O’Neal, Shaquille 1972–

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Shaquille O’Neal 1972–

Professional basketball player

Towering center Shaquille O’Neal entered the National Basketball Association in 1992, as the first-round draft choice of the Orlando Magic. O’Neal, whose college career at Louisiana State University established his reputation as one of the top half-dozen basketball centers in the world, was virtually an international superstar before he even scored his first professional points. Thanks to multiple product endorsements, movie projects, and rap albums, the engaging O’Neal has reached an audience far beyond the bounds of professional basketball. Still, it is on the court where he must prove himself, if only in order to assure the continuance of his unprecedented fame. “’Awesome’ is the only word to describe Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA’s chairman of the boards,” wrote Alan Richman in Gentleman’s Quarterly. “And it’s a good bet … that he’ll soon be the most marketable athlete in the world.”

Well shy of his 25th birthday, O’Neal was the top draft choice of 1992, Rookie of the Year in 1993, and the starting center on the All-Star Team in both 1993 and 1994. His seven-year contract with the Magic and lucrative deals with the likes of Pepsi, Reebok, and Kenner Toys have made him an estimated $70 million in earnings to date. And with his help, the expansion Magic franchise—once renowned more for its halftime promotions than for its performance—improved enough to qualify for the 1994 NBA playoffs.

“If sports is indeed moving into the world of cartoons, who better to represent the NBA than Shaq?” asked Richman. “He is backboard-breaking strong, magnificently photogenic, mellifluously named, and bigger than mankind is supposed to be [7’T”]…. When he approaches an arena, players who are very large in their own right seem to shrivel, not just in size but in their heart. It is stunning to watch athletes who have throughout their life been the biggest person in the room come up against a man who dwarfs them. Not all of them are able to handle it. Nobody since Wilt Chamberlain has had that effect.”

A Strict Father Helped to Set Goals

Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1972. His first name means “little one” in Arabic, and his middle name means “warrior.” Because his parents did not marry until he was three years old, he carries his mother’s maiden name as his last name. The son of an Army sergeant, Shaquille’s early years were largely spent in tough neighborhoods in Newark and nearby

At a Glance…

Born Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal, March 6, 1972, in Newark, NJ; son of Philip Harrison (a U.S. Army staff sergeant) and Lucille O’Neal. Education: Attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA, 1989-92.

Center for the Louisiana State University basketball team, 1989-92; chosen first in first round of 1992 National Basketball Association draft by Orlando Magic; center for Orlando Magic, 1992—. Author of Shag Attack (autobiography), Hyperion, 1993.

Selected awards: Winner of the Adolph Rupp Trophy and the John Wooden Award as college basketball player of the year, 1991; starting member of NBA Ail-Star Team, 1993 and 1994; named NBA Rookie of the Year, 1993.

Addresses: Office —Orlando Magic, Orlando Arena, One Magic PL, Orlando, FL 32801.

Jersey City. “It’s kind of rough in Newark,” O’Neal told the New York Daily News. “I’m glad my father took me out of there. If I’d have stayed, I think I would have been a troublesome kid, hanging around, doing the wrong thing.”

When Shaquille was 12, his father, Sgt. Philip Harrison, transferred to an Army base in Wildflecken, West Germany. Around that time, the youngster began to grow at a phenomenal pace. At 13, he was 6′6″ and wore size 17 shoes. “We’d buy him pants on the [Army] post on Saturday and the next Friday they wouldn’t fit,” Harrison told Sports Illustrated. Eventually, the family had to order custom-made clothes from the United States. Sometimes, they were too small before they reached Germany.

When he was 13, O’Neal first met Dale Brown, head coach of the Louisiana State University (LSU) basketball team. Brown was in Germany conducting coaching clinics while O’Neal was trying to improve his game. “I asked him if he had any information on how to improve my vertical jump,” O’Neal told the Rocky Mountain News. “As he reached in his briefcase, he asked me, ‘How long have you been in the Army, soldier?’ I told him I was 13. He said, ‘Where’s your father?’ My dad was in the sauna. Coach Brown had a nice suit on, but he went right in the sauna, found my dad, shook his hand and said, ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Harrison.”

Brown then immediately started a sales pitch for LSU. The sergeant, also an imposing 6’6“, listened for a while, then stopped Brown. “He said to me, ‘Well, basketball, that’s fine. But I’m concerned with this young man’s education,’” Brown recalled in the Philadelphia Daily News. “Then, he went on to tell me he thought it was about time for blacks to become managers, not laborers; to became generals, not sergeants; head coaches, not assistants. I told him, ‘Sergeant, we’re going to get along just fine.’”

Throughout his young life, Shaquille has been strongly influenced by his father, a career soldier and strict disciplinarian. Shaquille also has two younger sisters and a younger brother. “In junior high in Germany I fought kids all the time,” O’Neal remembered in Sports Illustrated. “I had such a bad temper, I almost got thrown out of school. A few lickings from my dad got me out of that scene. He wore me out with a paddle.”

