Shaq Felt Like He Was ‘Robbing The People’ During His Year With The Celtics

There are exceedingly few all-time great athletes that don’t go through a period of decline to end their career, and navigating that stretch can be extremely difficult for players to deal with mentally. While everyone knows Father Time is undefeated, accepting that fact is quite hard for players who once were at the pinnacle of their sport.

For Shaquille O’Neal, the end of his career was something he had to grapple with as he went from being the league’s most dominant player to playing 20 minutes per night in Boston in his final year (2010-11). As he explained to JJ Redick on the Old Man and the Three podcast this week, that year messed him up feeling like he was “not ‘him’” and left him grappling with the truth that “Shaq’s not Shaq anymore.”

Shaq says he felt like he was “robbing the people” by not being his old self, and that he told Boston to “f**king keep it” when they called him to say they owed him $1.5 million for next year. As for when he knew it was gone, it was when he had to start working hard to get up for a dunk. The problem for Shaq was, he’d never considered his basketball mortality before the end. Some players are able to step back and understand that a basketball career is finite, but as Shaq explained, he was so dominant for so long it never crossed his mind that one day it’d just go away.

It’s always really interesting to hear players talk about this point of their careers, because it is the most human experience that happens to an elite athlete. They spend years being able to do things almost no one else on the planet can do, but at some point they cannot reach that level anymore, which is something everyone has to grapple with at some point. However, it’s even more difficult for them to deal with because an athlete has so much of their identity into what they do and the sport they play that it can rattle them to their core, and it requires a lot of work to figure out what comes next.