PUNK-ASS DAVID ROBINSON From Shaquille O’Neal’s...

6:01 pm - Thu, Oct 6, 2011: 564 notes

PUNK-ASS DAVID ROBINSON

From Shaquille O’Neal’s biography Shaq Talks Back:

To me, pressure is where your next meal is coming from. So while I wasn’t under any real life pressure to win a title, I knew it was gonna be hard to win it. I knew that everything had to be right, especially with Tim Duncan and the Spurs ready to defend their championship.

A lot of people believed that’s what motivated me, because people were saying Duncan was the best player in the game. That wasn’t it. Would they ever give me that title? Probably not. Tim has a nice all-around game. My game is more dominant in the middle. But there was an ego aspect to my desire to win a title, and it had nothing to do with Tim.

I’m thinking, Punk-ass David Robinson got one before I did? That made me really mad. Oh, man. David Robinson had a ring before me. I’m crushed and I’m hurt.

Me and Dave have history. I looked up to him when I was at Cole High in San Antonio, and he was just starting out with the Spurs. I was a player-of-the-year for my high school. He was player-of-the-year for the Spurs. One time I asked him for an autograph.

He wrote his name real quick and was like, “Yeah, come on, hurry up.” He kind of dogged me out. He was my favorite player. That’s OK. I said to myself, “When I see you, I’m gonna get you.”

Shaq continued in another excerpt:

I don’t hate Dave off the court. I just had to dominate him on it because I got tired of the Goody Two-Shoes image he was throwing out there. He was this crossover guy everyone liked. And I was this big, bad wolf dunking on everyone. Everyone was trying to make it out to be black and white, and it didn’t seem right. So I had to do him like that.