Shaquille O’Neal promises to change his life in wake of Kobe Bryant’s death
Shaquille O’Neal has paid emotional tribute to Kobe Bryant and vowed to change how he approaches his own life in the wake of his friend’s tragic death.
Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others died in a helicopter crash in the Los Angeles hills on Sunday.
He was a five-time NBA champion who played for the Lakers throughout his 20-year career. O’Neal played alongside Bryant at the Lakers.
“You don’t really know how long you have left,” O’Neal said on The Big Podcast. “I’m all about being hard and all that but I’m going to have to delete my beef and my confrontation clause. I don’t want to do that anymore.
“I guess I just call all the people I’ve had discrepancies with and say, ‘Look, man, I love you.’”
On TV O’Neal and colleagues from the TNT network were supposed to be doing a pregame show before the Lakers’ game against city rivals the Clippers, but the game was postponed.
Instead, they sat at centre court, from where O’Neal recalled his former teammate as a great player whose kids called him “Uncle Shaq”.
“The fact that we lost probably the world’s greatest Laker, the world’s greatest basketball player is just – listen, people are going to say take your time and get better, but this is going to be hard for me,” O’Neal said. “I already don’t sleep anyway, but I’ll figure it out.”
O’Neal was with family members when he got the news of Bryant’s death and hoped it wasn’t true.
“I didn’t want to believe it. I said to my son, ‘I hope some buttface made this up and it’s not true’. But then after getting all the calls ... my spirit just left my body.” He added: “I never could have imagined nothing like this.
“I was thinking the other day I’ve never seen anything like this. All the basketball idols that I grew up (watching), I see them. They’re old.”
O’Neal and Bryant helped the Lakers win three straight championships from 2000 to 2002, but they occasionally feuded and O’Neal was traded to Miami in 2004.
He won another title there, while Bryant won two more with the Lakers.
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