He Won’t Be Pulling Punches

This is just another game, he says. He says it over and over, in fact, either trying to talk himself into something or just testing to see if there’s actually anyone gullible enough to believe it.

Sure it’s just another game. And the sun is just another cigarette lighter.

Shaquille O’Neal returns to his NBA roots today with the best of intentions, going hard with the tone-it-down angle, and the worst of chances to pull it off. Laker players remember how pumped up he was for a home game against the Magic a month ago--and that wasn’t even the first meeting with the former club--and Coach Del Harris has already talked to him about not trying to do an Ostertag on an entire city.

“I want him to stay on an even keel and not get baited into doing too much,” Harris said.

Indeed, 19 months after he left the Magic to sign with the Lakers as a free agent, and 11 months after what should have been The Return was postponed because of a knee injury, O’Neal heads into Orlando Arena today for the first time as a visiting player in what figures to be a very emotional reunion.

The locals, given only the pleasure last season of heckling him in absentia, will finally get the chance for a face-to-face venting session, and O’Neal will get the chance to crush their hearts in his palm for a second time.

The extra year the injury brought has done little to decrease attention. What might have been a cooling off period from the bad feelings--”Just like a jilted lover,” Harris said--instead became more time to stretch the wounds. Magic players and fans called him a coward for being in town last March 23 and refusing to sit on the Laker bench, and he called Orlando a “dried-up little pond” as recently as two weeks ago.

“It might be a hostile arena, but no more than when I played at Duke or when I played at Mississippi in Starkville,” O’Neal said. “If I get booed or stuff like that, it’s not going to hurt my feelings. It might make me play harder. The madder I get, the more I dominate.”

And dominate he might.

With the Magic having recently traded Rony Seikaly, O’Neal will start against Danny Schayes, get a regular diet of double-teams, and then cracks at the power forwards who are having to fill in at backup center--Horace Grant, Bo Outlaw and Derek Strong. But he does not figure to play against Penny Hardaway, bothered because of a strained calf muscle and somewhat bothered by O’Neal in general.

“He doesn’t really have a lot to say to me now,” Hardaway said. “I don’t know what his problem is, but it’s like he tries to avoid me.”

That may be putting it mildly.

“I respect him as a person and I respect his game,” O’Neal countered. “But I’m not going to go out of my way to be friends with someone like him. If he was a so-called friend, he would have stuck up for me [during the final days in Orlando].

“He never did. He had more important things on his mind: whose team is it? Selfish things. He forgot who brought him in there. It wasn’t the management.”

Just another game.