The headline to this post is one of the greatest lines ever uttered to me during an interview. You probably don’t even have to guess from whom it came.

Shaq: "When you're a freak, freaky things happen."

I could go on a Shaqilicious rampage here, but I had my time and so did Shaquille O’Neal. Since he announced his retirement from pro ball, appropriately enough on Twitter, there already has been much written about his place in NBA history and his abundant nicknames. I just wanted to drop a few personal memories and acknowledge that it required Shaq’s retirement to prod me out of my mini-retirement from the blogosphere.

Way back when I was still a newspaper writer, I wrote a large piece about Shaq as an emerging crossover star (see Welcome to ShaqWorld). He hadn’t even won his first NBA title, though he’d dropped his first recorded verse and filmed an ill-fated movie. This was during a time when a writer could earn big-time access to superstars, and I hung around him for a few days in El-Lay.
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