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shaquille o'neal's book?

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cranrab

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"So I'm on edge because I don't have a new deal, and Kobe is on edge because he might be going to jail, so we're taking it out on each other," according to an excerpt posted on Deadspin. "Just before the start of the '03-'04 season the coach staff called us in and said, 'No more public sparring or you'll get fined.' ... Phil was tired of it. Karl Malone and Gary Payton were sick of it. ... So what happens? Immediately after that Kobe runs right out to Jim Gray and does this interview where he lets me have it. He said I was fat and out of shape. He said I was milking my toe injury for more time off, and the injury wasn't even that serious. (Yeah, right. It only ended my damn career.) He said I was 'lobbying for a contract extension when we have two Hall of Famers playing pretty much for free.' I'm sitting there watching this interview and I'm gonna explode. Hours earlier we had just promised our coach we'd stop. It was a truce broken. I let the guys know, 'I'm going to kill him.'

"Kobe stands up and goes face-to-face with me and says, 'You always said you're my big brother, you'd do anything for me, and then this Colorado thing happens and you never even called me.' I did call him. ... So here we are now, and we find out he really was hurt that we didn't stand behind him. That was something new. I didn't think he gave a rat's ass about us either way. 'Well, I thought you'd publicly support me, at least,' Kobe said. 'You're supposed to be my friend.'

"Brian Shaw chimed in with 'Kobe, why would you think that? Shaq had all these parties and you never showed up for any of them. We invited you to dinner on the road and you didn't come. Shaq invited you to his wedding and you weren't there. Then you got married and didn't invite any of us. And now you are in the middle of this problem, this sensitive situation, and now you want all of us to step up for you. We don't even know you.' ...

"Everyone was starting to calm down when I told Kobe, 'If you ever say anything like what you said to Jim Gray ever again, I will kill you.'

"Kobe shrugged and said, 'Whatever.' [...]

"From that day on, I was done dealing with Kobe. I was done dealing with Jim Gray, too. What goes around, comes around. When he got fired, he actually had the nerve to call me and ask me to help him out. What, did you lose Kobe's number?"
 
According to the book, Kupchak promised to grant Shaq a contract extension following the 2003-04 season and not to discuss their contract negotiations publicly. Once the 2003-04 season ended, however, O'Neal was disturbed by an apparent interview in which Kupchak revealed the Lakers' plan to hold onto Bryant while keeping their options open with O'Neal.

"That was it. That was the end of me in a Lakers uniform. Mitch broke our agreement. How could I trust him again?" Shaq writes in the book. "For months, I kept waiting for Mitch to come to me and say, 'Shaq, you're getting older, we need some new players. Mr. Buss doesn't want to pay you and Kobe doesn't want you here.' But that conversation never happened. So that was when I demanded a trade. I couldn't trust Mitch anymore and it was clear Kobe was now the one with all the power."

Shaq says, he no longer felt any support from the Lakers' front office once Kupchak succeeded Jerry West after the 1999-2000 season.

"Once you deal with someone like Jerry West, you better come up with someone pretty special to keep my attention," O'Neal writes. "Unfortunately, Mitch wasn't that guy for me. We never got along. Mitch looked out for two people: himself and Jerry Buss. The rest of us were afterthoughts."
 
Bryant didn't mince words during a Nike promotional stop in Italy when he acknowledged that Shaq's 30-minute workouts still annoyed him, considering that Bryant would put in six to seven hours a day in the gym.

Shaq would have none of it.

"I don’t need to work out," O'Neal said when the New York Times' Joe Brescia asked him about Bryant's comments. "My numbers speak for itself. My three finals MVP’s speaks for itself."
 
"[Shaq is] 60 pounds lighter in Miami than he was in Los Angeles," Buss said. "And as you've probably gathered recently, he seems to be having some [health] problems. My reaction was, if he was not willing to get in shape, which he had five, eight years, some number of times to do, and we urged him. It seems that the motivation for him to lose weight was to trade him."

"I suspect if I had known he was going to lose 60 pounds I probably would have made a different decision," Buss said.

Shaq's response was "I didn't need motivation, I needed a real owner, like [Miami's] Micky Arison. Not a guy who parties with girls that are three times [younger] ... "

"Jerry Buss needs to retire because his comments, like his decisions, are dumb as hell and make no sense," Shaq said.
 
jim gray is a piece of shit :lol: would love to get an epub for this book
 
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