“Thanks for picking me the first two times. But this time, I’ll probably decline,” Shaquille O’Neal said prior to the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Team USA’s roster was littered with talent, the team boasted of Tim Duncan, Alonzo Mourning, and Vin Baker in its ranks. So, Shaq felt, or at least claimed, they had enough resources to win the Gold medal.
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The team, to no one’s surprise, won a gold. USA’s third in a row. But even with the win, the mystery remained, why had O’Neal forgone the golden opportunity to win his second Olympic gold? The question hung in the air, a great USA basketball mystery. After all, O’Neal had been at the absolute peak of his career, having won his first regular-season MVP, Finals MVP, and the NBA Championship with the Lakers.
Missing the Olympics did not make much sense. And so, on the latest episode of the Big Podcast with Shaq, Alonzo Mourning, O’Neal’s former teammate at Miami and a member of Team USA in 2000 tried to dig up the matter again. But Shaq, in typical Shaq fashion, deflected the question and came up with a witty response. He revealed,
“I was shooting Kazaam, but don’t worry about it… Don’t tell nobody.”
His response left Mourning and the podcast’s co-host Adam Lefkoe perplexed. They sneered at his response, and poked fun at it, before moving on from the subject. Their reaction is valid, considering it is one of Shaq’s signature jokes.
Kazaam, a why-would-anyone-make-this comedy movie that saw O’Neal play the role of a genie, was released in 1996, 4 years before the Sydney Olympics. Considering there is fortunately no sequel, his answer is 4 years too far from the actual truth.
Shaq was upset about his treatment in the 1996 Olympic Final
In the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, O’Neal, who came off the bench, was unstoppable on the court. In Team USA’s first seven games, he averaged 10.3 points, six rebounds, and one assist in about 17 minutes of game time.
He planned on capping his stellar campaign with a massive performance in the gold medal match against Yugoslavia. However, he never got the opportunity. In his book Shaq Uncut, he wrote,
“Before the game [Team USA head coach] Lenny Wilkens came up to me and said, ‘Shaq, you will go to many more Olympics, but this will be David Robinson’s last one, so I’m going to give him most of the minutes.’”
He also wrote of his reaction to the Jayson Tatum-esque snub,
” I barely played in the gold medal game. I played about five minutes total. Wilkens put me in for the final fifteen seconds. I think I had 2 points. It was David Robinson’s third Olympics and my first. So you can’t give me some time? I was really disappointed. After we won, I took my medal and I jumped in my car and I drove home. That was the beginning and the end of my Olympic experience.”
O’Neal played only five minutes, the fewest of any player on the team, while David Robinson played 26. He was so upset about the ordeal, that he left the arena after the medal ceremony, and drove home. En route, he tossed his gold medal out of the window and never recovered it.
The Hall of Famer never let go of that disappointment and that final against Yugoslavia was the last time he donned the Team USA jersey.
