Everyone asked me why I did it and I told them, “I had orders from the great Bill Russell. Me and him were talking in Seattle the other day, and he was telling me how rivalries should be. I asked him if he ever disliked anybody he played against and he said,
‘No, never,’ and he told me I should shake Kobe’s hand and let bygones be bygones and bury the hatchet.”
Naturally everyone lapped that up. The Great Bill Russell! Detente with Kobe and Shaq! It was a great story, but that’s just what it was—a story.
I can tell you this now: I made it up. I was just trying to add to the mystique of the great Bill Russell. I did talk to Bill Russell in Seattle
and we discussed many things, but we never even mentioned Kobe. We talked about Red Auerbach and all the racism Bill endured in Boston and how he learned to become a leader.
I was so impressed with him I wanted to elevate his status a little bit. People seemed to have kind of forgotten him a little bit, so I figured if I made him peace broker between Kobe and me that would
amp his credibility.
He is one of the greatest players of all times and deserves respect.
By the time I had been in Phoenix a couple of seasons the whole Kobe thing was irrelevant. We had both moved on. We played together on the West team in the 2009 All-Star Game and they voted us co-MVPs.
I’m there with my son, and we’ve got this one trophy, so I said, “Here, Kobe, you take it.” He said, “No, give it to your son.
I’ll get mine later. Give it to your little guy.”
My kids absolutely love Kobe Bryant. They call him Uncle Kobe, and his girls call me Uncle Shaq. If you look at our relationship from the eyes of a kid, it’s pretty simple. We played together, we won together, and everyone thinks we were the best together. They don’t need to know the other stuff.
So here’s my son Shareef coming home with this
big trophy and he tells all his friends, “Kobe gave me his MVP trophy.” I don’t think he even realized I got the MVP trophy, too. It was all about Kobe. It almost brought a tear to my eye.
Seriously. I mean it.
Right after that was the game when I went off on Toronto and Chris Bosh and scored 45. I was in a bad mood that night, but I started off with a couple of good looks, and they were trying
to guard me with just Bosh in single coverage, so I took that as a sign of disrespect and just went off.
My teammates were laughing and high-fiving me and slapping my hand. I guess it was funny to them to see me go off, but I wasn’t laughing, because I knew even at thirty-six years old I could do that if they gave me the ball.
People thought my game was falling off, but to me “falling off” is
consistently going 2 for 13, and I’ve never done that. I’ve shot 60 percent before in a season, and 58.2 percent for my career. My numbers
might be down, but that’s because the shot attempts are down. Give me ten to twelve shots a night and you’ll be satisfied with the results.
My final season in Phoenix we won forty-six games but we didn’t make the playoffs. I knew what that meant: time for
me to go.
Steve Kerr called me and said, “Cleveland has been asking around about you. Mr. Sarver wants to save some money, so I wanted to give you the courtesy of knowing we might make a move.”
I was impressed. That’s all any player wants—to be treated fairly and honestly. I told him, “I appreciate it. Go ahead and do what you have to do.” He didn’t have to call me. It was his right to do whatever
he wanted, but he made the effort and I appreciated it. He was like that the whole time I was there. He’d say, “Hey, I need you to do this” or “We’re going to sit you and rest you this game.” I’d say, “Are you sure?” and he’d say, “Yes, we think it would be good for you.” I would have done anything for Steve Kerr. All he had to do was ask.
When they pulled the trigger Steve called me again and
said, “Hey, I’m sure you are watching the news. I understand this might be hard.” I told him there were no bad feelings. I understood Sarver was a businessman and he wanted to be under the cap and I had a big salary and I was thirty-six years old. Made sense to me.
I was going to Cleveland to win a ring for the King, LeBron James. That was what I told them when I arrived, and that was what I
aimed to do.
LeBron was a huge star. He was as big as I was in 2000 in LA when I was dominating the league. My kids are too young to remember any of that. My sons love LeBron more than they love me. I’m a little jealous about that.
You get around LeBron and you realize he’s everything he appears to be. He’s a strong kid with a ton of confidence who works his ass off. He doesn’t quite have Kobe’s
range yet, but I bet he will. He’s not going to stop until he wins multiple rings.
