Shaq Uncut: My Story (17 page)

When the LA riots broke out in 1992, I called up Lester and told him, “We’ve got to buy those cops some new cars.” He said, “Shaq, they have a budget for that.”

I didn’t care. I love law enforcement, and I love cops. I was already starting to go through the Police Academy, so I figured it couldn’t hurt from a public relations
standpoint. I had a deal with Ford, so I said, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have these cars and you can stand up on the stage with me when we give them out.” Ford paid for one, I paid for one, and the LA Police Department paid for one. It was good for me, good for Ford, and good for the LA cops. A win-win-win, I think they call that.

Now, in the back of my mind I knew I
had to be smart about not going crazy with my spending. But, in those early years, in the front of my head I was thinking, “I’m making twenty million dollars a year. Screw it!” I wish I was a little wiser at a younger age, but that’s why you get old, right? So you can be wise. That means now I’m Nostradamus.

I was a great dreamer—what you’d call a fake dreamer. What I mean by that was when I
was a kid I didn’t really have the confidence or the know-how to make my dreams happen. My life wasn’t really all that great sometimes. It was the same old cycle—screw up, get a beating from my father, spend the whole day in my room. But instead of being sad and depressed and upset about having just taken another brutal ass whupping and being stuck in my room on punishment again, I’d force myself
to be happy. I’d watch TV and there would be a beautiful woman on the screen smiling, and I’d say, “Oh, she’s smiling at me! I’m going to marry her!” I’m picturing my wife and my beautiful house and my fabulous kids and my glamorous cars, and it made me feel better.

I never stopped dreaming. Not even after I got to LSU and things started to go well for me. I remember being in the dorm room one
night and we were watching the movie
Jungle Fever
with Halle Berry in it, and I thought she was so stunning, so I wrote her a letter. I was
just kind of kidding around, telling her I was a big fan and I’d love to meet her sometime.

The guys totally goofed on me for doing it, but I didn’t care. A few weeks later, no lie, Halle Berry wrote me back. She sent me a signed picture that I still have
hanging in my office. Turns out she’s a basketball fan. She wrote, “I’m a big fan of yours, too. I can’t wait until you get to the NBA.”

I finally got to meet her in person in 1999. I told her, “You know, I wrote to you when I was in college.” She said, “I remember. I told you that you’d be in the NBA!” Halle Berry is a beautiful person—both inside and out. Sometimes I still can’t believe she
knows who I am.

That’s LA for you. All your dreams come true—except, when I first got there, we couldn’t win a championship.

Hell, we couldn’t even get to the Finals.

When I first got there Kobe was just a skinny teenager. He had plenty of confidence but not a whole lot of life experience yet.

It’s funny to look back on the fact that Derek Fisher and Kobe were rookies at the same time. Derek
always seemed so much older than him. He was one of those guys who knew how to keep his cool at all times. He had a certain way about him that made you respect him.

So here’s how I met DFish:

It’s my first season with the Lakers and I’ve just finished up with the Olympics in Atlanta and I get a call from my bodyguard, Jerome. He says, “You’ve got to come down and work out for Del Harris.” Del
was the coach of the Lakers at that point. I said, “Work out? Why? For what?” Jerome said, “I guess he wants to see what you can do.”

I’m thinking to myself,
If you want to see what I can do, why don’t you replay the highlight reel of my first four years in the league?
But I’m new, and I’ve just signed this big contract, so I’m going to do what they want.

So I show up and the first thing they
have me do is take some shots. There’s this little bald-headed guy passing me the ball, over
and over. I say, “What’s up dawg, you a coach?” He said, “No, I’m Derek Fisher. I’m on your team.” I was a little embarrassed, so I said, “Hey, great to meet you, bro. Looking forward to it.”

Next thing I know Del starts putting me through all these conditioning drills. He’s got me running and jumping
and dunking. He had me running stairs, suicides, all that stuff for about an hour and a half. I’m saying to myself,
I just signed for over $100 million and I used to come to this town and bust Del Harris’s team every night, and now I have to audition for this guy?

But I didn’t say anything. I’m thinking that because I have all this other stuff going on he’s trying to see if I’m in shape or not.
I wasn’t—not in basketball shape, anyway—and I was sucking wind a little bit, but I’m a player. I knew how to fake it.

