Shaquille O’Neal has done some wild things in life. No, we are not talking about playing Tim Meadows’ 10-foot-tall cop brother with crazy hair in Adam Sandler’s Grown Ups 2. According to his former Lakers colleagues, Shaq collected sh*t as a souvenir once.
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Shaq has always been a prankster. Just a few weeks ago, he and his cousin Bill Bellamy got nostalgic about putting poop in a pal’s Ferrari. A few months back, he filled his Inside the NBA crew member Kenny Smith’s car with snow.
It does sound a little bizarre, but from the looks of it, Shaq has a weird obsession with dung. His former teammate, Cedric Ceballos, has testified to it.
“[Shaq] always would play with feces for some reason,” Ceballos confessed on Byron Scott’s Fast Break last week.“What are you gonna do with [a guy who’s] 7’1″, 300 pounds, that’s trying to put some feces on you? I’m trying to be clean right now for the fans and the kids. But stop playing with sh*t, man!”
Scott seems to be collecting a team of Shaq’s former colleagues who are happy to share the tales of his escapades with excreta. Garry Vitti, the former head athletic trainer for the Lakers from their showtime era to Kobe Bryant’s last game in the NBA, is the latest to join the chronicler list.
Scott asked Vitti if the story about Shaq involving Lakers commentator Chick Hearn and poop in a bus was true. Whether it was the smell or the sight, or the occasion, the incident certainly left an impact on Vitti. He remembers it like it was yesterday.
“It’s true. There was a plastic bag in the liner for the trash can, so it was already in a plastic bag. He just pulled it out and tied it up, and he told me he’s still got them. He’s got them in a safe. That’s some nasty… You have to understand how bad this was,” Vitti said.
Shaq had apparently tripped broadcaster Hearn on the bus, which made Hearn defecate in his pants. But that wasn’t enough. You would think it would have been cleaned before they left, right? Wrong!
“It was so bad that we had asked the bus driver… because we were going to Newark. We played the Knicks the night before… and this bus smells so bad. I don’t know if they understood what was happening with the man, but they let him by. I had no idea it was happening until you smell it, right?” Vitti added.
They all had to open the hatches on the bus and bring the luggage down, so Hearn could have a change of clothes. According to Vitti, it was there that they found out Hearn was having a bit of a heart episode.
“So, Garry V, Shaq collected his sh*t and kept it as a souvenir?” Scott, curious about it, asked Vitti again. And Vitti responded with a firm “yes.”
Vitti confessed to loving and adoring Shaq but claimed that anyone around him needed to be looking over their shoulders. Apparently, you couldn’t even leave toothbrushes out in the open because they would eventually find themselves kissing Shaq’s behind.
Well, never meet your heroes, they say. If you are a Shaq fan and reading this, this should prompt you to pay heed to that advice.
