The NBA Torch Passes Today to the Rookie All-Star, O’Neal

With Magic Johnson and Larry Bird gone, the torch passes in today’s NBA All-Star game to the man everyone has come to see, the one, the only . . .

Shaquille O’Neal?

“I doubt it,” said O’Neal, apparently still under the misconception humility is a requirement for NBA superstardom.

“There’s (Michael) Jordan, there’s (Charles) Barkley.”

He can stop doubting it. A canvas of the players shows that the man they want to see is. . . .

“Probably Shaquille,” said Dominique Wilkins.

“Shaquille!” said dunk contestant and super-fan Harold Miner. “I mean, that’s the man!”

“Well, if you read the press clippings and things like that, everybody wants to see Shaquille O’Neal play,” allowed Karl Malone, the Oscar the Grouch of this league.

“It’d be Shaquille,” said Larry Johnson. “Who’d you come to see?”

“One guy?” asked Detlef Schrempf, laughing. “I know it’s not me so . . . probably Shaquille.”

“Me!” said Barkley.

Not since Jordan, the last rookie voted onto the starting team in 1985, has a first-year player ridden into this game on such a publicity bubble. Jordan will never forget how that turned out, since it changed NBA history.

Veterans resented Jordan’s huge new Nike deal, then unheard of for a rookie, and froze him out in the game. Jordan blamed Isiah Thomas for it, producing a feud that lasts to this day and fueling the Piston-Bulls wars.

You might count the passes into the low post today but O’Neal’s all-star teammates say you’d be wasting your time.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” Wilkins said. “Shaquille has come in the league, he’s taken the league by storm. he’s a great athlete, he’s a big guy who plays very aggressively and who has a lot of confidence in himself. You can’t fault anybody for that. The kid can play.

“This is the way he is as a person. He’s a real good kid.”

Unlike Magic Johnson and Bird, who were only supposed to be superstars, O’Neal was supposed to be the second coming of Wilt Chamberlain, or dominant in a way that may be impossible now. When Chamberlain entered the league, there was no other seven-footer and only two other players over 6-10. Of 24 all-stars here, nine are over 6-10 and four are seven-footers.

Facing such wild expectations, O’Neal has been studiously low-key. Before the season, he said he hoped to average 15 points and 10 rebounds, which he is beating by eight points and four rebounds.

“He’s not playing that above-all status where he thinks he’s better than anyone,” Schrempf said.

“As far as I can see, he’s a nice person. That’s always good to have, a rookie coming in like that, the way he’s playing, the kind of status he has and he’s still pretty human.”

Of course, if there was resentment, only one man could rise above the humdrum noise of daily existence to set the record straight.

But that man wasn’t biting.

“I love Shaquille O’Neal and I wish him nothing but the best,” said Barkley. “I just think anyone who can take the pressure off me is great.”

Notes

Other first-time all-stars: Larry Johnson, Shawn Kemp, Detlef Schrempf, Sean Elliott and Danny Manning . . . Manning is the first Clipper representative since Marques Johnson in 1986, even if it doesn’t make him teary-eyed. “It’s like when people come up and ask me, ‘You guys haven’t won in this building since 1942,’ ” he said. “I wasn’t around then..”.. The NBA announced the Phoenix Suns will play in next fall’s McDonald’s Classic in Munich. Said Commissioner David Stern: “Charles (Barkley) called me and asked me, in the light of his financial support of the NBA office, if we could do anything for his career as far as international basketball.”