For example, if Del told me to shoot 10 hard jump hooks, the first two I went at really hard, then 3, 4, and 5 medium, then 6, 7, and 8 slow, then the last two real hard again.

Of course, when you run the wind sprints, there’s no faking that. You have to go all out because there’s
really no other way.

I was pretty ticked off Del put me through all that, but I did it because I didn’t want to be labeled as one of those disgruntled, know-it-all superstars.

Del Harris is a nice, nice guy. He knows basketball, too. He was just the wrong guy for the job.

One thing I admired about him, though, was he didn’t care if you were Shaquille O’Neal or Kobe Bryant—he was hard on everybody.

If Kobe came down and threw it between his legs ten times and then made a pass, Del would call a time-out and tell him, “Pass the damn ball!” and then Kobe would talk back and Del would sit his ass down.

That was impressive, until one of Buss’s cronies would come up in the middle of the game and tap Del on the shoulder. He’d tell Del, “Put the kid back in the game.” I never knew what the guy’s
name was, but there he was, always lurking around our bench, talking to our coach while we’re trying to beat San Antonio.

Meanwhile, the fans are all chanting “Kobe! Kobe!” so Del Harris didn’t have much of a choice. He’d have to put Kobe back in.

You knew even then Kobe was special. He was just different from everyone else, from Day One. I remember the first practice he was there, I walked
in and here was this skinny kid doing all this “And One” crap; high crossovers, between the legs, palming and carrying and all this other trick street stuff. Eddie Jones and Nick Van Exel were laughing at him, but all I kept noticing was he never stopped working. He worked harder than all of us. So I started thinking,
Damn, this kid is going to be all right
.

He was so young and so immature in
some ways, but I can tell you this: everything Kobe is doing now, he told me all the way back then he was going to do it. We were sitting on the bus once and he told me, “I’m going to be the number one scorer for the Lakers, I’m going to win five or six championships, and I’m going to be the best player in the game.” I was like, “Okay, whatever.” Then he looked me right in the eye and said, “I’m
going to be the Will Smith of the NBA.”

It would be one thing if the kid was all talk, but he was always trying to add something to make his game better. If practice was at 10:00 a.m., I might show up at nine once in a while to work on something, and Kobe would have been there since seven shooting. Sometimes, he’d be working on his moves without the ball. You’d walk in there and he’d be cutting
and grunting and motioning like he was dribbling and shooting—except there was no ball. I thought it was weird, but I’m pretty sure it helped him.

Kobe and I were fine in the beginning. We didn’t spend a lot of time together because he was a quiet kid, too young to go out to the clubs or anything. I don’t know what he did because he kept to himself.

One thing we had in common was our first year
with the Lakers was a struggle.

We didn’t have the right guys to win. Nick Van Exel was our point guard, but he was too busy trying to be a star, and you could see that before long Derek Fisher, the quiet cat, was going to take over.
Eventually it happened, and after that Nick stopped caring. Eddie Jones was supposed to be another veteran to help us win, but he spent most his time looking over
his shoulder at Kobe. He knew it, I knew it, and Kobe knew it. Eddie Jones was done in LA. Kobe was going to take over his position.

And if you listened to Kobe, he was going to take over the team, too. My reaction to that was “Not so fast, young fella.”

My first year with the Lakers I missed twenty-eight games with a knee injury. I hyperextended it, fracturing a bone and partially tearing a
ligament. I was in a bad way for a while. When I came back I played with a brace, but I had no confidence in my leg. The team went 16-12 without me. Even so, my first season in LA I was in the top five in the league in scoring, rebounds, shooting percentages, and blocks.

In the fall of 1996 they picked the top fifty NBA Players of all time, and I was on the list. I was kind of surprised because
it was still early in my career, but it was obviously a great honor. The plan was to have everyone who was chosen to go to the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland for a big ceremony to celebrate the NBA’s fiftieth anniversary.

Because I had the knee injury and I was in a cast, and flying would have caused it to swell, I got strict orders from Jerry West not to go. He said, “Shaquille, you have to
do what’s best for the Lakers, and we can’t afford to aggravate that injury any further.” That sounded right to me. The only way I could have possibly done it was if I flew privately, and the Lakers weren’t going to sign off on that. Jerry really didn’t want me pushing my injury.

