Basketball Hall of Famer Grant Hill was a guest on the “All The Smoke” podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson last month. During one of the segments they began talking about Shaquille O’Neal. Barnes and Hill cracked themselves up reminiscing over stories about Shaq in the locker room as a teammate. One story in particular stood out.
During their time with the Phoenix Suns one day after practice while taking a shower, according to Hill, Shaq commented on teammate Jason Richardson’s ample posterior.
“I remember one time, man, Shaq. So bad I can’t repeat this, man. We in the showers after practice, and he goes to J-Rich: ‘J-Rich, you got a fat ass, man.’ I’m like, how do you come back? What does J-Rich do, man? Shaq was just funny, nasty, crazy.”
If you’ve ever played team sports you know locker rooms are interesting places, from the conversations that take place to the activities. We’ll just leave it there.
This story about Shaq is not surprising if you’ve read about and followed his career. He is a big-time joker and jokester. Shaq enjoys using his size and physicality to make people uncomfortable for a good laugh.
Barnes and Hill say it in the episode. “Always naked” doing “nasty” things like taking a teammates mouth piece and putting it down his pants. Riding a teammate’s bicycle while naked. Funny to him and others if not on the receiving end, but certainly uncomfortable if you’re at the center of the “joke.”
Shaq once told his Phoenix Suns teammates he saw Bigfoot and had proof on video, and when he showed the video, it was himself walking naked through the desert at dusk.
“He came in and said he saw a sasquatch in the desert. I saw a Bigfoot; there was a Bigfoot. My man had someone film him, and we didn’t know it at the time. It was a grainy, blurry video of a desert at dusk, and the lighting is poor. This is a big f***ing figure walking like Bigfoot would walk in some of those fake videos. Everybody is huddled around, and we are like, this isn’t god damn bigfoot. That is your big a** walking through the desert. He set the whole sh-t up.”
Some of Shaq’s “jokes” are funny, others are cruel and disgusting. According to former teammate Gary Payton while they were on the Heat, Shaq would use the bathroom in a bucket and pour it on rookies while they were in the bathroom stalls.
“Shaq is a jokester,” Payton says in the clip. “So if one of the rookies would be in the stall, he would take a bucket, and use the bathroom in it for about a week. And then all of the sudden he would pour it on them.”
That’s just a sampling of some of the “jokes” or “pranks” Shaq has pulled off throughout his 20-year NBA career. If you got to watch from the sides no doubt some of this was funny. But if you were intimately involved it was likely less so.
