For the first 15 years of his life, nobody knew that Shareef O’Neal’s father was Shaquille O’Neal. Despite carrying the infamous last name of one of the most dominant players in NBA history, due to family hardships, it wasn’t until his adolescent years that the public knew about his major personal life.
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Shareef joined the Then They Rose podcast and opened up about his life and the hardships that he experienced. Of the many accounts he provided were the struggles of being a child of divorce, especially when one of his parents was a mega-celebrity. Shareef said,
“When I lived with my dad in elementary school people knew. But once we parted ways and my dad was still playing and we moved to LA, nobody knew who my dad was. I never went to school telling anybody who my parents were.”
Shareef kept his life at home a secret from his friends and classmates at school. It allowed him to form an authentic relationship with the game of basketball, which wasn’t derived from an obligation due to his father’s reputation.
Unlike other prospects that are highly touted at a very young age due to the stature of the parents, it was the opposite for Shareef. Shaq made an unexpected appearance at one of Shareef’s AAU games when he was 15 years old, which changed the course of his career. Shareef said,
“Playing basketball nobody really knew who I was. My dad came, it wasn’t that packed. I see a guy under the hoop with a camera, I didn’t think anything of it. I wake up a few days later, this video has like 11 million views on YouTube and it’s like Shaq’s 15 year old son. I go on my Instagram and I have thousands and thousands of followers, and everything’s just going crazy.”
The trajectory of Shareef’s career significantly improved as he became one of the best players in the nation in his high school career. He was ranked a four-star prospect coming out of Crossroads School in Santa Monica.
Although the media and fans around the world were aware of the relationship between Shareef and his father Shaq, it never took away from the years of work that he put in when nobody was watching.
Shareef’s basketball career took a detour due to a health scare that required open-heart surgery, but unsurprisingly, Shaq’s son continues in the pursuit of turning his dreams into reality.