Jerry was also chosen as one of the top fifty players of all time, but he didn’t go, either.

I didn’t think it was
a big deal, but all of a sudden people are saying, “Who does Shaq think he is? Why didn’t he go?” Instead of stopping for a minute and realizing I was injured they all said, “Shaq’s arrogant.”

All the criticism kind of blindsided me. It wasn’t like I lobbied to
be on the list. I don’t even know who voted for it. I agree there were a couple of players who should have been ahead of me. Dominique
Wilkins, Sidney Moncrief—they were great players who put in the work before me. But I had no say at all in how it was done.

They gave Jerry West some grief, too, about not going. He had scheduled some surgery on his nose, which was messed up from all the times he had broken it during his playing career, so that was his excuse.

I didn’t find out the real reason Jerry West didn’t go until a whole
bunch of years later. Turns out the Orlando Magic had filed tampering charges against the Lakers for signing me. When Jerry heard about it, he went ballistic. He told the guys in the NBA office, “You are questioning my integrity and Shaquille’s integrity and Jerry Buss’s integrity. I can tell you no one will ever tamper on a team owned by Dr. Jerry Buss.” David Stern said he understood, but they
had to investigate.

Jerry West was so annoyed about it he decided, “The hell with the NBA. You can have your top fifty without me.”

And without his young star center, as it turned out.

Here’s why I love Jerry West: he wasn’t afraid of Stern or anyone else. Afterward, he admitted to people the way he acted was “a little childish.”

I didn’t think it was childish at all. Once I found out what
went down, I was saying, “That’s why Jerry West is the best general manager there ever was.” I’m big on loyalty, and Jerry West was loyal from start to finish.

My first year with the Lakers we won fifty-six games but lost to Utah in the second round of the playoffs. We just weren’t ready to beat a veteran team like the Jazz that had John Stockton and Karl Malone. For some reason their center
Greg Ostertag thought he had something to do with why Utah won, which I would have found to be hilarious if I wasn’t so irritated that we lost.

Nick Van Exel was getting into arguments all the time with Del. Usually it was in practice, but in Game 4 of the series against Utah
it spilled over to the game. They were yelling at each other on the bench while John Stockton was tearing us apart.

We took the Jazz to overtime in Salt Lake in Game 5, but Byron Scott got hurt and Robert Horry got thrown out of the game and I fouled out, so that left the Kobester to pull it out on his own.

It was the moment he had been waiting for. I’m sure he had replayed it a thousand times in his mind, only Kobe wasn’t ready yet. He threw up three air balls in the final minute and a half of overtime. Forced
one shot after another. I’m standing along the bench and I want to vomit.

We lose 98–93 and the kid is shaken, maybe for the first and only time in his life. I put my arms around Kobe as we walk off the court. I tell him, “Look at all these people laughing at you. One day we’re going to get them back.” I knew eventually he was going to be a great player. I told him, “Don’t worry. Someday everybody’s
going to be screaming your name. Take this and learn from it.”

What did he learn? I’m not sure. Maybe that no matter how many air balls he throws up, he still has the green light to shoot. Hey brother, how about learning to pass? Me and Rob Horry tried to explain to him he could still get his 20, but instead of coming out, putting it between his legs and shooting, he could pass it to me and cut,
and I’d give it right back to him.

We were victims of expectations that season. I was only twenty-five and Kobe was still only a teenager. I told reporters, “We’ll be back.”

Our potential was unlimited. Everyone in Los Angeles was dialed into the Lakers. I was in the white-hot spotlight and I loved it. I spent a lot of time entertaining the media. When a reporter asked me, “Do you have a special
routine before the playoffs?” I told him, “Yeah, I rub your mother’s feet.”

When the ’97–’98 schedule came out and I saw we played Utah in the season opener, I put a circle around my calendar. I had some unfinished business with Ostertag. I didn’t like how he spouted
off after they beat us in the playoffs, and I planned to take it up with him.

I saw him at the shootaround and I went over and
confronted him. I told him, “You should stop talking and stick to playing. Watch what you say.” He said, “Fuck you, man. You watch what you say.” So I said, “Oh, you bad now?” We got into it and he was mouthing off again, so I turned and slapped him upside the head.