Shaq Uncut: My Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

really did look like Sasquatch!
    Of course I complained a lot about doing those damn log drills, but it really helped me with my agility and my footwork.
    Joe introduced me to the guys on the basketball team, and I liked them right away. Doug Sandburg, who became my best friend, was a smartplayer, a good point guard who could shoot, too. If he had a little more size he probably could have gone on to play Division I. Robbie Dunn was funny as hell. He was a little guy with herky-jerky moves who didn’t get to play a whole lot, but he was still a big part of our group.
    Our motto back then was “Fake it until you make it.” We used to go to the Eisenhower Flea Market, about two milesfrom the base. They sold all sorts of junk nobody really needed. Me and Joe would go around looking for the fattest plastic gold chains we could find, since we couldn’t afford the real stuff. We’d buy these big-ass plastic chains, then we’d troll around looking for a Mercedes and steal the emblem off the top of the car and paint it gold. Then we’d string the emblem through the plastic chains and thereyou go. What’s cooler than that?
    I always wore a Gucci hat back then. Hey, I was already tall, so why hide it? I’d take that hat and make it sit high on my head like a shark fin. I swear, I was about seven foot eight with that thing on.
    We used to do a lot of low-level juvenile-delinquent stuff. Outside the base we were surrounded by mayhem—guns, drugs, violence. We stayed on the base, for themost part, and did stupid things like knocking on people’s doors and running off. We used to egg people’s cars.
    One of our favorite tricks was to have three guys on one side of the road and three guys on the other. The speed limit on the base was about thirty miles per hour, but people were always driving too fast. We’d have guys on either side of the street and pretend like we were pulling arope. A car would come flying down the street and see us pulling this imaginary rope and they’d lock up their brakes. We got them every time with that one.
    There was a pool on the base, and on weekends in the summer it would close around ten o’clock. We’d wait until the lights were outand the officers went inside to have their cocktails, and then we’d hop the fence and do cannonballs in thepool.
    The officers would hear us splashing around and call the military police. The cops would then come and try to chase us, but they’d have their combat boots on. We were a bunch of athletes, and we knew they couldn’t catch us. We’d park Robbie’s car on the corner, sprint out of sight, and jump in the car and take off.
    Most of the time, they knew it was us. I mean, there weren’t a whole bunchof six-foot-ten kids roaming around the base. But we were kind of famous for the athletic stuff we were doing, so they cut us some slack. If the other kids on the base did something like that they’d be lined up and paddled.
    I got paddled a few times by teachers on the base in Germany, but not in San Antonio. By then I was too big. Nobody was brave enough to come at me with a paddle—except myfather, of course.
    The paddles were a part of life on a military base. If you screwed up by breaking a rule or failing an exam or getting in a fight, they’d call the whole school together and line you up in the middle of the gymnasium and have you straddle the line, and the principal or the athletic director would start lighting you up. It hurt, but mostly it just humiliated you. Plus, your parentsalways heard about it—and if your father was a commanding officer, then look out.
    Cole High School was really small and had never won a championship in basketball until I got there. We had seventy-six kids in our class, and we were playing against schools three times that size. I was still learning the game of basketball, still developing my style. My coach, Dave Madura, was a no-nonsense guy.He had me do leg squats in front of a mirror until they were burning. He was