Shaquille O’Neal was told by a college professor of his at LSU that he couldn’t make a brand out his likeness. His reasoning behind it was that ‘big guys don’t sell’. To a certain extent, this professor of his was right. Guards like Michael Jordan, Penny Hardaway, and Magic Johnson were marketable.
Advertisement
So Shaq ‘devised a plan’ and decided that he would make himself into a marketable guy. He knew how to light up a room with his positive energy and was generally quite the funny guy. He used this to his advantage and established himself as one of the league’s youngest and most sought-after stars.
Soon enough, Reebok swooped up the Magic superstar and signed him to a multi-year deal worth $15 million. They would be the ones who launched the iconic Shaq Attaq and Shaqnosis shoes that O’Neal would sport for a majority of his career.
Shaquille O’Neal couldn’t compete with Michael Jordan so he stopped trying
Michael Jordan’s Air Jordan 1 shoe was slated to make $3 million over 3 years when they released it in 1984. Instead, it raked in $126 million in a single year. Jordan Brand hasn’t looked back ever since, raking in $5 billion in a single year. Their meteoric rise to basketball sneaker superstardom shunned quite a lot of other brands to the side.
Reebok was one of these brands who, despite having Shaquille O’Neal, simply couldn’t compete. So Shaq, on his own volition, left Reebok and started his own brand of affordable sneakers that he sold at Walmart with a starting price of $29.
During the interview below, Shaq talks about the same, how Jordan would constantly kill him in sales at Footlocker, leading to him looking towards conquering the Walmart market.
Why did Shaquille O’Neal leave Reebok?
Shaquille O’Neal was called a ‘motherf**ker’ by quite the angry woman one day while still with Reebok. This was because she couldn’t stand the fact that his shoes cost as much as they did. Despite O’Neal hilariously trying to calm her down with $2,000 out of his pocket, it didn’t work.
This was a wake-up call for the Lakers legend. He would go on to leave Reebok, giving up on a $40 million deal that they wanted him to sign. He would go on to found the aforementioned Shaq brand of sneakers that made basketball shoes affordable, instead of slapping a standard starting price of $110 like the rest of his competitors.
