The NBA Finals: The Lakers Vs. The Pacers Shaq Opens Up

When Michael Jordan was ruling the National Basketball Association, everybody wanted to be like Mike. He was larger than life but not bigger than our imagination. Most ordinary humans can’t dunk from the foul line or do what M.J. did against the Utah Jazz in Game 6 of the 1998 finals, faking his defender, stopping at the top of the key, 5.2 seconds on the clock, firing off a shot–swish!–holding the pose, wrist cocked, end of game, end of career. No one has his exact gifts, but we can all imagine being like him. The famous silhouette of M.J. soaring for a one-handed slam is somehow the right size and shape for us to slide our own image into.

But it’s hard to imagine being like 28-year-old Shaquille O’Neal. At 7 ft. 1 in. and 320 lbs., he is IMAX big, a human order of supersize fries, a skyscraper in size-22 sneakers. NBA stars, of course, tend to be tall, but there’s usually a sense of elongation, of a body stretched, like gum, until it is long and thin. O’Neal seems like a man who has been magnified. He is not just tall; he is massive.

Shaq’s size-22s seem too big for even imagination to fill. What playground b-baller dreams of using his rear end to back down Arvydas Sabonis for a 5-ft. jump hook? Sports fantasies are spun of finer threads of memory and desire–Magic’s no-look passes, Dr. J’s finger rolls, Larry Bird sinking shot after shot. “People dream of doing what Kobe Bryant does more than they dream of doing what Shaq does,” says NBC sports commentator Bob Costas of Bryant, O’Neal’s telegenic 21-year-old teammate. “It’s just human nature. They dream of doing what Michael Jordan did more than they dream of doing what Wilt Chamberlain did.”

That may change, because this year O’Neal is crashing his way into a lot of dreams. He has dominated basketball like no other player since Jordan. It’s a wonder the league hasn’t been renamed the O’NBA. During the 1999-2000 season, he led his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, to the league’s best regular-season record while also winning the scoring title; so far in the playoffs, he’s the leader in both scoring and rebounding. He was voted MVP in the biggest landslide in league history.

Now O’Neal and his Lakers are up 2-0 in the best-of-seven championship series against the Larry Bird-coached Indiana Pacers. If the Lakers win, it will be the first title of O’Neal’s career and the first for the Lakers since 1988 and the “Showtime” glory days of Magic and Kareem. Says Hall of Fame center Bill Walton, no easy grader: “This season he’s performing at his highest level by far, at a level few players in the NBA have achieved. He rivals Jordan, Jabbar, Magic, Bill Russell; he’s come into the absolute elite of the NBA.”

If Jordan was Lord of the Air, O’Neal is King of the Mountain; if Jordan played like musical fusion, combining Dr. J’s jazzy, improvisational style with a rock-‘n’-rolling, aggressive athleticism, O’Neal is pure hip-hop. “I love hip-hop to death,” says O’Neal, who has recorded several rap CDs. “I live for the beats. In order to hang with the fellas, you gotta have rhythm. And I got rhythm when I’m on the court.”

Make no mistake: the man has skills: cross-court passes out of double-teams, spin moves around opposing centers that leave them rooted like 1,000-year-old sequoias. He has finesse, but he relies on power. You can feel the beat when he plays, explosions of mass and muscularity that fill up the court like blasts of boom-box rap. Short, curt hooks. BAM! Power-jams in the paint. BOOM! Or, as in Game 7 of the Portland series, a spectacular fourth-quarter alley-oop from Bryant that O’Neal pulled from the rafters of the Staples Center. Shaq came down harder than thunder, harder than a Dr. Dre track. SHAKA-LAKA-BOOM! Portland was finished.

Nobody roots for Goliath, Wilt Chamberlain once complained to teammate Jerry West. The reason, of course, is that in a world consisting by and large of Davids, we assume the Goliaths have it easy. If they dare complain, we search for slingshots. O’Neal’s life, however, didn’t start off so terribly comfortably. His biological father, he says, abandoned him and his mother Lucille when he was an infant. O’Neal wrote a caustic rap song about it in 1994 called Biological Didn’t Bother. O’Neal’s mother eventually married Philip Harrison, an Army staff sergeant, who imposed, naturally enough, a disciplined upbringing on a boy who was growing at an unruly rate. “I never see my biological dad,” says the unmarried O’Neal, who has two children of his own, Taahirah, 4, and Shareef, 6 months, who live with their mothers. “Don’t even know what he looks like. What if that guy had raised me? Who knows where I’d be? If I had to do it all over again, would I change it? The answer is no.”

As a military kid, young Shaq moved around. In the spring of 1987, O’Neal, then a 6 ft., 8 in., 15-year-old sophomore, transferred into Robert G. Cole High School in San Antonio, Texas. Herb More, O’Neal’s geometry teacher at Cole, remembers him as a humorous kid who “made class fun.” More was also the assistant basketball coach. O’Neal was already too big for the other players to handle in practice, so More had to be his practice partner. “I used to foul him an awful lot–he used to complain about it,” says More. “I would say, ‘Hey, that’s what they’re going to do to you in game situations.'” O’Neal’s team won the state championship his senior year, and he went on to a collegiate career at Louisiana State University before leaving for the pros after his junior year.

