A LOOK AT THE 1992-93 NBA SEASON : The Next Generation Arrives : Rookie O’Neal of the Orlando Magic Is Ready to Step Into NBA Stardom

The NBA ain’t ready for this kid. This is like Wilt coming into the league.

--DONNIE WALSH, general manager, Indiana Pacers This is the second coming of Wilt Chamberlain?

This 20-year-old who celebrated his $40-million NBA contract by taking his buddies to a water park, where they sloshed around for five hours until closing time, whereupon he offered the owner $5,000 to stay open?

And who got off the plane here, in the shadow of the Magic Kingdom, wearing mouse ears?

Closer inspection suggests this is one of your larger Mouseketeers.

He measures 7 feet, weighs 300 pounds and tests at only 12% body fat. His agility, quickness, industry, intelligence and ambition all are rated top of the line. This portrait of Chamberlain is a young man is named Shaquille O’Neal.

Arriving at the dawn of a new commercial era, post-Larry Bird, post-Magic Johnson, post-Michael Jordan’s innocence, O’Neal has already generated $50 million in salary and endorsements and is merely warming up.

He has a five-year, $10-million contract with Reebok, which is committed to a $20-million ad campaign this year, more even than Nike will spend on that heretofore incomparable mover of merchandise, Jordan.

In the pipeline are a computer game, toys, figurines, a soft-drink endorsement and a deal with a fast-food franchise that plans a special Shaq snack, or snaq.

He can’t miss.

Can he?

He’s 20 years old? Give me a break.

--RONY SEIKALY, Miami Heat, after exhibition opener

At the midpoint of the exhibition season, the Charlotte Hornets at the Orlando Magic. Alonzo Mourning, the Hornets’ prize rookie, is holding out, so the Hornets are defending O’Neal with 6-8 Kenny Gattison and 6-8 J.R. Reid.

O’Neal throws down two thunderous dunks but misses a couple of short jump shots. After that he clangs up layups, jump shot and a string of free throws for the rest of the half.

He still finishes with 22 points and 10 rebounds in 29 minutes.

No, he can’t miss. All that remains to be seen is how big he hits.

“I’ve found a lot of guys with his kind of reputation. They come into this league and they can either go one of two ways,” veteran Magic point guard Scott Skiles says.

“Shaq cannot get any better than he is today and still be a very good player in this league for a long time. Or he could say, ‘Hey, I’m going to carry this team.’

“He can start thinking about winning championships. He can start thinking about being one of the best players who ever played the game. He can start thinking about doing all those things and then working very hard to get there. That’s what your Magic Johnsons do, your Larry Birds, your Julius Ervings, Michael Jordans.

“And then there’s your Darryl Dawkins.

“Right now, you’ve got your rookies, they come in, they think they know what it’s going to take to play at this level. And they come in and they go through two-a-days for a week. They’re already gassed after that because none of them come in in as good shape as they should because they don’t know.

“Shaq has just unbelievable strength, but if you don’t know how to use that to the fullest all the time, what good is having that strength? He’s used to just not respecting a guy’s ability, playing behind him and then when they throw him the ball, just blocking his shot.

“What’s going to happen here, the guys are going to get position down low, almost under the basket, and he’s going to get in foul trouble. They’re going to go up, and he’s not going to be able to block their shot. But when he realizes he can push them out a little bit . . . and, on the other hand, not let them push him out, he’s going to be very hard to handle.”

Here’s the good news for the Magic and the bad news for everyone else:

This doesn’t look like the second coming of Dawkins.

Unlike the 76er who alternated assaults on backboards with odes to Lovetron, O’Neal is deadly earnest about his new profession.

With more leverage than a player has enjoyed since Bill Walton left UCLA, O’Neal agreed to terms in mid-July, earlier than any top pick since Mark Aguirre in 1981.

Shortly thereafter, O’Neal enrolled in Pete Newell’s big man’s camp.

His fellow campers, veterans such as Sam Perkins, Stacey King and Danny Ferry, became the first to walk away shaking their heads.

One day someone asked Perkins what O’Neal was doing there.

“Hell if I know,” said Perkins, laughing.

Newell, the coaches’ coach, was as impressed as any of them.

“He’s not a Wilt,” Newell says. “But he’s got some of the same stuff Wilt had, the overpowering physicality. He doesn’t have all the moves yet, but for a kid his age, he’s so much farther along than any kid I’ve seen in a long time.

“There are so damn many potholes out there with the money being what it is. You just don’t know what’s ahead. But he comes from a real solid background. His father and mother really cared. They instilled in him a sense of responsibility and respect, and he has that. He respects his coaches and his teammates.

“I really enjoyed him. If you didn’t know who he was, you’d never have known he was a heralded rookie.”

