Shaq Uncut: My Story (25 page)

So Pat talked to me a little about DWade and how he saw the two of us working out and
how he wanted me to take Wade under my wing. We were cool.

Of course, I already had my own plan about how I was going to turn Miami upside down business-wise. And we were going to win a championship while I was there—I made that guarantee to Pat Riley privately and to the city of Miami publicly.

Everything was looking great, except one thing: I didn’t have time to do anything but work out all
day long because Pat was all hung up on this body fat program. He was very serious about it. He expected
all the guards to have 6 percent body fat, the forwards to have 7 to 8 percent body fat, and the centers to have 10 percent body fat.

It made no sense to me. I had been taking care of my body for twelve NBA seasons and we had won three championships, and I had never seen anyone from the Miami
Heat even come close to winning anything. They may have been in the best shape, but I never saw any of them around when we were passing out rings.

I mean, look at Alonzo Mourning. He is a machine. Really. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found out he was a robot. The guy was always in amazing shape. He always looked ten times better than me, but I used to kill him on the court, which tells you that
body fat don’t mean shit. It’s all about what’s in your heart and in your mind. Are you tough enough? Do you want it enough? You don’t need to be at 10 percent body fat for that.

There’s no question by trying to get my body fat down I became more injury prone. I never had any of the ticky-tacky injuries I got until I went to Miami. My massage therapist, Danny Garcia, who has been with me since
I was with the Lakers, swears they made me too lean and my body couldn’t absorb hits the way it used to. I had no cushion, no buffering. Pat forgot to take into account the pounding my body took, day in and day out, going for those rebounds he wanted me to get. I was too much of a power player to take that kind of abuse on that lean of a body. I had more injuries in my time with Miami than anywhere
else in my career.

I didn’t see how I could get down to 10 percent body fat, but I didn’t want to hear the flack I’d get for not conforming. I was in a new place with a new team and a new coach, so I did it. I spent all day doing cardio and eating stuff I never eat. Salad, fucking salad—I hate the stuff. So I was eating salad, fish, and chicken. It was terrible. I drank water all day long. I’ve
never had to make so many bathroom runs.

The summer before I was supposed to report to the Heat training camp I got this letter from Pat. He told me he was looking forward
to having me there and the team had a body fat requirement of 10 percent for centers, but because I was bigger he was willing to let me come in at 13 percent. At the bottom, there was all this fine print that tells you, “If
you don’t make the body fat percentage, you will be fined $1,000. The next time you are fined again, and the third time you are suspended a game.”

I’m reading all this and I’m groaning, because I know what my body needs. By the end of a long NBA season, my body is so tired, so sore, so
abused
, I don’t do much basketball stuff in the summer at all. For the first two months, I do next to nothing,
to give my body a chance to recover. Sometimes I gain weight, sometimes I don’t.

Around August, I start doing cardio and some basketball drills. I also do a lot of swimming because it’s easier on my joints. I rarely came into training camp in basketball shape. I need that recovery time. I’m lugging around a big body. I ain’t no little guard flitting around the perimeter hoisting up three-pointers.

The way that worked best for me was to come in at 75 percent and work my way up. You can’t come into basketball season in basketball shape unless you play every day, and I couldn’t do that anymore without my body breaking down.

Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to follow my regular routine and meet Pat’s requirements. One of the first things I did was call up my business partners who helped me
run these twenty-four-hour fitness clubs that I owned. I told them, “Hey, I’ve got to work out every night—we need a couple of gyms down here.” So we opened up five of them in the Miami area right away.

I was my own best customer.

Even with all that work, I showed up to Miami in October 2004 with 16 percent body fat. Pat didn’t fine me but he did call me into his office. I told him, “Hey, look,
I’m trying. I’m on the damn treadmill all day long. I’m working at this, I’ll do what it takes, but I’ve never been that low before.”

I’m trying to also work into the conversation that I’ve been pretty successful at 18 percent body fat, but he’s not listening. He’s a dictator
and he wants to do it his way, so I’m avoiding confrontation by yessing him to death.
Yes, okay, whatever you say.
The
media asked me about Riley and I said, “He’s the president. I’m the general. Unless I want to get impeached, I’ve got to do what he says.”

