AMERICA AT LARGEThe long-simmering feud between two of basketball's legends has ignited once again
JUST WHEN we were thinking we could relax and take a break from basketball during the nine-day hiatus between the Boston Celtics' triumph in the NBA Finals and tonight's NBA draft in New York, here comes America's fun couple, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant, elbowing their way back into the public consciousness with the latest airing of their long-simmering feud.
Commissioner David Stern has worked assiduously to improve the year-round visibility of his sport, but this latest episode probably wasn't what he had in mind.
Sunday night, at a New York nightclub, Shaq, who has a couple of rap albums to his credit, was invited onstage for an impromptu performance. He launched into an improvised ditty of his own creation, and invited the audience to sing along with its thematic refrain, to wit: "Kobe, tell me how my ass taste."
In case anybody missed the point, Shaq reminded his audience in the wake of the Los Angeles Lakers' six-game loss to the Celtics the reigning NBA Most Valuable Player, who had played on three NBA championship teams with O'Neal as a team-mate, hasn't won one since.
"Kobe," said Shaq in his rap, "you can't do it without me."
The Lakers won three straight titles between 1999 and 2002 but haven't won one since. More gallingly, from Bryant's perspective, is the fact that in his first year away from LA, Shaquille led his new team, the Miami Heat, to the championship.
As team-mates the two had always been a curious oil-and-water mixture anyway, in part because the rules say you can play with only one basketball at a time, and they never could quite agree on how it should be shared.
Bryant and O'Neal, or at least their respective agents, were also intensively engaged in head-to-head competition over commercial opportunities. In this arena, Bryant appeared to have a nose in front - right up until five years ago, when he was arrested and charged with rape in a celebrated case in Eagle County, Colorado.
Bryant's sponsors, which at the time included McDonald's, Nutella, and Ferrero Spa, deserted him in droves, and the NBA's marketing department confirmed a precipitate drop-off in sales of his replica number eight jerseys.
O'Neal, in the meantime, experienced unprecedented success. A commercial spot (for Vitamin Water) that debuted on February's Super Bowl telecast featured Shaq as a 7ft 1in, 325-lb jockey booting his mount home to victory against a field of more conventional (ie, jockey-sized) jockeys. It remains a classic of inspired advertising campaigns.
Bryant's comportment during the rape investigation exacerbated the on-court tensions between himself and O'Neal. At one point, during a deposition, he dragged his team-mate's name into the proceedings, declaring that "I should have done what Shaq does . . . Shaq would pay his women not to say anything."
In alleging O'Neal had paid more than a million dollars in hush money to his own female road conquests, Bryant not only violated a long-standing locker-room code, but, or so claims O'Neal, directly contributed to the break-up of Shaq's marriage. ("I'm a horse. Kobe ratted me out. That's why I'm getting divorced," was one line from Shaq's Sunday night rap performance.")
Bryant's claim that he was vindicated in the Colorado rape case is at best specious. Once the judge ruled the victim could be grilled about her own sexual history, the young lady in question declined to take the stand, and prosecutors were forced to drop the charges.
Although, like OJ Simpson, Bryant was not convicted of criminal charges, he did keep the story from acquiring further legs when he agreed to a settlement in a subsequent civil action brought by his victim.
Bryant reinvented this season with a new uniform number (24) and produced a year that saw him named the league's MVP for 2007-08. During the play-offs, his face even began to reappear in TV commercials (for Nike and Coca-Cola) although, come to think of it, I don't recall seeing a single one of them since the Lakers' embarrassing implosion in the decisive sixth game, a 131-92 blowout in Boston.
Interestingly, O'Neal's smackdown of Bryant triggered no immediate response from Lakerland or the NBA, but condemnation was swift in coming from another unlikely quarter.
The Fuzz. Throughout his career Shaq has been something of a dilettante cop groupie. During his days with the Heat he served as a reserve officer with the Miami Beach Police Department, in which role he participated in night-time patrols and the odd drug raid.
And after being traded to the Phoenix Suns last year he was made both a special deputy and a Colonel in Mariposa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's official "posse". It was neither his attack on Kobe Bryant nor the sexually explicit content of Sunday night's rap that cost him those positions, but rather a racially-charged line in which he employed the "N" word - "Like a white boy trying to be more nigger than me" - that drew the ire of Arpaio, the owner of the self-proclaimed title "America's Toughest Sheriff."
"I want his two badges back," said Arpaio on Tuesday. "If any one of my deputies did something like this, they're fired. I don't condone this type of racial conduct."
In the meantime, just in case you'd care to see what all the fuss is about, Shaq's impromptu performance has been preserved on video: http://www.tmz.com/tmz_main_video?titleid=1626146951 1
