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That week, while he was speaking for Valuetainment, Kobe Bryant sparked a minor emotion by calling Shaquille O. Neal to be misrepresented and not being motivated while she was spending together on Lakers. After praising O'Neal, Bryant said, "I wish he was at the gym. We would have had twelve fucking rings. He went on to stress that it was "nothing but love" between the two, which did not stop O. Neal from pulling on Instagram because " you would have 12 if you passed the ball especially in the finals against the pistons. "
It was the last episode of the long-standing love / hate relationship between the two, which, although never lacking fireworks, has become quite predictable. What has changed is the perception of the dynamic between the two, which no longer resembles a fair fight. In the aftermath of his brilliant public relations blitz after retirement, Bryant has somehow established himself as one of the most famous players in the sport, a so-called scholar who also serves as a valuable ambassador. O'Neal, meanwhile, is a great galoot whose role in TNT's studio consists largely of a physical comedy and denouncing blatant nonsense in the league in a way that says "you have to know each other ". Bryant is so revered, and O 'Neal is so much put to do the clown, that he does not even feel as if the two were living on the same planet.
But it's not just their respective public figures that have changed over the years in a way that has negative effects on O'Neal. At this point, Bryant's stock has only risen until only the most ferocious dead ends still consider him to be an inefficient and selfish ball-killer. Even if it's not in the GOAT discussion (whatever that means), Bryant's competition and determined zeal have become a legend, to the point that he replaced Michael Jordan, more and more useless, as as the standard bearer of this department. For almost every year, Bryant has been a polarizing character as much as in sports. The speech that surrounded him at one point was so inflamed and impenetrable that it was difficult to imagine him achieving any stable and agreed inheritance.
If Bryant invariably landed on something timeless, O'Neal may be swallowed up by the story. His CV is still quite impressive: career average of 23.9 points and 10.9 rebounds, four titles, a title of most useful player, three finalist goals in the final and 15 games in front of the stars, but the numbers and Honors are only beginning to tell the story. At its peak, O'Neal was a force as dominant as the NBA has ever seen. No matter how many defenders the opposing teams sent him, when O'Neal got the ball in the block, a bucket was guaranteed. The only option was to send him the line, which gave rise to the "Hack-A-Shaq", which forced any potential competitor to embark on large bodies whose only role was to accumulate mistakes. O'Neal was so unstoppable that when he was healthy and motivated, it was generally thought that the Lakers were unbeatable. It became a cliché to say that he deserved the MVP title every year, but that does not make it less true: the whole NBA was centered on O'Neal. All the others of that time – even Bryant, Tim Duncan, Allen Iverson and Kevin Garnett – were mortals by comparison.
Unlike Bryant, whose brand is designed to narrow his career to a series of discussion topics, appreciating O'Neal depends on the context. He became one of those athletes "you had to be there," an athlete you do not get if you're not there to experience what it's like to watch him at his best or follow near the NBA during these years. Everyone knows that O 'Neal was a monster; he's not esoteric like his former Orlando Magic teammate, Penny Hardaway (or, in fact, fellow Magic legends, Grant Hill, Tracy McGrady and Dwight Howard) have become where any conversation at theirs subject turns into a stalemate between do not understand anything "and" you were blinded by the hype ". But the sheer gravity that O-Neal exerted at the pinnacle of her powers is hard to communicate because she was just as much a mood, a general feeling in the air, as something that is easily expressed by numbers or even images. O 'Neal casts a shadow as long as any player on the NBA; you can only speak of the league so long without its name being mentioned; and the feeling of inevitability around him and the Lakers inspired a mixture of fear and fear. It was an emotional as well as an emotional experience, and it was simply not possible to adequately convey, let alone re-create, O'Neal's singular effect on the sport.
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