We get checked once a week by Riley and his staff. My body fat is going down, and by midseason I’m at 13 percent, but I start having all these little injuries. I’m also as tired as hell. I’m practicing my ass off and my body is complaining. Loudly.

Of course,
part of the reason I was tired was that Miami was such a lively town. I was out late, then up early eating horrible salads and having my waistline pinched. So some of that being tired, well, I guess that was on me.

Stan Van Gundy was the coach during all of this, although you’d never know it. Pat overshadowed him so much it was hard for Stan to put his stamp on the team. Stan was a damn worrywart.
He was always worried about what Pat was going to say. He worried about everything. He worried too much. I’m sure he worried because he cared, but it drove me crazy.

There would be times we’d be up by 20 points with two minutes to go and a guy on the other team would hit a couple of three-pointers and Stan would call a time-out and start yelling at us.

He’d get all worked up and I’d look at
him and say, “Calm yourself, man. We’re fine.”

Here’s the other thing: I don’t like to be jinxed. You know, the whole Spooky Wook thing. Stan would come in before the game and say, “You guys aren’t focused, you aren’t going to play well tonight.” I’d hear that and go nuts. I’d tell him, “Stop saying that!” and he’d say, “I’m serious. You’re not focused.”

He didn’t like all the silly stuff I
did, like doing jumping jacks naked to get the guys to smile and relax. He didn’t understand it was good for our team to be loose. He hated me and Damon Jones because we were always pulling a prank or getting the guys to bust up laughing.

Stan would come into the locker room with a hundred different
things written on the board and we were all supposed to have our mean faces on, and I’m not like
that. Every game was Armageddon and depended completely on this stat and that stat, and I’m sitting there thinking,
We’re playing Milwaukee. I know Andrew Bogut is pretty good, but their record is something like 3-25. Why are we doubling this guy?
So we’d go out and double Bogut and the other players would hit open shots and we’d lose.

We all knew Stan was a dead man walking. I kind of felt sorry
for the guy. He didn’t deserve to get fired. My first year, in 2004–05, we went to the Conference Finals and lost to Detroit in Game 7. They let Stan go in December of the following season. I was injured at the time, but I was just about ready to come back. One of the things that ticked me off was people said I got Stan fired. They said I wouldn’t play for him and I waited to come back until
he was gone. I can tell you there wasn’t an ounce of truth to that.

Are you crazy? Did you really think I wanted to play for Pat Riley instead?

Stan got fired because Pat wanted to take over, not because I wanted him out. I had no control over it—not a smidgen of control. We all kind of knew it was coming because Pat and Stan were always arguing. Pat would come down and tell Stan how to do something
and Stan would want to do it his own way, and that was a fine game plan if you wanted to get yourself fired.

I will say when Riley finally did take over as head coach, he was tremendous. I had never seen him like that in my life. Guys who had been there before were commenting on it, too. He was the best that year. He even moved practices back to twelve o’clock. He said, “I know you guys like
to do your thing, so let’s start a little later.” We were stunned. No one could believe it.

Pat was big on his motivating tactics. One of the first things he did when I got there was take us all to a private screening of
Glory Road
. He was involved with the movie somehow. He knew the producer and his name was in the credits. It was a team-building thing, and I have to say it was a very inspiring
movie.

There were times when Pat did some nutty things, and some of them didn’t make a whole lot of sense. One day he gave us a speech on how no team can truly succeed unless people are willing to sacrifice. He walked into the locker room with a freezing bucket of water. He put his head in the freezing water for something like two minutes. Everyone was trying not to laugh.

Riley also did some
things that I was expecting, because his past players had tipped me off about them. He would storm in at halftime and break the chalkboard or trash the VCR or throw the remote across the room. He kicked more than a few trash pails while I was there. A lot of those outbursts, I’m sure, were premeditated.

It was all about intensity with Pat. He never let up and he wasn’t going to let us ever let
up, either.

For the first forty-five minutes of practice, we did this drill that I absolutely hated that was called the Indian drill. Here’s how it works: Let’s say three people are running. Pat blows the whistle, and DWade has to run full speed and come behind me with his hands up. Then the whistle blows and I run full speed behind him, hands up, then the whistle blows and it’s Udonis Haslem’s
turn, running full speed with his hands up.

