Outside Features

On Friday, Shaquille O'Neal plopped the massive collection of muscle that is his body in front of a webcam and told his fans that this past season, his 19th campaign and one that was pocked with injuries, would be his last. The friendly giant has been an institution in pro basketball – for a few years my mother worked out in a Shaq shirt she got in a box of Cheerios, if that's any indication of his popularity – since he began tearing down hoops for shits and giggles during the Clinton administration. But he was more than a basketball player, as those who own a rare VHS copy of the “hit” 1996 film Kazaam know quite well. Here are my favorite Shaq moments of all time.
The Skinny Shaq: The year was 1990 and a lanky man-child named Shaquille O'Neal put on some shorty LSU shorts and began blocking any shot that came near the basket. He once blocked 12 shots against Loyola Marymount in a game that freshman season (he did allow Hank Gathers to score 48 points in the same contest, but whatevs) and did it as a slender, sexy young man. Soon, he began eating.

Last weekend, rather than absorb my typical diet of basketball from my couch or baseball atop a barstool (where I would have almost certainly found myself engaged in an argument with a stranger over the obvious benefits of the designated hitter), I went to a music festival for four entire days of rock and/or roll music, but absolutely zero sports.
You're probably thinking to yourself right now, “Jeez, this damn guy gets to go to the internationally known Sasquatch Festival and now he's bitching about having missed out on sports? Puh-leese.

Anybody seen that new Thor movie? Yeah, neither have I.
But from the previews, I've gleaned one thing and that's the fact that Thor looks and probably acts almost exactly like Dirk Nowitzki. And judging from the way the lanky German is dominating the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, maybe he is some sort of demigod. Right, I know, Thor is from the Norse tradition and Dirk is German, but wasn't Thor the god (or part god or whatever) of thunder? If that's the case, chalk a point up for Dirk, would ya pal, because he's definitely in charge of the Thunder right now.
And if you're slamming down your horn-adorned helmet and angrily stroking your massive blond and/or red beard at the effrontery that is my lack of Norse mythological knowledge, I'm sorry. But shouldn't you really be in line to see Thor again instead of reading this stupid sports column? Thor never reads sports columns, but you'd know that because you're an expert, right?

One time, I took a golf ball to the neck. True story. I wish I could say that the ball was merely bouncing along the cart path and caromed harmlessly my way, nicking the top of my back. But no. This was a 125-yard shank job that nearly knocked me from my perch atop the diesel-powered industrial lawn mower on which I spent most of the summer of 2002. Son of a bitch hit me square in the side of the neck, an inch below my ear, almost prematurely ending my career in golf course maintenance.
I brought the mower to a halt and turned to see in the distance, at an adjacent hole, a sunburned man in a Hawaiian shirt giving me a half-assed and seemingly apologetic wave. I leapt from the mower, picked up the offending golf ball and hurled it toward my assailant. It fell a good 75 yards short, so I also chucked my neon hard hat – the design flaw of which turned out to be its lack of neck coverage – for extra effect, before realizing that my neck was slowly swelling to a near-immobile state. That bastard stood there with his hands on his hips, shaking his head disapprovingly at the behavior of the minimum-wage employee he almost erased from the face of the earth.

Well, L.A. Lakers, you win some and you lose some. And when you lose some, you apparently start body-slamming people in an attempt to embarrass your soon-to-retire coach.
Rarely has such a hyped team of reality television stars and veteran players flamed out so badly in the NBA playoffs. The Seattle Sonics (they don't exist anymore) did it back in 1994. The Spurs kind of did it this year against Memphis. But the Lakers' four-loss flameout to the Mavericks was perhaps the most unglamorous playoff series loss and it came from the NBA's most glamorous team – and one that many thought might be on its way to a third consecutive world championship.