He’s also a great team player. I give him the edge over Kobe on that. He’s going to do what it takes to win, knowing that he can take
over the game whenever he wants, but understanding you’ve got to keep your teammates involved.
LeBron takes losses a little differently than most superstars I’ve been around. He’s
not the kind to blow up after a bad game. He’s not going to be in your face, spitting at you. I heard him say more than once, “There’s eighty-two games in a season. Let’s be real with ourselves.” He got it. At a very young age, he was already acting like a veteran.
Once in a while if the guys weren’t responding, he’d come, curse a few people out, and say, “You can work harder than that. I know
you can.”
LeBron is also a pretty good X and O guy. He used to talk to Mo Williams and Boobie Gibson all the time about how he was going to get them open. He’d say, “Fellas, these guys are disrespecting you. You gotta make them pay. I’m going to have three guys hanging on me and I’m going to kick it out to you, and you make sure you have the right angle so you can make the shot. Got that? Hit
a damn shot. Loosen it up now, fellas. C’mon now. I’m counting on you.”
There was talk Mo Williams and I had words while I was with the Cavs. Mo was fine. He just took too many shots. He thought the team should be a one-two punch of him and LeBron, and as a result guys like Boobie were underutilized.
Doc Rivers said he heard I turned the team against Mo. How was I going to turn everybody against
Mo, anyway? He was LeBron’s boy. They were tight. And it was LeBron’s team. Everyone was afraid to rock the boat when it came to the King, so he got to do things his way. I don’t blame him. All the pressure was on him. It was LeBron and everyone else. I was in the “everyone else” category, and that was fine with me.
LeBron was a leader, clearly the top dog, but he was likable. In all the time
I was with him, I only saw him get really mad once. I remember during the playoffs after one of our losses he smacked the bathroom stall, but that was it. He wasn’t crazy like me.
Maybe he was different before I got there. It’s kind of pointless to
snap or go nuts when you are in first place all year. We won sixty-one games. We were at the top of the league. It wasn’t like we were staring in
the face of adversity every night.
Our coach, Mike Brown, was a nice guy, but he had to live on the edge because nobody was supposed to be confrontational with LeBron. Nobody wanted him to leave Cleveland, so he was allowed to do whatever he wanted to do.
He didn’t really abuse it much because he was a team player, and if you were open LeBron was going to throw the ball to you. It wasn’t like
he was out there being a prima donna or anything, but Mike Brown kind of tiptoed around him, and sometimes that was a problem.
I remember one day in a film session LeBron didn’t get back on defense after a missed shot. Mike Brown didn’t say anything about it. He went to the next clip and there was Mo Williams not getting back and Mike was saying, “Yo, Mo, we can’t have that. You’ve got to hustle
a little more.” So Delonte West is sitting there and he’s seen enough and he stands up and says, “Hold up, now. You can’t be pussyfooting around like that. Everyone has to be accountable for what they do, not just some of us.”
Mike Brown said, “I know, Delonte. I know.”
Mike knew Delonte was right. Delonte was fearless. He and Mike Brown used to go at it all the time. Delonte would storm out
of practice and sit in the locker room, and they’d have to bring a therapist in there to straighten him out.
It was a respect thing with Delonte. He just felt Mike Brown didn’t treat him the way he should have been treated. Delonte never went at Doc Rivers like that, though, when he was with the Celtics. When Delonte and Von Wafer got into a fight when we were in Boston, Doc’s attitude was “Get
him the hell out of here. We don’t need that for our team.” But both KG and I stuck up for Delonte. KG said, “I’ll talk to him. Let me handle it.” And Doc said, “You better tell him if it happens again, he’s gone.”
Delonte has had his share of problems, but I really like him. He
was a good teammate, both in Cleveland and in Boston. He played the game the right way. The year we played together
with the Cavaliers, I really believed we were going to win the championship. I thought we were good enough.
The Celtics were just smarter. They knocked us out of the 2010 Eastern Conference Finals and they did it by doing a great job of loading up. I was trying to tell LeBron, “Hey, if you get the ball do something fast, so they can’t get into position.” But when he got the ball and did the Jordan
stare, now Kendrick Perkins can come over and meet him at the baseline. Then Paul Pierce has time to rotate. If we had moved the ball a little more, we would have had more success. You’ll never beat any team that’s standing there waiting on you.