We’d be in a jog and he would blow the whistle and the last guy had to sprint all the way back around out in front of the guy.

We did all sorts of drills, very basic stuff, over and over and over again. My drills were jump hooks and rebounds, high school stuff. High school stuff I didn’t need to do. We’d do that, get some water, then scrimmage full
speed for an hour and a half. I was taking this terrific beating from Michael Doleac every day. He was the backup center trying to earn some playing time, so he was just killing me in practice, hacking me, bodying me, pounding me. By the time I got to game day I was all beat up.

I wanted to tell Pat, “This isn’t going to work,” but there was no way to reason with him. Coaches couldn’t, the front
office couldn’t, the owner couldn’t. No one could. So I wasn’t going to rock the boat.

Pat gave a lot of motivational speeches. After a while, when he
launched into one of them, my eyes kind of glazed over, to be honest. I can’t tell you one speech he ever gave, because I knew it was all BS. I knew what I had to do as a player because I had already been given the blueprint by the great Phil Jackson.

Pat Riley was a big film guy, so after we lost we’d have an hour-long film session pointing out all our mistakes. He picked on DWade in those sessions. Pat always wanted us to fight over a screen, and DWade would always shoot the gap instead. Those sessions could get tough. We heard a lot of “See what happens when you don’t rebound? You guys aren’t in shape!” So then we’d go upstairs and practice
for another three hours. Every time something went wrong, it was because we weren’t in shape.

Even though the practices were hell, I really did love playing in Miami. I loved playing with DWade and I loved the guys on our team.

One of the best things was, we were able to get Gary Payton to come play with us. I felt I owed him a championship since things hadn’t worked out in LA. You got to love
GP. He’s mean, he talked a lot of trash and he wasn’t afraid of anybody. He was a fabulous player who was stuck going up against the great Michael Jordan, otherwise he would have had more rings.

Payton had a chance to come to Miami ten years earlier for more money than he ended up taking in Seattle, but he didn’t want to play for Pat. GP figured he had a few years left, and he didn’t want to
get worn down by Riley’s practices. By the time Gary came in 2005, he knew he was near the end. He just wanted the ring. “I’m coming because of you, Shaq,” he told me.

James Posey was another one of my guys. I called him my designated hit man. If Dallas star Dirk Nowitzki was killing us I’d tell Pose, “Go touch him up a couple of times.” Posey would foul him, put his foot on his ankle, whatever
it took to make him uncomfortable.

I don’t remember ever having a single bad conversation with Posey. He’s one of those guys I owe everything to, and I’ve probably
never told him how much I appreciated him. Robert Horry is a guy like that. Derek Fisher is another. Brian Shaw and Dennis Scott. Those players won’t be in the Hall of Fame, but without them Hall of Famers like me wouldn’t have been
able to close the deal.

Alonzo Mourning wasn’t in Miami when I first got there. We had a history and not a very good one, so when Toronto bought out his contract Pat called and said, “Do you mind if we bring him in?” I said sure.

I didn’t know Zo at all but I didn’t like him. He always thought he was better than me, or at least that’s how it looked from where I was standing, so I felt like I
had to show him who was the top dog. When I got drafted No. 1 he was No. 2. We both had great rookie seasons, but I was picked Rookie of the Year, and he thought he should have won or at least been a cowinner with me.

And, when he signed that $100 million contract, I made a comment in the press that if you paid a BMW this much money, how much is a Bentley worth? I was the Bentley. He was the
BMW. That kind of fueled our feud a little more.

Of course once I met him I couldn’t believe what a perfect gentleman he was. He was so generous and courteous and I thought,
Okay, I had this dawg all wrong.

Antoine Walker came to us in a trade. He was a veteran who could score. ’Toine called me up before he got dealt to Miami and asked me if I would be willing to take a pay cut so they could
fit him under the salary cap. He told me he really wanted to play with me, so, being a team player, I took an extension that was a five-year deal for $100 million with the money spread out instead of the three-year deal which would have paid me over $30 million a season.