Shaquille O’Neal was raised with parents who instilled a lot of wisdom within him. His mother, Lucille O’Neal, once gave him perhaps the most sound advice someone can give to their son and that was to make sure people would remember his name.
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His father, Philip Harrison, who took Shaq under his wing when he decided to married his mother, was another person who helped the future NBA Hall-of-Famer find his way through life. Up until his passing in 2013, Philip continued to bestow knowledge upon his son.
The army sergeant, who Shaq would later give various gifts to like cars worth hundreds of millions and even $500,000 in allowance, was actually the reason for why Shaq got into basketball. It was him taking his son to a Philadelphia 76ers game that led to Shaq wanting to make basketball his career as he was enamored by Julius Erving’s play.
Philip Harrison gave Shaquille O’Neal a valuable lesson
Shaquille O’Neal has grown up to become quite the wise man. This didn’t happen overnight however. He had to make mistakes along the way and have ideologies that weren’t all too sound for him to be later corrected by his father to reach the point of intelligence that he has reached today.
One such moment came when he faced off against his idol, Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks, and failed to dominate. After Ewing’s team bested his him and his squad, he expressed his frustrations to his father. Instead of comforting him, he called Shaq to use his private plane to come meet him.
Upon doing so, he drove ‘The Big Aristotle’ around the city and showed him rampant homelessness. When Shaq ‘cribbed’ about feeling pressure when it came to facing off against titans of the game like Ewing, Harrison in turn told him that real pressure was not knowing when your next meal would come.
This changed O’Neal entire perceptive on what it meant to actually feel pressure in the world. From then out, he looked to take a calmer approach to the game.
Damian Lillard had a similar perspective on pressure
Like Shaquille O’Neal, Damian Lillard had a similar view on what pressure truly was in the world. Dame is notorious for being one of the best performers in NBA history when the game is coming to a close in when talking about this, he claimed he never felt any pressure at all in those waning moments.
“Pressure? Nah. This is just playing ball. Pressure is the homeless man who doesn’t know when his next meal is coming from. pressure is the single mom who is trying to scuffle and pay her rent. We get paid a lot of money to play a game. to call it pressure is almost an insult to regular people,” said Dame.
