Shaq Used To Bet Thousands Of Dollars On Episodes Of ‘Maury’

It is very easy to bet on things that are not sports. Think about all the times where you and a friend made an innocuous bet on, like, how many hot dogs you can eat over the course of an entire baseball game or something. Heck, there’s lots of money that moves around every single year based on how long it takes for the person to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

As it turns out, Shaquille O’Neal is the kind of person who likes to bet on things other than sports. As he explained on a recent episode of The Big Podcast, Shaq told the story about how he used to watch one particular television show and throw down large sums of money on, well, if you’ve seen an episode of Maury you can probably guess where this is going.

“Every morning at 10 a.m., we’d wake up with thousands of dollars and we’d watch The Maury Povich Show,” Shaq said. “And we’d make bets on who the father is … Every day. So, like, we watch it, we let them talk, and then we pause and then we pull that money out. ‘I’ll bet you a thousand he’s not the father!’ So, that was my thing.”

There is no thing I want more than for the next episode of Inside the NBA going off the rails at, like, 1:28 a.m. EST because Charles Barkley cannot stop asking Shaq about this.