Parsing a notorious Shaquille O'Neal quote

The Game Room
1

(I wasn’t really planning on doing this, but now that ESPN is piling on LeBron James…the network, you’ll remember, that freakin’ aired The Decision in the first place…I need to do something to clear my head. Go to Page 2 if you don’t believe me. The word “chutzpah” doesn’t go far enough. Yeesh.)

Well, Shaq is retired now. He’ll go through the usual reassessment-of-his-life phase before his inevitable Hall of Fame nomination; barring some bizarre decision, I think he’s a lock to get in. Granted, there’s been so much hype and white noise and general delusion surrounding his career to the point where any objective evaluation of how good he really was is just about impossible. (A lot of sports seem to be infected with this…cf. Rory McIlroy winning the US Open by 8 strokes, which is like winning the Daytona 500 while the runner-up is taking his last pitstop, and ESPN promptly responded with a raging debate over whether or not it was better than Tiger’s 2000 Masters.) But this much indisputable: He was damn good. And, at his best, damn scary.

Now, a lot of athletes, even Hall of Famers, have said some things in their young 'n foolish days they regret later, and the Big Diesel is no exceptions. The sports outlets have wisely not made a huge deal out of it. However, this is one particular quote that I’ve never completely forgotten, and now that his career is over, it’s come up again.

Here it is:

“I’ve won at every level except college and professional.”
- Shaquille O’Neal

(All right, this may not be exact word-for-word, but you get the idea.)

I remember him taking some flack for this. Not hard to see why, given the fairly obvious implication that he was covering his butt for what many expected to be a bitterly disappointing NBA career.

Didn’t quite work out like that, of course. He retired with four championships and a plethora of individual accomplishments, most of them at the same time he was doing movies, recording rap CDs, doing mocap for video games, and shooting commercials. He never needed excuses.

So why did he mean by that quote? Some ideas…

  1. He had a Dan Quayle moment. “Oahu is an island! Oahu is in the Pacific Ocean! Oahu is an island in the Pacific Ocean!” Just yakkin’ it up, and by the time he realized how dumb it sounded, it was too late.
  2. He was trying to say how disappointed he was that he hadn’t won anything of note since high school and that he was going to step it up in the NBA. Not the smartest way to make this kind of statement, of course, but it’s not like he’s a PhD or anything.
  3. He is genuinely proud of what he won in the levels below college and thinks they matter when assessing an athlete’s accomplishments.
  4. Originally it was just “college”, but for some reason he wasn’t able to publicly make the statement until after the Orlando Magic had drafted him, so he just added the professional part without thinking.
  5. He meant “college and professional” as a single entity; he considers them to be the same thing.

Have at it!

(Yes, I realize this is the second OP I’ve started about something stupid an athlete said. No, I’m not making it a habit.)

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At what time did he make the statement?

And another possibility is that he started making the statement as “I’ve won at every level”, meaning just that he’s won games. But as he was saying it, he realized that that wasn’t all that significant, and that he should be talking about where he’s won championships, so he amended it on the fly.

3

Some sources (like www.shaqquotes.com) say he made that comment after winning a championship in high school. Meaning he hadn’t won championships in college or the pros because he hadn’t played there yet.

4

Don’t forget about summer league (AAU) ball. Does anyone know if his AAU teams won national championships as he passed through the different age levels? It sounds silly to us to compare those to an NCAA or NBA championship, but those are some hard core tournys for those involved.

5

I remember that quote. I believe it was right before the Lakers won their first championship with him in 2000. I don’t remember when it was exactly, but probably during that 1999-2000 season since I watched a lot of Lakers that year

I think he was trying to do 2 things: one, to give the reporters interviewing him something funny to quote about, and two, to kind of backhandedly compliment himself while being self-deprecating at the same time

He was a huge star in those days and people kept talking about how dominant he was, but the knock on him was that he could never win a championship. I think he knew exactly what he was saying and how he was coming off. He wanted them to know that even though he hasn’t won anything, he’s still a winner and still a great player. Also, that his shortcomings such as his free throws and his work ethic never stopped him from being a winner in all levels of basketball (except college and professional).

To me, that’s the only way it makes sense given the structure of that sentence and how it was phrased

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Don’t remember when exactly, but I’m 95% certain it was early in his career, definitely well before he went to the Lakers. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be around the time the Magic got stomped in the first round of the playoffs. (It was especially painful since the Magic were in the media spotlight at the time and just about everyone expected or at least wanted them to make a deep run.) I don’t buy that he said it in high school…that smacks of revisionist history.

Playing around with the press, that sounds plausible. Yeah, it certainly helped that he’s likable, doesn’t make excuses, and doesn’t have any dirt on him. If Chris Webber said something like that, it would hound him to his grave.

Thanks for the insights as always, gang! I can’t even imagine where else to ask something like this.

(P.S. Shaqquotes dot com? Man, there’s a website for EVERYTHING these days. :wink: )