Word: neale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...challenged O'Neal to a writing contest. We each had four days to craft 400 words about Twitter, and we'd let TIME.com readers, who I'm sure are not at all biased toward celebrities, vote for the superior writer. I called O'Neal to do some pregame trash-talking, which I thought would be a better idea than doing it to his face, partly because I'm a coward and partly because his face would be so far away...
...Neal began by telling me he's won every contest on Shaq Vs., a bold gambit, since the two episodes that had already aired showed him losing. When I brought this up, he said, "I guarantee I beat Michael Phelps at swimming. And when I guarantee, I deliver." When I asked him what kind of handicap Phelps gave him, O'Neal said, "I win one race." Then: "Out of many races...
...always longed for Shaq-grade confidence, because to write well, you have to believe that tons of people want to know what you have to say, even though, in person, not even your wife does. So I asked O'Neal how he does it. "To this day, I don't remember myself ever missing a shot, missing a free throw or losing a game. That comes from a military background. Move on. Always move on," he said. I have no doubt that if I mentioned his movie Kazaam, he'd have no idea what I was talking about. Although neither...
...beat me. "I probably can't," he said. This clearly was a trick, perhaps a way of distracting me while he appeared out of my boom box as a genie and dunked a basketball on my head. Seriously, I feel better every time I mention Kazaam. But then O'Neal said, "There's a difference between confident and arrogant. I'm a humble person. I'm not going up against a fifth-grade writer. I'm going up against the man." For a moment, I truly believed that O'Neal knew who I was. And that he should...
Despite O'Neal's cheerleading, I worried about my contest entry. I finished an entire piece about how O'Neal's Twitter success meant society valued authenticity over quality. That essay was as boring as it sounded. I scrapped it and wrote one about how impotent my Twitter power was, since I could get only four of my 700,000 followers to spread false rumors about CNN's Rick Sanchez. I went through five different first sentences, finally choosing one just because my editor kept e-mailing me that I was past my deadline...