Shaquille O’Neal may be the most dominant big-man in NBA history but he wasn’t necessarily ‘ripped’. He was a physical powerhouse who used his stature to his advantage to carve out a Hall of Fame career, but there were habits he developed that concerned those around him. Robert Horry recently spoke about one.
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Horry was on the Los Angeles Lakers between 1997 and 2003, which means he shared the locker room with a prime Shaq. He knows the Diesel on a fairly personal level, and has also made memories with him, one of them including a trip that turned out to be a mayo-sandwich party.
Horry and Shaq both had kids in Houston. Shaq asked his teammate to join him on his private jet, before which they stopped at a sandwich shop to get some snacks for the journey. There, the amount of mayonnaise the Lakers center chose to put on his bread shocked Horry.
Big Shot Rob, on Byron Scott’s Fast Break podcast, narrated this incident, much to the amusement of Scott. And Horry did not stay quiet when he saw Shaq, one of the best NBA players ever at that point, biting on sandwiches that healthy athletes would choose to stay away from.
“No wonder your a** that big, you can’t have all that mayo,” Horry recalled telling O’Neal, as he watched the mayo spilling all over his face. “But it was a good sandwich, I’m not gonna lie,” he cheekily added.
This was very much on brand for Shaq. After all, the ‘Big Aristotle’ was someone who would oil himself up so he could pass Pat Riley’s ‘grueling’ body fat percentage checks on the Miami Heat.
Perhaps eating whatever he wanted was the secret to O’Neal’s massive presence. Standing 7’1″ and weighing anywhere between 325 and 425 pounds, his body needed fuel.
If sandwiches helped him get there and steamroll his way through everyone else in the league, the teams he played for would certainly be grateful to the inventor of mayo.
Shaq’s journey towards eating healthier
To be fair to Shaq, he didn’t munch on mayo sandwiches forever. He loved them, sure, but there came a point in his life when he had to slim down. He realized that he was beginning to look older than he really was, which is why he decided to bring about a change to his eating habits.
It wasn’t easy. For instance, around the time Kobe Bryant passed away in 2020, he was struggling emotionally because had lost his sister and other close people in life in a very short time span. “I couldn’t sleep. So, I’d wake up at three in the morning and make a sandwich, five in the morning and make a sandwich,” he said.
But Shaq had a dream. He wanted to get his six-pack abs back. So, he gave up having sandwiches and began hitting the gym regularly. He only ate healthy items in small portions, and ended up losing 25-30 lbs. Insane transformation from one of the best in the sport’s history.
