(2 of 4)
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.