O’Neal posted amazing stats in his first year in the league–with the Orlando Magic, in 1992–and was named rookie of the year. In 1995, with teammate Penny Hardaway, he led the Magic to the finals. But they were swept by the Houston Rockets, and O’Neal & Co. were pegged as overhyped underachievers. “When we got there we let down,” O’Neal says. “We just kept talking about ‘Let’s get to the finals, let’s get to the finals.’ Nobody ever talked about winning. That’s what our mistake was. We were hungry, but not enough.” In 1996 O’Neal left the Magic for the Lakers, a $120 million seven-year contract and an opportunity to be close to Hollywood, where he starred in several forgettable films.

Until this year, O’Neal’s tenure with the Lakers mimicked his movie career: the Lakers were swept out of the playoffs two years running. But this year they have a new coach: Phil Jackson, the man who helped guide Jordan and his Chicago Bulls to six titles in the ’90s.

Much has been made of Jackson’s philosophical approach to the game. Earlier this season, he gave O’Neal two books to read: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo and George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. (Shaq admits he dipped into both but finished neither.) The works are nuanced and complex. Yet Jackson’s take on the world is actually quite direct.

First off, Jackson treats his players with respect. “It’s a trust sequence,” says Jackson. “If you keep trusting people more and more, they get into it.” Jackson is not a big screamer. He figures his players are adults and can work out most situations on their own. Typically, when a team falls behind in a game, a coach will call a timeout. Jackson, calmly sitting on the sidelines, will often let his players play on and work out their problems in the flow of the game. “With the other coaches I’ve had, they were great coaches, but I guess we really didn’t trust them,” says O’Neal. “With Phil, we trust him ’cause we know who he is and we’ve seen what he’s done, and he treats us very well. He treats us like men.”

O’Neal’s new coach also recognizes that sometimes you have to lose to win. When Jackson met with his star center last summer, O’Neal weighed 346 lbs. Jackson told him he had to lose about 20 lbs. He also told O’Neal there was something else he had to give up: some of his scoring. Jackson wanted him to concentrate instead on rebounding, shot blocking and field-goal accuracy–things that would help the team overall. Jackson’s firm, fair style has worked well with O’Neal, who grew up under Sergeant Harrison’s discipline. “It’s Phil’s job to inspire us, but it gets translated down to me,” O’Neal says. “He’s the general, and I’m the drill sergeant.”

Even if O’Neal secures his elusive championship, or a couple of them, he may never be the ubiquitous cultural figure that Jordan is. It’s not because he lacks the tools. He has a personality that is both oversize and ultra-authentic, like one of those new $20 bills with the large face on them. Sometimes, in interviews, his voice is unexpectedly gentle and muffled, like something rumbling deep in a volcano. But when he gets rolling, he can be funny and engaging, blending warrior bravado, street slang and genuine insight. Jordan, for all his charm, often spoke in sanitized sound bites, like the polished business executive he’s since become. O’Neal the rapper is unpredictable and, at times, eloquent. “From this day on I would like to be known as the Big Aristotle,” he said when he accepted his MVP award, “because it was Aristotle who said excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.”

So do we wanna be like Shaq? In the end, it’s not just about stats–“I wanna be like Dominique” (that would be Wilkins) never caught fire as a catchphrase. And it’s not just about championships–Tim Duncan is a champ, but he’s still about as exciting as dishwasher liquid. O’Neal accurately dubbed him “the Big Fundamental.”

What connects Jordan and O’Neal–and makes O’Neal into a similarly iconic presence–is an almost ineffable quality to their play. Both are able to impose their will on games in ways that go beyond stats, beyond predictions and projections. There was a virus-ravaged Jordan in Game 5 of the 1997 finals, scoring 38 points to give his team the win. Or O’Neal, in Game 4 of this year’s Western Conference final against Portland, fouled repeatedly by the Trail Blazers (a strategy called Hack-a-Shaq), hitting nine foul shots in a row despite his history as a horrible free-throw shooter. True sports greats surprise us, exceeding our high expectations.

Yet basketball stars, no matter how great their height or extravagant their talent, need teammates to step up if they want to become champions. Every NBA championship squad in recent memory has featured at least two superstars; no player can do it alone. Every Jordan needs a Pippen. Every Olajuwon needs a Drexler. Every Shaq needs a Kobe. The star adapts his talent for the good of the team; the other players learn from his example. He needs them–the fellow star, the role player, the Steve Kerr taking a pass from Jordan and knocking down the shot, the Brian Shaw coming off the bench and raining down threes.

And the viewer, watching at home, seeing even Goliath reach out for help, feels a little more needed, vicariously. As the Little Aristotle said 2,000 years ago, “Some drink together, others dice together, others go in for athletics…They seem to become even better men by exercising their friendship and improving each other; for the traits that they admire in each other get transferred to themselves.”

That may be why there is one thing you won’t find anywhere in Shaq’s 15,000-sq.-ft. mansion high above Hollywood, nor in the secret apartment he sometimes escapes to along a sugary swath of beach just south of Los Angeles: a trophy. “My dad never [displayed] any trophies,” says O’Neal. “Neither do I. I don’t want to look like I’m satisfied.” It’s all about the team for him now. It’s all about winning. Someday soon, though, if the Big Aristotle successfully completes his playoff drive, he just may want to clear away a little room in a display case for a memento to remember this season by: a championship ring.