One time, Harrison grabbed Shaquille at halftime of a high school basketball game that he was dominating and ordered the youngster to tuck in his uniform shirttail. “I always told Shaquille the world has too many followers,” Harrison remarked in Sports Illustrated. “What he needed to be was a leader. He’d see guys hanging out on the corner, and he’d know they were followers. I told him I’d whup him rather than have the guys on the corner whup him. I told him there’s no half-stepping in this life.”

In 1987, when Shaquille was 15, the family moved to San Antonio, Texas, where his father was stationed at Fort Sam Houston. Shaquille attended Cole High School, where he was a B student. He also continued to grow; by the summer after his junior year he stood at 6′10″ and weighed about 250 pounds. Even though Cole High went 32-1 during Shaquille’s junior season, he was not considered an outstanding prospect. During his senior year, O’Neal’s father began criticizing him for half-hearted effort. Finally, Sgt. Harrison told his son that if he wasn’t going to try his hardest, he might as well quit. Angered by those words, Shaquille played that same night and scored 52 points in a tournament game in Lubbock, Texas. “I was made that night,” O’Neal was quoted as saying in Newsday. “I got home the next week, there were recruiting letters from Georgetown and North Carolina on my desk.”

Cole High went 36-0 and won the Texas state title that season. O’Neal was sought after by dozens of colleges. In the end, however, LSU coach Brown’s recruiting effort five years earlier paid off. “I chose LSU, first, because Coach Brown was honest,” he pointed out in the Houston Post. “Second, the players were like family. They were close. Other places, one goes this way, one goes that way. Here, they’re together.”

A Promising College Player

The LSU team O’Neal joined in 1989, was expected to contend for a national title. It featured another 7-foot freshman, power forward Stanley Roberts, and the high-scoring All-American guard Chris Jackson, who averaged more than 20 shots per game. O’Neal found himself positioned as a so-called third wheel. “It was a very difficult season for me,” O’Neal later told the Washington Post. “The coach’s philosophy is if you’re open, shoot it. Chris was so quick with the ball that every time he touched it he was open, so he shot it most of the time. The only time I got the ball really was on rebounds.” O’Neal still averaged 13.9 points and 12 rebounds and had a Southeastern Conference record of 115 blocked shots. On the flip side, he fouled out of nine games. In the end, LSU had a disappointing season, losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

During the summer of 1990 O’Neal played in the National Sports Festival, an event featuring the country’s top ama-teur athletes. Playing for the team representing the South, he dominated against players three and four years older, and, wrote Sports Illustrated’s Kirkpatrick, he “transformed college opponents into handmaidens.” Overall, O’Neal averaged 24.5 points and 13.8 rebounds per game during the tournament and was named its most valuable player. Those who had seen him show promise as a freshman now predicted greatness.

When O’Neal returned to LSU for his sophomore season, he found that Jackson had left college to join the NBA. Roberts had been ruled academically ineligible and departed to play professionally in Spain. That put the scoring onus on O’Neal. Brown showed his confidence by naming the youngster a co-captain, and O’Neal, who had only an 16-inch vertical jump during his senior year of high school, did his part by working out and increasing his leap to 42 inches. With his arms outstretched, he can touch a spot two and a half feet above the rim. “We found out last year that talent isn’t everything,” O’Neal noted in the Orlando Sentinel going into the 1990-91 season. “The difference this year is the number of superstars. Last year, we had too many. This year, we have only one.”

That was all that was needed. O’Neal improved considerably, becoming college basketball’s dominant player. In the 1990-91 season, he led the NCAA in rebounding, with 15.2 a game. He was sixth among all college players in scoring (28.5 points), fourth in blocked shots (4.8) and 14th in shooting (63.9 percent). After a January game, in which O’Neal scored 34 points and snared 16 rebounds, forlorn Georgia coach Hugh Durham admitted in Sports Illustrated that “last year you could play behind him and know he wasn’t going to get the ball from those other guys. Now you have to front or side him, and he muscles you out of the lane anyway. They just keep going to the mountain, going to the mountain. ‘Shack’ may be unguardable.”

O’Neal’s style is to use his size to intimidate opponents. He also has surprising speed for a big man and a gritty determination. The Orlando Sentinel’s Tim Povtak called O’Neal “a powerful giant with a feathery touch who can control a basketball game in so many ways. He blocks shots like [New York Knicks player] Patrick Ewing but runs the floor like [Utah Jazz’s] Karl Malone. He is strong enough to knock down anyone but is graceful enough to dribble the length of the court and athletic enough take an errant alley-oop pass, change his course in midflight and still slam it.”

To help O’Neal advance, Coach Brown called in two private tutors in 1991—Hall of Fame centers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. Abdul-Jabbar showed O’Neal the secret of the sky hook. Walton taught O’Neal offensive moves and shot-blocking. “Bill and Kareem did many things we’d been trying to teach Shaquille,” Coach Brown said in the Rocky Mountain News. “But it’s like raising a child. You can keep telling him something. But when somebody he respects tells him the same thing, it makes an indelible impression.”

