Shaquille O’Neal He will also have four champion rings and a plaque in the Hall of Fame, but he is not delivering his son to his son without warning him.
In his new Netflix series, “Power Moves with Shaquille O’Neal“, The legend of the NBA, 53 years old, sits with his son Venticinquenna Shareef – wing of the Gaegue with NBA ambitions – and offers him a life lesson without filters that most of the young athletes never receive from their parents Superstar.
“Are you ready to live that life? Why if you want to become a great, my friend, you have to sacrifice everything,” Shaq told his son. “I lost my family in an attempt to become a big.”
They were not words said for the cameras: he really thought them. And it was not the first time that he opened openly about the personal price paid to build an empire.
Last year, in his podcast “The Big Podcast With Shaq”, he spoke with the former NFL Jason Kelce star of the price to pay for his obsession with success.
“I made a lot of madorn mistakes, to the point of losing my family and finding myself without anyone,” said Shaq. “I lost my whole family. I find myself alone in a 9,300 square meter house.”
That type of lucidity did not emerge during a post-match press conference, but it arrived with hindsight.
Now, while his son prepares to make a audition for the Kings sacrament, O’Neal admits that he is reluctant to see Shareef enter a scene that may never belong to him completely.
“I don’t want me to play, because it would be bad luck for him to be compared to me,” he said. “A bit like it is now happening to Bronny James. He is unfair towards him, and I don’t want him to pass through all this”.
He continued: “What he doesn’t understand about me is that I was a madman. Basketball was the only thing that interested me. He jeopardized our relationship a little, and I don’t want him to ever live like this. Everything falls on the name O’Neal”.
For Shareef, that surname is at the same time a blessing and a sounding board.
“My father has missed birthdays, games, you know, Christmas,” he said. “Now I understand it and I respect it. I remember that as a child we always asked if it would come. In a certain sense, we already knew the answer: Okay, he is playing basketball, is busy”.
Despite the weight of the comparisons and expectations, Sharef has no intention of holding back.
“I will try for the team and, if they offer me a place, I will have much to think about. I don’t have a plan B”.
Shaq, once obsessed with greatness, now seems more concentrated on the inheritance, not only on statistics, but on stability. What had started as a chat between father and son on basketball has turned into something deeper: a lesson on the limits, on the identity and on the real scoreboard that matters when the siren sounds.
Because, apparently, being a big one on the pitch can cost you everything off the pitch, and Shaq is ensuring that his son understands the difference.
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