retired anyway. His body could not take it anymore. O’Neal’s pure force of personality meant he became a crowd favourite among the Celtics even though his input was limited.
O’Neal, for instance, had the chutzpah to get dolled up in a tux and wave the baton in front of the Boston Orchestra for a few nights running (and was instantly dubbed The Big Conductor). If you have ever seen pictures of him, he looks perfectly at home. He looks like he could be good at it.
Then, O’Neal has always fancied himself as a multi-careerist. During his NBA career, he also moonlighted as a rapper, an actor, a deputy sheriff, a restaurateur, a boxer (he boxed Oscar De La Hoya), a martial arts expert and a reality television show star.
But O’Neal’s reputation preceded his eccentricities. Someone sometime may do a study on how it was Shaquille O’Neal and the Orlando Magic came to hold such a grip on the leisure apparel of Irish consumers circa 1996-1999. There is no way of acquiring empirical proof of this but there was a time when every second youngster in the country seemed to be running around in Magic shorts or vests, vastly outselling GAA merchandise.
And perhaps because people saw O’Neal replica shirts and tee-shirts bearing his various personas – Shaq Diesel and Shaq Attack – his name became a common reference point in middle Ireland. It didn’t matter whether people had ever seen him play: he was just the biggest creature imaginable, with his freakish size 23 feet, and this gargantuan physique, a smiling, cheerful hulk of a man. And it was in Ireland as it was all over the world: the Shaq myth moved at the speed of light.
The peculiar thing was that even though O’Neal exerted such a powerful pull on the global imagination, watching him doing what he did best – play basketball – could be a desperately dull experience. It wasn’t his fault; his strengths lay in the quick-footed athleticism allied to his prodigiously strong frame and it made sense for him to basically power-play his way through games, bulldozing smaller men (mere 6ft11in shrimps like Denis Rodman) out of the way and then slam-dunking from close into the basket.
There was nothing of the uncanny guile of Larry Bird or the aerial beauty of Michael Jordan about Shaq’s game. It was pure big-kid-in-the-playground force and there was something comic book about that. At his best, he was unstoppable and he threw his weight around, tossing egos and multi-millionaires in his wake as he crashed towards the basket.
And as O’Neal became the dominant player and mouth in the NBA, it became clear he was truly and delightfully kooky. He said and did as he pleased and hang the consequences and seemed to have that ability to take himself highly seriously while also poking fun at himself. The thing about O’Neal is he made basketball his life without ever allowing it to fully define his life. Unlike Michael Jordan, you never felt O’Neal was haunted by that ferocious, relentless competitive flame; O’Neal’s saw basketball as a celebration of himself, just as he saw his turn signalling the notes for the orchestra in Boston as another means to express himself.
It is hard to believe a character as articulate and fearless and as interested in people as O’Neal is going to spend his retirement in obscurity. You have to have a soft spot for someone whose retirement message breaks into a video phone shot (presumably self-filmed) of him boisterously singing the old Prince song When Doves Cry as he drives his car. Don’t be surprised if you see him sitting next to Louis Walsh on X Factor some day.
There is one statistic about O’Neal that shines above all others. It is not the 292 million bucks he made by slamming a basketball or the 28,000 career points or four championships or the 147kg frame. It is that in the 1,207 games he played, O’Neal has scored just one three-point shot. He attempted 20 and made just one. To put it in perspective, Ray Allen, who was O’Neal’s team-mate during his final season, broke the NBA record for threes made when he hit his 2,651st in February.
O’Neal’s lone success from “downtown”, as the NBA commentators like to term shots from distance, occurred during a humdrum league game against Milwaukee, back in the mid 1990s when he was becoming a household name in Ireland and everywhere else. But just one lonely three-pointer in almost 20 years? From a man who was known around the world for big numbers, there is something gloriously perfect about that.