For his part, Walton was impressed by his student. “He reminds me of [Philadelphia 76ers player] Charles Barkley,” Walton remarked in the Philadelphia Daily News. “Shaquille has that quick, unrestrainable explosion, like Barkley. It’s a raw power you don’t get from the weight room. It comes from somewhere else, deep in the soul. The guy may have the physical talent and personal discipline to be the best. But I told Shaquille it’s not the numbers or the stats. It’s how he controls the flow of the game.”

O’Neal is also serious about his schoolwork. A business major, he had the highest grade point average on the team in 1990-91, a 3.0 out of a possible 4.0. LSU athletic director Joe Dean described O’Neal in Newsday: “Infectious personality, talks all the time, smiles a lot, overachiever academically. He’s one of those kids who walks into class and sits in the front row.” During his first three years of college, O’Neal claimed that he planned to finish his degree before announcing his draft eligibility. In 1982, however, he changed his mind—he could no longer ignore the pro teams’ clamor for his services. O’Neal was chosen first in the first round of the 1992 NBA draft and signed to a seven-year, $40 million contract with the Orlando Magic.

Bigger Than Mickey Mouse

Fortunately for O’Neal, the Reebok shoe company was looking for a nascent superstar to compete with the popular Michael Jordan and his Nike commercials. Reebok chose O’Neal—giving him a multimillion dollar deal—and released commercials starring the young player even before he embarked on his professional career. In fact, O’Neal, with his catchy nickname and powerful on-camera blend of sweetness and menace, quickly caught the media spotlight and held it firmly in his grip.

When O’Neal made his debut with the Magic in the fall of 1992, he already had a $13 million contract from Pepsi, a $12 to $20 million contract with Reebok, and another $20 to $25 million combined from Kenner, Spaulding, and Scoreboard trading cards. By the All-Star break in his rookie year he had begun recording rap songs, both solo and with other hip-hop artists, and at season’s end he starred in a feature film, Blue Chips. “By most accounts in Orlando, home to the [Disney World theme park’s] Magic Kingdom, Shaquille O’Neal is bigger than Mickey Mouse,” claimed Scott Poulson-Bryant in Vibe. “The adulation and superstardom that greet Shaquille O’Neal take on another tone, so reverential that one wonders if this 21-year-old will be able to shoulder it and play ball at the same time.”

Cynics assured the public that O’Neal would crumble under the pressure, that the sheer volume of hype surrounding him would seriously curb his ability to perform on the court. For his part, O’Neal expressed nothing but confidence. “I’ve been a child superstar,” he told Vibe. “I’ve been getting attention since I was 16, in Texas, getting my name in the paper every day, then in college. So I just take from what I learned in high school and college to this [professional] level. It’s really all the same. You play well, they talk well about you.”

Shaquille O’Neal played well. In his rookie season with the Magic he averaged 23.4 points per game, had team highs in rebounds, blocks, and starts. He was voted onto the 1993 All-Star team—the first rookie so honored since Michael Jordan—and was named the starting center for the East. Most importantly, the Orlando Magic’s fortunes soared under his leadership. The Magic won only 21 games in 1991-92. The next year, with O’Neal on board, they won 41 and narrowly missed making the playoffs. In 1993-94 they won 50 and did make the playoffs, as O’Neal finished second in the league in scoring and rebounding and first in field-goal percentage.

All these achievements were not enough to silence the critics, especially when the Magic lost a first-round playoff series to the Indiana Pacers in 1994. “The knock on Shaq is that he has no bread-and-butter move, no touch to speak of on his outside shot, and little in the way of resourcefulness,” declared Michael Ventre in Sport. “Basically, he plows and slams. Not to say that plowing and slamming is a bad thing. But to achieve greatness, he’ll need more.”

Most observers, including O’Neal himself, feel that the superstar is still improving and that he will eventually fulfill all the expectations created when he entered the league with such fanfare in 1992. Los Angeles Lakers general manager Jerry West told Sport: “You watch [Shaquille], and you see things in his future that kind of open your eyes. He has all the things necessary to really be an impact player for years to come.” Sporting News contributor Tim Povtak calls O’Neal “the league’s most celebrated player and arguably its most dominating presence.”

O’Neal’s celebrity status has not led him into the pages of the tabloid press. He says little about his relationships with women beyond the claim that he is not interested in casual liaisons with those who might be attracted to his wealth or fame. What O’Neal is passionate about is music, particularly rap. He has released a solo rap album and has contributed tracks to other albums, and he has an extensive collection of rap music at his home in Orlando.

As for his movie work—most notably in the well-received 1994 film Blue Chips, O’Neal told Vibe: “Acting is nothing but delivery and facial expressions, like if you’re supposed to be mad, you gotta act mad. It’s not that complicated.” O’Neal added that he realizes his worldwide fame is partly due to luck and timing and partly due to skills he has developed by working hard. “[My mother] told me I was gonna be the man one day,” he said. “Here I am. Right now I’m just following my dreams and whatever opportunities come my way. I think I’m doing a pretty good job.”