Media Outrage

The undeniable rift between Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal is one of sports most publicized rivalries. These two dominated basketball from 2000-2002, while basking in NBA glory but were never able to maintain a good off-the-court relationship of any sort. Their rifts were always in the news and on the tongues of NBA analyst and announcers. Even though their feud is long behind us, Shaq is using his newest book as a sounding board for what really went wrong in their tenuous relationship.

Peep excerpts from the book

Shaq Uncut: My Story, the Diesel’s new autobiography written with noted Around the Horn personage Jackie MacMullan, comes out November 15 and it dropped on our desk today. There’s some juicy stuff in there, most obviously about the beef between Shaq and Kobe. We had always known that the feud took a turn for the worse during the 2003-04 season, but we never before knew what caused it. Now we have some insight.

Here’s Shaq, on the Kobe feud:

So I’m on edge because I don’t have a new deal, and Kobe is on edge because he might be going to jail, so we’re taking it out on each other. Just before the start of the ’03-’04 season the coaching staff called us in and said, “No more public sparring or you’ll get fined.” … Phil was tired of it. Karl Malone and Gary Payton were sick of it. … So what happens? Immediately after that Kobe runs right out to Jim Gray and does this interview where he lets me have it. He said I was fat and out of shape. He said I was milking my toe injury for more time off, and the injury wasn’t even that serious. (Yeah, right. It only ended my damn career.) He said I was “lobbying for a contract extension when we have two Hall of Famers playing pretty much for free.” I’m sitting there watching this interview and I’m gonna explode. Hours earlier we had just promised our coach we’d stop. It was a truce broken. I let the guys know, “I’m going to kill him.”

Kobe stands up and goes face-to-face with me and says, “You always said you’re my big brother, you’d do anything for me, and then this Colorado thing happens and you never even called me.” I did call him. … So here we are now, and we find out he really was hurt that we didn’t stand behind him. That was something new. I didn’t think he gave a rat’s ass about us either way. “Well, I thought you’d publicly support me, at least,” Kobe said. “You’re supposed to be my friend.”

Brian Shaw chimed in with “Kobe, why would you think that? Shaq had all these parties and you never showed up for any of them. We invited you to dinner on the road and you didn’t come. Shaq invited you to his wedding and you weren’t there. Then you got married and didn’t invite any of us. And now you are in the middle of this problem, this sensitive situation, and now you want all of us to step up for you. We don’t even know you.” …

Everyone was starting to calm down when I told Kobe, “If you ever say anything like what you said to Jim Gray ever again, I will kill you.”

Kobe shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

[...]

From that day on, I was done dealing with Kobe. I was done dealing with Jim Gray, too. What goes around, comes around. When he got fired, he actually had the nerve to call me and ask me to help him out. What, did you lose Kobe’s number?

 

On Young Kobe, braggart and tattletale:

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.”

My first Lakers season we had a couple of rookies, and we hazed them pretty badly. We were dogging them out constantly. It was “Go get my bags, go get me something to eat.” It was kind of a rite of passage in the NBA that a lot of teams do, but we probably went a little too far with it. One of the rookies—Derek Fisher—just took it. The other rookie—Kobe Bryant—ratted us out to Jerry West.

 

On Pat Riley:

My ticket out of Miami was punched in mid-February 2008. There was a lot of tension between Pat and the players. So we’re about to start practice and Jason Williams comes in about ten seconds late. Pat being Pat, he starts swearing at him and screaming, “Get the hell out of here!”…

That’s when I said, “Why don’t you make me?”

I start taking a couple of steps towards Pat. Udonis Haslem steps in and I shove him out of the way. Then Zo tries to grab me. I threw him aside like he was a rag doll. Now it’s me and Riley face-to-face, jaw to jaw. I’m poking him in the chest and he keeps slapping my finger away and it’s getting nasty. Noisy, too. He’s yelling “Fuck you!” and I’m yelling back, “No, fuck you!”

Zo is trying to calm us both down and he has this kind of singsong panic in his voice. He keeps saying, “Big fella, no big fella, big fella!” I finally turn around and tell him, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hit the man. Do you think I’m crazy?”

On Halle Berry:

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.”

On retired life:

“They’ve already got some things cooking in Hollywood for me. Adam Sandler called me in June 2011 and said, “I want you to be in some of my movies.”

I’ve stayed fairly low-key about what I own. For instance, out of the fifteen twenty-four-hour fitness places I own, only three have my name on it. None of the Five Guys I own have my name on it. None of the clubs I own in Vegas, either.

Source

You can pre-order Shaq Uncut: My Story, which comes out from Grand Central Publishing on November 15, here.

We don’t care what went wrong, these two were still one of the dominant duo’s in NBA history.