I know everybody wants to know what really happened in those 2010 playoffs. There’s been all sorts of crazy stories about what went on in our Cleveland
locker room during that time. There were a lot of rumors after LeBron left Cleveland that he and Delonte had some personal beef. Trust me, I lived thirty minutes outside of Cleveland in Richfield, Ohio, so if something went down, I missed it—and I didn’t miss much.
There’s no question in Game 5 LeBron was kind of out of it. He didn’t even score a basket until late in the third quarter and was
something like 1 for 11 from the perimeter. But that’s not as unusual as people think. I’ve seen plenty of superstars have a bad shooting game and get into a funk. I can remember that happening to Dominique and even Larry Bird. Shooters get rattled sometimes when they don’t shoot well. Scorers get frustrated when they don’t score.
Now some of my teammates told me later they were trying to talk
to LeBron on the bench and he wasn’t responding. He was, said one of the guys, almost catatonic.
I never approached LeBron that night. We were in first place all year. The kid was in total control and, to be honest, he didn’t really seem to need anything from me, so I took his lead and stayed in the background. It was his team. It didn’t feel right to me after all season
of leaving him alone
to start getting in his face in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
Only LeBron knows what was bugging him. Maybe it was personal problems, maybe it was his sore elbow, maybe it was all that pressure and expectations. Hard to say. He kind of checked out for part of the 2011 NBA Finals against Dallas, too.
I always believed he could turn it on at any moment, but for some reason he didn’t.
Not against the Celtics in 2010 and not against the Mavericks in 2011.
It was weird. It’s one thing to be a passer, but you are supposed to be the One. I’m watching him play against Dallas, and they’re swinging the ball and they get him a perfect open look—and he’s kicking it to Mario Chalmers. Makes no sense. I told people, “It’s like Michael Jordan told me. Before you succeed, you must first
fail.”
Those Heat guys put a ton of pressure on themselves. They got up there with their little coronation and their little concert and they’re saying, “Not one, not two, not three, not four” rings.
I’ve done stuff like that a few times in my career. When I went to Miami and that huge crowd was there to greet me I wanted to connect with them, so I gave them my word we’d win a championship. My
word is my bond, so that was going to motivate me. In LA, after we’d already won a title, I stood up there at the parade and said, “Can you dig it?” and told them I’d see them again next year.
I like the pressure. I feed off it. But if you are going to put pressure on yourself like that, you can’t have a bad game when it’s on the line. That’s what really puzzles me about LeBron. I’ve never seen
a guy with that kind of ability come up that short. He looked completely out of sync to me against the Mavericks.
Still, I wouldn’t bet against him.
When I left Cleveland in 2010 I wished LeBron luck in free agency, but I had no idea where he’d land. I never heard from him again once I left town.
I wished I had more of a chance to help the Cavaliers win. I feel
like I could have made a difference,
but not everyone in Cleveland was on board with that theory. I kept my mouth shut and packed my things and went home.
I even seriously thought about retiring.
In June 2010, the Lakers beat the Celtics for the championship, and they asked Kobe Bryant what it meant to him. “Just one more than Shaq,” he said. “And you can take that to the bank.”
Hey, I couldn’t blame the guy. He was holding the
trophy, so he had bragging rights. I sent Kobe my congratulations via Twitter and said, “Enjoy it, man. Enjoy it. I know what u r saying, ‘Shaq how my ass taste.’ ”
I didn’t know it at the time, but the owner of the Celtics, Wyc Grousbeck, listened to Kobe say he had one more ring than me and told Danny Ainge, “Let’s get Shaq.”
Hmmm. The Big Shamrock. Guess those retirement plans were on hold
again.
S
haquille O’Neal fidgeted while Doc Rivers reviewed the game plan on the chalkboard. The big man was trying to concentrate, but he was having difficulty getting his oversized frame loose. His hips had been locking up, and the training staff instructed him to keep moving, keep stretching, keep engaging his muscles before each game.
Shaq glanced around
the locker room for some free weights to warm up his biceps. There were none. He looked around once more and spotted Mike Longabardi, the diminutive Celtics assistant coach.