Book review: ‘Shaq Uncut’ by former Laker Shaquille O’Neal

So let me get this straight: Former NBA great Shaquille Rashaun O’Neal, better known as Shaq (or Diesel, or the Big Aristotle) is really a stuttering showman who fears embarrassing himself, so he overprepares, develops a second career as a rapper, buys a 64,000-square-foot dream house and feuds mercilessly with his costars but really, truly credits his no-nonsense grandma and heavy-fisted soldier stepdad for giving him the values he needed to succeed?

Whew. Is this a sports bio or a Judy Garland movie?

In any case, that’s the complex portrait the former Lakers sensation paints of himself in his new autobiography, “Shaq Uncut: My Story,” penned with Jackie MacMullan.

Only seven years ago, O’Neal was one of L.A.’s biggest and most popular landmarks. Scribes loved him, partly because he didn’t walk on eggshells around Kobe Bryant, the team’s young scion.

You always suspected there was more to this ginormous clown prince than just the clever one-liners. Turns out there is.

In 300 breezy pages, in prose no one would confuse with the real Aristotle’s, O’Neal reveals himself mostly through his relationships with others. At times, it feels as though we are learning more about them than him.

Yet, there is much for Lakers followers to love here. In juicy, behind-the-scenes peeks inside the team’s glory days, we learn:

— “Everything Kobe is doing now, he told me all the way back then he was going to do.… ‘I’m going to be the Will Smith of the NBA,’” he quotes Bryant as saying.

— Then-teammate Brian Shaw was the only person — management or otherwise — who confronted Bryant and O’Neal about their troubled relationship. “All these Lakers legends, none of them ever had the courage to say anything to Kobe and me. Not Kareem, not Magic, not Mitch Kupchak, none of them. Only Brian Shaw took us on.”

— One of their big showdowns came after the Colorado rape case, when Bryant went face to face with O’Neal to accuse his teammate of not supporting him.

— “All I ever said about Kobe is what everyone is saying now. I just had the [courage] to say it.”

— “Derek Fisher … was one of those guys who knew how to keep his cool at all times. He had a certain way about him that made you respect him.”

— “The day Jerry West quit was the day it all started going downhill.”

That’s the marrow of this book, at least for Lakers fans, but any NBA follower — Shaq fan or not — would probably enjoy O’Neal’s up-by-the-bootstraps story, and especially his scene-chewing moments in Orlando and Miami.

If his version of history is to be believed, O’Neal wasn’t always an angel, but neither was he clubhouse poison. Mostly, the 7-foot-1 force of nature wanted to win — on the court, in the clubs, in Hollywood. Mostly, he succeeded. But despite his natural gifts, he credits a work ethic and his drive to succeed.

Did you know O’Neal was cut from his ninth-grade team? Seems every hoops biography has that moment, when the can’t-miss kid is dealt a “they can’t do that to me” dose of reality. In O’Neal’s case, that low moment leads to a chance encounter with then-LSU Coach Dale Brown, which leads eventually to a scholarship to LSU.

Of his professional debut in Orlando: “The bad thing is when you have two alpha males on the team that don’t have the same understanding, things can go haywire. That’s what happened to Penny [Hardaway] and me.” In Miami, “[Riley] didn’t like to be challenged. I’m sure he thought I was trying to destroy the culture he created. He was probably right. I thought his ‘culture’ needed some tweaking.” And then there is the inevitable career-ending slide, in Phoenix, Cleveland and Boston, where age and injuries caught up to him.

What is lacking in this bio is more on his private life. We get lots of information about his clubbing, but not so much on how he managed to raise six children with a peripatetic NBA career. There is some, but not enough to make him seem human.

But maybe that’s the point. After all, O’Neal was always Superman — the original, not the Dwight Howard knockoff. With footwork more befitting a world champion boxer than a block-of-granite NBA center, supreme balance and thundering strength, he will go down as one of the best centers of all time, probably even among the top five.

And none of them gave us the laughs he did. Is it so bad to have fun playing pro ball? As if you could ever have any doubts, O’Neal was more than a guy with too many nicknames, he was an enormous and creative personality — not exactly deep, but never thoughtless.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

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