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 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.