Word: neale
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That may change, because this year O'Neal is crashing his way into a lot of dreams. He has dominated basketball like no other player since Jordan. It's a wonder the league hasn't been renamed the O'NBA. During the 1999-2000 season, he led his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, to the league's best regular-season record while also winning the scoring title; so far in the playoffs, he's the leader in both scoring and rebounding. He was voted MVP in the biggest landslide in league history...
...Neal and his Lakers are up 2-0 in the best-of-seven championship series against the Larry Bird-coached Indiana Pacers. If the Lakers win, it will be the first title of O'Neal's career and the first for the Lakers since 1988 and the "Showtime" glory days of Magic and Kareem. Says Hall of Fame center Bill Walton, no easy grader: "This season he's performing at his highest level by far, at a level few players in the NBA have achieved. He rivals Jordan, Jabbar, Magic, Bill Russell; he's come into the absolute elite...
...Jordan was Lord of the Air, O'Neal is King of the Mountain; if Jordan played like musical fusion, combining Dr. J's jazzy, improvisational style with a rock-'n'-rolling, aggressive athleticism, O'Neal is pure hip-hop. "I love hip-hop to death," says O'Neal, who has recorded several rap CDs. "I live for the beats. In order to hang with the fellas, you gotta have rhythm. And I got rhythm when I'm on the court...
...beat when he plays, explosions of mass and muscularity that fill up the court like blasts of boom-box rap. Short, curt hooks. BAM! Power-jams in the paint. BOOM! Or, as in Game 7 of the Portland series, a spectacular fourth-quarter alley-oop from Bryant that O'Neal pulled from the rafters of the Staples Center. Shaq came down harder than thunder, harder than a Dr. Dre track. SHAKA-LAKA-BOOM! Portland was finished...
Nobody roots for Goliath, Wilt Chamberlain once complained to teammate Jerry West. The reason, of course, is that in a world consisting by and large of Davids, we assume the Goliaths have it easy. If they dare complain, we search for slingshots. O'Neal's life, however, didn't start off so terribly comfortably. His biological father, he says, abandoned him and his mother Lucille when he was an infant. O'Neal wrote a caustic rap song about it in 1994 called Biological Didn't Bother. O'Neal's mother eventually married Philip Harrison, an Army staff sergeant, who imposed...