After three years at Louisiana State, playing the Maypole inside zone defenses, O’Neal’s repertoire is still rudimentary, consisting of a drive to his right, a baseline turnaround jumper on which he shows a nice--if erratic--touch, and dunks. When he develops a hook and a move to his left, he might be able to name his own point total.

The Magic brought in Mark McNamara, the veteran who understudied Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Moses Malone.

McNamara told O’Neal to come to him if he wanted advice.

O’Neal pulled up a chair.

“He basically came to me every day,” McNamara says. “The guy really wants to be the best.

“The first couple of days, the questions were real simple: ‘Can I do this?’ Now he’s asking questions like: ‘When I’m in weakside help position, how can I get back to my man?’ ”

O’Neal, suspecting greatness in himself but wise enough to soft-pedal it for the moment, says he hopes to average 15 points and 10 rebounds this season.

“Fifteen and 10,” McNamara says. “He’s going to get that by accident.”

You know how they used to call Walter Berry ‘the Truth?’ They need to change that.

--JOHN SALLEY, Heat forward O’Neal was raised all over the globe by Sgt. Phillip Harrison, U.S. Army, and his wife, Lucille. They married after Shaquille was born, and he kept his mother’s maiden name.

Phillip, 6-7 and unapologetically gruff, hounded his son down the straight and narrow.

Lucille, 6 feet, is thoughtful and wry. Introduced to a writer doing a story about her son, she looks down at him and says: “Don’t make up any lies.”

O’Neal started high school in Germany, already huge but not yet coordinated. There were jokes at his expense. There were fights at the jokers’ expense. He says he was “a real juvenile delinquent,” but the Sarge had him too scared to think about stealing or worse.

Then O’Neal had his famous meeting with LSU’s Dale Brown, the premier used-car salesman of college coaches. Brown described a stairway to heaven, starting with a four-year stay in Baton Rouge, La. O’Neal got to work.

The family moved to San Antonio for O’Neal’s junior and senior years in high school, and he became the nation’s top prospect and one of its least bashful.

At a Rocket-Spur game, he met Hakeem Olajuwon and marked him down as a peer to be.

“I didn’t get real excited when I met him, because in San Antonio I was getting so much press when I was young, I was ‘the Man,’ too,” O’Neal says. “I was telling myself, ‘If I keep doing what I’m doing, I’m going to be there one day, too.’ ”

He did ask for Olajuwon’s autograph, though.

O’Neal entered LSU at 6-11, 265 and kept growing. By his sophomore year, he was the program. Games consisted of trying to shake off the five opposing Lilliputians hanging on his arms. The pros coveted him--Golden State’s Don Nelson said he had fallen in love--but the rest of the world had only a dim view of what O’Neal could do.

He thought about leaving in 1990, decided against it--”I said to myself, ‘Too young,’ “--but departed last spring, despite Brown’s pleas and the Sarge’s frown.

“Every time I touched the ball, every team, three guys on me,” O’Neal says. “One guy in front of me. One guy behind me. Sometimes they didn’t even play our point guard.

“Do I miss it? When you play against defenses like those, you don’t get to showcase yourself and people assume that you can’t do anything but dunk. They assume I don’t have a jump shot or I don’t have a hook.

“After the Indiana game (LSU’s NCAA tournament defeat), I stayed around LSU for a week but I didn’t go to class. . . . I got my stuff and drove home. I told my dad, ‘I think it’s time to move on.’ He went into his room and slammed the door because he wants me to get a degree. And he came back and he said, ‘All right. But promise me you’ll get that degree.’ I made him that promise.

“Coming in here, I didn’t know what to think. You hear a lot of things from a lot of different people: It’s hard, it’s easy, you’ll adjust quick, you’re a quick learner. It’s pretty fun, though.

“My expectation is to contribute to my teammates. Rebound, score, whatever. When all is said and done, no matter what happens, whether I’m the best center or I’m a medium center or whether I’m a flop, I’m always going to keep smiling.”

Smiling seems no effort for the extroverted O’Neal. The world might seem bewildering now, if not downright scary with centers such as Olajuwon out there waiting for him, and grown-ups with notebooks, tape recorders and minicams gazing up at him raptly.

Here he is, six months removed from his teen-age years, and suddenly adolescence is over.

Adulthood, it’s no day at the beach. He could ask the adults.

“My mom called me the other day,” he says, smiling. “She said, ‘You have to start paying your own bills.’ ”

During his first exhibition, Miami double-teamed O’Neal the first time he touched the ball.

The first time Seikaly put a move on him, O’Neal blocked his shot into the seats.

Yelled Skiles: “It’s a whole new world now, Rony!”